I generally liked the article, but let me disagree with the part of “a soul-crushing job is still the only thing that gives meaning to your life”. (Yeah, you didn’t write it that way, but that is how I read it.)
People are different. Yes, there are people who retire, or just remain unemployed for a few months, and their lifestyle becomes: “stay in bed till 10 AM; slowly eat some breakfast while watching TV; now it’s time to make some lunch; slowly eat lunch while watching TV; now it would be good time to take a walk but meh I will watch some more TV; now it’s time to make a dinner; slowly eat dinner while watching TV; now let’s watch some good late-evening TV; going to sleep at 1 AM; repeat every day”. There is probably a lot of them.
But I also know people who use their retirement time to travel, learn about their hobbies, do various projects. (Also spend time with their grandchildren.) There are entire institutions specialized to provide education or travel for the elderly. So while I agree that keeping regular activities might be necessary to live a meaningful life, those activities do not require having a boss.
On the opposite side, I have seen people stop doing things that were most meaningful for them at the moment, because they needed to find a job that would pay their bills. Retiring early means this will not happen to you. If you e.g. enjoy teaching, you can remain a teacher for the rest of your life, regardless of how much salary teachers get; and even if the school fired you, you could simply offer your lessons for free, or create a YouTube channel.
Speaking for myself, I have a backlog of things I want to do. (Learn some advanced math, make a few computer games, write a math textbook maybe an interactive one, dance,...) In the past, before I burned out at work, and before I had kids, I used to do projects like this once in a while, so it seems likely to me that I could do the same in the future, when the kids grow up, if I could get early retired somehow.
If I sold all my assets right now, other than the home I live in, it would pay my expenses for about 10 years, assuming nothing unusual happens. But if none of those activities becomes profitable during those 10 years, what then? Still more than a decade towards regular retirement. Still having kids who depend on me. Who would hire a 50+ software developer who didn’t spend the last 10 years developing software? (I am already the oldest guy in the room, and no, it doesn’t make others treat me with respect. I look five or ten years younger than my actual age, but even that is already too old.) I am no superstar, my job skills are kinda average.
Addressing your other points: I am one of those who enjoy the opportunity to work from home, and I dread the probably inevitable return to the office when this is over. Now I can spend more time with my kids, cook my own food, exercise during the breaks between coding. I don’t feel alone; I have my family around me. (It would be nice to have a lunch with my coworkers now and then, but I don’t really need them around me for 8 hours a day.) I never felt like my job was my ingroup; there was usually a person or two I clicked with, but otherwise my job was the place where I had to spend most of my time instead of being with my ingroup.
If you want social conformity, you can found a non-profit, and pretend to be hired by it. Then whatever you do during the day, just pretend your boss told you to. :D
Among the things worth splurging on, from my perspective most of them would be side effects of early retirement. Seriously. “Ever feel like you’ve got a constant low-level cold?” People who work in open spaces are statistically more sick than people having their own office rooms. “Imagine you want to learn something new.” Yep, I already have the plan, and I downloaded the books; all I need now is the time to focus on learning. “Mental health. Stress relief. Lots of things related to health and exercise.” Yep, having less stress from work, and more time to exercise would benefit both my mental and physical health. “Living near friends and family.” Already mentioned this.
“a soul-crushing job is still the only thing that gives meaning to your life”. (Yeah, you didn’t write it that way, but that is how I read it.) … There is probably a lot of them.
Sounds like we are in agreement here. Lots of people who would, in practice, regress to a lot of TV watching and lounging around and end up less happy than they would be at a job, even though in theory they should be able to take advantage of eg. the educational and travel programs you mention to live a happier life. But also a good chunk of people who have things they’re passionate about and would live a happier life in retirement.
I don’t want to make it out as if it’s all about passion vs. no passion or keep busy vs don’t keep busy though. I think there are also subtle things that make retirement better or worse than being at a job.
For example, I’m 28 years old and spent time a) working as a programmer, b) starting a startup, and c) self-studying. Maybe this is just a quirk of my psychology, but in (b) and (c) I am very critical of myself, basically acting like my own boss breathing down my neck, judging my performance. “Are you doing enough? Should you be meditating more? Working more hours? Less? Using pomodoros? Networking more? Investing more in education? Less? Taking a long mid-day break? Doing journaling count as hours towards my workday?” There are just all of these questions, and I experience a sort of pardox of choice. I’ve found that having a boss I don’t experience those things too much, it’s more about doing the standard, expected stuff. These experiences have made me think that there are weird subtle things that can be hard to predict, and that an outside view of looking at how people handle their retirement (or retirement-like periods of time) is more appropriate than an inside view of looking at the gears of retired life and thinking about what happens when you turn those gears.
In the past, before I burned out at work, and before I had kids, I used to do projects like this once in a while, so it seems likely to me that I could do the same in the future, when the kids grow up, if I could get early retired somehow.
I think some people’s response to this would be that your past self might be different and stuff, something perhaps similar to value drift. It’s a thought that has been in the back of my mind to pay attention to, but for me I don’t buy it. Eg. people say that for entrepreneurship, if you re-enter the workforce it’s hard to pick back up again in the future, but I’ve both a) picked back up again and b) plan on picking back up again (currently at a job but planning on starting startups again in the future).
Who would hire a 50+ software developer who didn’t spend the last 10 years developing software? (I am already the oldest guy in the room, and no, it doesn’t make others treat me with respect. I look five or ten years younger than my actual age, but even that is already too old.) I am no superstar, my job skills are kinda average.
I hear ya there. I had about a 3 year gap in my resume as I self-studied and started a (failed) startup and it seems to have really hurt my ability to find jobs. I’m also on the average side skill-wise.
I’ve found that having a boss I don’t experience those things too much, it’s more about doing the standard, expected stuff.
Yeah, when you do things for yourself, you need to switch between the “boss mode” and “worker mode”. They require completely different approaches.
In the boss mode, you need to think strategically. Sometimes the most productive thing is to say: “Actually, let’s not do this, it is a waste of time. Let’s do X instead.” (Where X can be making a different thing, or deciding to buy/rent something instead of making it for yourself.) You also need to look for new opportunities.
In the worker mode, you need to do what needs to be done. Then proceed to the next thing in your backlog, until hopefully everything is done.
Even if you can do each of these separately, it is difficult to switch between them, because you risk getting stuck somewhere in between, which is a completely unproductive place. The place where you do something for 10 minutes, and then get second thoughts like “maybe I should be doing this differently, or I should do a different thing instead”, and then you just can’t focus on the work fully anymore.
The separation of roles is easier when one person is in the boss mode all the time, and the other is in the worker mode all the time. (The risk of this approach is that now important information is split between two people, so neither sees the full picture.)
I wonder if it would help to separate these roles temporally, something like: on Sundays you are in boss mode only (you are not allowed to work on the project, you can only make decisions and document them), and the rest of the week you are in worker mode only (you implement the backlog, then take a break; and strategic thoughts you can only note on paper that will be processed the next Sunday).
And… this might be also the problem some retired people have: having to play both roles, for the first time in their lives, after spending decades practicing something else.
I had about a 3 year gap in my resume as I self-studied and started a (failed) startup and it seems to have really hurt my ability to find jobs.
This depends on country a lot. (From European perspective, the American job market is just brutal. You guys work lots of overtime, barely get any vacation; women get a 15-minute break for childbirth. And when you get sick, you get fired for low productivity, which means you lose your health insurance, which means you lose all your savings to pay the medical bills. I might have exaggerated a bit here.)
I was also punished for a gap in my resume, but not too much. I spent 5 years as a high-school teacher, then I realized this job also sucks (the work is 10% teaching and 90% babysitting), so I might as well return to the profession that sucks but at least pays well. Finding the first job was difficult; it was the worst programming job in my life: most stressful and least paid. But after a year my resume was like “yeah, I had a 5y gap, but that was in the past, now I am a developer again”. And after that, my resume is like “these are the three or four most important jobs I had, there were also a few minor ones I didn’t list here, feel free to ask”, and no one asks.
Hm, I like that idea of boss mode vs worker mode. I think it’ll help me and I’m excited to give it a try.
Interesting to hear about your experiences as a high school teacher. Teaching is one of my favorite things to do and a part of me in the back of my mind whispers, “Maybe you should just go be a teacher since you like it so much.” But I have a pretty strong impression that like you’re saying, and like most things that people are passionate about, things change a lot once it’s a job.
I like how you worded that, “now I’m a developer again”. I think that’s exactly what I’m working towards right now. I spent 1 year on self-study, 2 on a startup, then this past year was a 3 month contract, some freelancing, and some more self-studying. Now I just started a job and am 1.5 months in and am looking to get that “I’m a developer again” status.
Teaching, and being a teacher, two different things. I used to make some extra money tutoring math, and I enjoyed the experience. Once in a while I taught groups of adults; I liked that too. Sometimes I gave lectures on various topics.
Being a teacher means less autonomy on choosing what to teach (you need to follow a curriculum). When the teenagers are unmotivated, they won’t hesitate to remind you about it all the time. If half of the class is interested in the topic, and another half is bored, you spend most of your energy dealing with the other half. (When someone wasn’t paying attention to me, and read a book instead, I pretended not to notice, because it was much preferable to actively disrupting.) Then you have to do the paperwork, teach classes for your absent colleagues (on subjects you don’t know, so it’s often just: “kids, read the book”).
Here are some articles from a teacher in UK, where the situation seems exceptionally bad, but it’s a difference of degree: 1, 2.
Interesting about tutoring. I would imagine that even there, a) you wouldn’t really have autonomy about what to teach, because the clients would mostly be students who are taking a class looking to get a good grade, which would usually involve memorizing the teachers passwords, so your job would be helping them memorize these passwords. And b) even if there was no test you needed to get the students to pass, eg. maybe someone learning to code, I’d imagine that usually they’d be interested in something analogous to “getting the code to work” rather than being intellectually curious about deeper stuff.
In which case I would expect tutoring to not be much fun either. Did this stuff match your experiences at all?
My tutoring typically started with “debugging” student’s knowledge. The problems were usually deeper that the student reported, and full solution required fixing the underlying problem first.
For example, suppose the student has a problem with quadratic equations. But after doing some background check, it turns out they are quite confused about what happens when there is a minus sign before the parenthesis. Now of course, if they don’t get this right, then no matter how much time you spend explaining quadratic equations, they are going to get half of them wrong whenever the problem starts with something slightly more complicated, that you first need to convert into the standard quadratic equation.
So I kinda imagine the mathematical “tech tree” in my head, and check the previous nodes first, and so on recursively, if necessary. Then gradually build up the correct knowledge.
In school, this would be one student among 20 or 30. There is no time to do this background check with one of them, and definitely not with half of them, no matter how much they need it. Also, you are constrained how much time you can spend at each topic. If it’s not enough for some students, well, sucks to be them, but we must move to the next topic.
(Currently, there is a reform in math education that tries to get the fundamentals right, even if it costs somewhat more time at the beginning, because then kids can progress faster, while actually understanding everything. One day I would like to write a post about it on Less Wrong, but I am not a teacher anymore, and my contact with teachers who use this method is limited because of covid.)
I see. I find that sort of debugging quite enjoyable.
However, I find that students often are very impatient when it comes to traversing deeper down the dependency tree, and instead impatiently just want to “get it working/get the answer” and move on. There are three separate instances in my life that I can think of where I experienced this recently: 1) a backend dev learning frontend stuff, 2) someone entirely new to programming I was tutoring, 3) a college student taking precalc.
I generally liked the article, but let me disagree with the part of “a soul-crushing job is still the only thing that gives meaning to your life”. (Yeah, you didn’t write it that way, but that is how I read it.)
People are different. Yes, there are people who retire, or just remain unemployed for a few months, and their lifestyle becomes: “stay in bed till 10 AM; slowly eat some breakfast while watching TV; now it’s time to make some lunch; slowly eat lunch while watching TV; now it would be good time to take a walk but meh I will watch some more TV; now it’s time to make a dinner; slowly eat dinner while watching TV; now let’s watch some good late-evening TV; going to sleep at 1 AM; repeat every day”. There is probably a lot of them.
But I also know people who use their retirement time to travel, learn about their hobbies, do various projects. (Also spend time with their grandchildren.) There are entire institutions specialized to provide education or travel for the elderly. So while I agree that keeping regular activities might be necessary to live a meaningful life, those activities do not require having a boss.
On the opposite side, I have seen people stop doing things that were most meaningful for them at the moment, because they needed to find a job that would pay their bills. Retiring early means this will not happen to you. If you e.g. enjoy teaching, you can remain a teacher for the rest of your life, regardless of how much salary teachers get; and even if the school fired you, you could simply offer your lessons for free, or create a YouTube channel.
Speaking for myself, I have a backlog of things I want to do. (Learn some advanced math, make a few computer games, write a math textbook maybe an interactive one, dance,...) In the past, before I burned out at work, and before I had kids, I used to do projects like this once in a while, so it seems likely to me that I could do the same in the future, when the kids grow up, if I could get early retired somehow.
If I sold all my assets right now, other than the home I live in, it would pay my expenses for about 10 years, assuming nothing unusual happens. But if none of those activities becomes profitable during those 10 years, what then? Still more than a decade towards regular retirement. Still having kids who depend on me. Who would hire a 50+ software developer who didn’t spend the last 10 years developing software? (I am already the oldest guy in the room, and no, it doesn’t make others treat me with respect. I look five or ten years younger than my actual age, but even that is already too old.) I am no superstar, my job skills are kinda average.
Addressing your other points: I am one of those who enjoy the opportunity to work from home, and I dread the probably inevitable return to the office when this is over. Now I can spend more time with my kids, cook my own food, exercise during the breaks between coding. I don’t feel alone; I have my family around me. (It would be nice to have a lunch with my coworkers now and then, but I don’t really need them around me for 8 hours a day.) I never felt like my job was my ingroup; there was usually a person or two I clicked with, but otherwise my job was the place where I had to spend most of my time instead of being with my ingroup.
If you want social conformity, you can found a non-profit, and pretend to be hired by it. Then whatever you do during the day, just pretend your boss told you to. :D
Among the things worth splurging on, from my perspective most of them would be side effects of early retirement. Seriously. “Ever feel like you’ve got a constant low-level cold?” People who work in open spaces are statistically more sick than people having their own office rooms. “Imagine you want to learn something new.” Yep, I already have the plan, and I downloaded the books; all I need now is the time to focus on learning. “Mental health. Stress relief. Lots of things related to health and exercise.” Yep, having less stress from work, and more time to exercise would benefit both my mental and physical health. “Living near friends and family.” Already mentioned this.
Thanks for the comments!
Sounds like we are in agreement here. Lots of people who would, in practice, regress to a lot of TV watching and lounging around and end up less happy than they would be at a job, even though in theory they should be able to take advantage of eg. the educational and travel programs you mention to live a happier life. But also a good chunk of people who have things they’re passionate about and would live a happier life in retirement.
I don’t want to make it out as if it’s all about passion vs. no passion or keep busy vs don’t keep busy though. I think there are also subtle things that make retirement better or worse than being at a job.
For example, I’m 28 years old and spent time a) working as a programmer, b) starting a startup, and c) self-studying. Maybe this is just a quirk of my psychology, but in (b) and (c) I am very critical of myself, basically acting like my own boss breathing down my neck, judging my performance. “Are you doing enough? Should you be meditating more? Working more hours? Less? Using pomodoros? Networking more? Investing more in education? Less? Taking a long mid-day break? Doing journaling count as hours towards my workday?” There are just all of these questions, and I experience a sort of pardox of choice. I’ve found that having a boss I don’t experience those things too much, it’s more about doing the standard, expected stuff. These experiences have made me think that there are weird subtle things that can be hard to predict, and that an outside view of looking at how people handle their retirement (or retirement-like periods of time) is more appropriate than an inside view of looking at the gears of retired life and thinking about what happens when you turn those gears.
I think some people’s response to this would be that your past self might be different and stuff, something perhaps similar to value drift. It’s a thought that has been in the back of my mind to pay attention to, but for me I don’t buy it. Eg. people say that for entrepreneurship, if you re-enter the workforce it’s hard to pick back up again in the future, but I’ve both a) picked back up again and b) plan on picking back up again (currently at a job but planning on starting startups again in the future).
I hear ya there. I had about a 3 year gap in my resume as I self-studied and started a (failed) startup and it seems to have really hurt my ability to find jobs. I’m also on the average side skill-wise.
Yeah, when you do things for yourself, you need to switch between the “boss mode” and “worker mode”. They require completely different approaches.
In the boss mode, you need to think strategically. Sometimes the most productive thing is to say: “Actually, let’s not do this, it is a waste of time. Let’s do X instead.” (Where X can be making a different thing, or deciding to buy/rent something instead of making it for yourself.) You also need to look for new opportunities.
In the worker mode, you need to do what needs to be done. Then proceed to the next thing in your backlog, until hopefully everything is done.
Even if you can do each of these separately, it is difficult to switch between them, because you risk getting stuck somewhere in between, which is a completely unproductive place. The place where you do something for 10 minutes, and then get second thoughts like “maybe I should be doing this differently, or I should do a different thing instead”, and then you just can’t focus on the work fully anymore.
The separation of roles is easier when one person is in the boss mode all the time, and the other is in the worker mode all the time. (The risk of this approach is that now important information is split between two people, so neither sees the full picture.)
I wonder if it would help to separate these roles temporally, something like: on Sundays you are in boss mode only (you are not allowed to work on the project, you can only make decisions and document them), and the rest of the week you are in worker mode only (you implement the backlog, then take a break; and strategic thoughts you can only note on paper that will be processed the next Sunday).
And… this might be also the problem some retired people have: having to play both roles, for the first time in their lives, after spending decades practicing something else.
This depends on country a lot. (From European perspective, the American job market is just brutal. You guys work lots of overtime, barely get any vacation; women get a 15-minute break for childbirth. And when you get sick, you get fired for low productivity, which means you lose your health insurance, which means you lose all your savings to pay the medical bills. I might have exaggerated a bit here.)
I was also punished for a gap in my resume, but not too much. I spent 5 years as a high-school teacher, then I realized this job also sucks (the work is 10% teaching and 90% babysitting), so I might as well return to the profession that sucks but at least pays well. Finding the first job was difficult; it was the worst programming job in my life: most stressful and least paid. But after a year my resume was like “yeah, I had a 5y gap, but that was in the past, now I am a developer again”. And after that, my resume is like “these are the three or four most important jobs I had, there were also a few minor ones I didn’t list here, feel free to ask”, and no one asks.
Hm, I like that idea of boss mode vs worker mode. I think it’ll help me and I’m excited to give it a try.
Interesting to hear about your experiences as a high school teacher. Teaching is one of my favorite things to do and a part of me in the back of my mind whispers, “Maybe you should just go be a teacher since you like it so much.” But I have a pretty strong impression that like you’re saying, and like most things that people are passionate about, things change a lot once it’s a job.
I like how you worded that, “now I’m a developer again”. I think that’s exactly what I’m working towards right now. I spent 1 year on self-study, 2 on a startup, then this past year was a 3 month contract, some freelancing, and some more self-studying. Now I just started a job and am 1.5 months in and am looking to get that “I’m a developer again” status.
Teaching, and being a teacher, two different things. I used to make some extra money tutoring math, and I enjoyed the experience. Once in a while I taught groups of adults; I liked that too. Sometimes I gave lectures on various topics.
Being a teacher means less autonomy on choosing what to teach (you need to follow a curriculum). When the teenagers are unmotivated, they won’t hesitate to remind you about it all the time. If half of the class is interested in the topic, and another half is bored, you spend most of your energy dealing with the other half. (When someone wasn’t paying attention to me, and read a book instead, I pretended not to notice, because it was much preferable to actively disrupting.) Then you have to do the paperwork, teach classes for your absent colleagues (on subjects you don’t know, so it’s often just: “kids, read the book”).
Here are some articles from a teacher in UK, where the situation seems exceptionally bad, but it’s a difference of degree: 1, 2.
Interesting about tutoring. I would imagine that even there, a) you wouldn’t really have autonomy about what to teach, because the clients would mostly be students who are taking a class looking to get a good grade, which would usually involve memorizing the teachers passwords, so your job would be helping them memorize these passwords. And b) even if there was no test you needed to get the students to pass, eg. maybe someone learning to code, I’d imagine that usually they’d be interested in something analogous to “getting the code to work” rather than being intellectually curious about deeper stuff.
In which case I would expect tutoring to not be much fun either. Did this stuff match your experiences at all?
My tutoring typically started with “debugging” student’s knowledge. The problems were usually deeper that the student reported, and full solution required fixing the underlying problem first.
For example, suppose the student has a problem with quadratic equations. But after doing some background check, it turns out they are quite confused about what happens when there is a minus sign before the parenthesis. Now of course, if they don’t get this right, then no matter how much time you spend explaining quadratic equations, they are going to get half of them wrong whenever the problem starts with something slightly more complicated, that you first need to convert into the standard quadratic equation.
So I kinda imagine the mathematical “tech tree” in my head, and check the previous nodes first, and so on recursively, if necessary. Then gradually build up the correct knowledge.
In school, this would be one student among 20 or 30. There is no time to do this background check with one of them, and definitely not with half of them, no matter how much they need it. Also, you are constrained how much time you can spend at each topic. If it’s not enough for some students, well, sucks to be them, but we must move to the next topic.
(Currently, there is a reform in math education that tries to get the fundamentals right, even if it costs somewhat more time at the beginning, because then kids can progress faster, while actually understanding everything. One day I would like to write a post about it on Less Wrong, but I am not a teacher anymore, and my contact with teachers who use this method is limited because of covid.)
I see. I find that sort of debugging quite enjoyable.
However, I find that students often are very impatient when it comes to traversing deeper down the dependency tree, and instead impatiently just want to “get it working/get the answer” and move on. There are three separate instances in my life that I can think of where I experienced this recently: 1) a backend dev learning frontend stuff, 2) someone entirely new to programming I was tutoring, 3) a college student taking precalc.