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Wow, this post is an incredible example of gut-wrenching honesty about things working out differently than expected. I'm eight months into life without work rig

Wow, this post is an incredible example of gut-wrenching honesty about things working out differently than expected. I'm eight months into life without work right now, and can relate to a lot of this. I didn't make a plan to retire (early or otherwise), I just wanted to move abroad and take time to learn the language and think a little about what I want out of life aside from career. I can relate to the anxiety and ennui they experienced in 2018. Something good about being in the rat race is that even during bad days you don't feel adrift or wasteful. During the first couple of months after I quit working, and after moving abroad, I hadn't yet enrolled in full-time language classes. At first it was easy to enjoy myself meeting new people, going rock climbing, traveling a bit, going on dates, etc. But after a while, I started noticing that if I woke up at 11am and didn't have "something to do," i.e. a plan, I started feeling a very strong sense of unease, something like a very mild sense of panic or alarm. Like here I am with no work to eat up my day, plenty of money, nothing but free time. If I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, or just don't feel like I'm enjoying myself, I am utterly wasting my precious time on Earth. That's a pretty dark chasm lurking just beneath the surface. If I'm having a bad day but can still pour a cup of coffee and go to work, I'm at least banking up money for some future day that I can enjoy it. I feel like he was a little unfair in how he characterized his partner's experience of that ennui, although I don't blame him for feeling bitter after an affair. I've never wanted to keep up with the Joneses or spend my life jockeying for status, but I still don't think I'd feel okay permanently quitting work this young. There's more existential dread in being immediately responsible for enjoying every single day to the fullest than I'm ready to face.

ericjang 5y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience. the term "dark chasm lurking just beneath the surface" to describe what total freedom looks like on bad days speaks to me. I also agree with your assessment of his partner. Keeping up with the Joneses sounds shallow at first, but I think it belies the true human desire to be respected by others. Maybe his partner felt like they weren't "accomplishing much" in life, which doesn't mean a 9-5 per se or an annual income $ per se, but that accomplishments were the best way to get respected by other people. We're social creatures, so I don't think it's wrong to seek social validation by others. I think when one is single and looking for a partner, what other people think does matter a lot. I think if the author was still committed to not working, finding a partner would be much harder.
fossuser 5y ago
I think people need purpose to feel fulfilled. Work serves as a default purpose for lots of people. Family and children are a pretty good built-in biological one. Learning things, building a company, making things can all serve that need. Working on big unsolved problems can too. I think most people feel uneasy and unhappy if they're not part of a community doing something they think is valuable. A lot of religion serves this purpose for people (though I personally find religion to be a net negative). Finding different things that motivate you and are worth dedicating your life (or some subset of your life) to work on is hard, but I think knowing that it's worth trying to find something is the first step. True financial independence is a way to make the search more possible without anxiety of financial ruin, but it doesn't remove the non-money related anxieties and it doesn't fix all the other sexual selection incentives that remain.
jseban 5y ago
I don't understand how you can wake up with nothing to do and panic over it. I would always have some hobby or sports project going that I know I'd always want to work on, I seriously can't understand how someone can run out of things to do when there's painting, music, cooking, sports etc, just one of those would keep me busy and socially connected for a lifetime.
- WA 5y ago
  Because if you drop out of the work force, you get a different perspective. There's painting and music and they are a good contrast to your work, a good way to spend time not thinking about work. But if there is only painting and music and cooking, it becomes kinda pointless, especially if most people you know don't have time during the day. You're doing this all alone.
  - eloisius 5y ago
    Well said. Try quitting work and indulging those activities for a while. I don't think of myself as a particularly boring person. I love bike touring, and I live in a foreign country with all kinds of interesting places, food and culture to explore, yet doing it months on end I started to question whether _this_ was what all my hard work in years past was meant for. Did I save up all this money and liberate myself for this particular stroll around the neighborhood to take pictures? It felt unsettling. I've been thinking about this all day, and I realized another experience it gives me similar feelings to. at 15 I absolutely hated public high school. I had been alt-schooled (home schooled, unschooled, something like that) up until 9th grade. After one year in regular school, learning at a mind numbing pace, I knew with conviction that I just wanted to finish school and get on with life, so I withdrew and enrolled in the local night school. I blew through classes and would have graduated in no time, but something started gnawing at me. I could finish school for the day at my own pace and then leave, but to do what? After leaving regular high school, my classmates were mostly troubled kids, or people trying to get their life back on track by getting a diploma. I fairly quickly realized that I was going to miss out on being in the rat race of high school for 4 years, and went back to regular school halfway through the school year.
stay_pattern 5y ago
A shift in mindset is required. We value our time too much. It's true that it's finite and non-replenishible, but we still value it too much. Once we can see our time for what it's really worth (not much), anxieties about potentially pissing it all away disappear, replaced with ideas and possibilities (most of which may have previously have been classified as "a waste of time").

ericjang 5y ago

Thanks for sharing your experience. the term "dark chasm lurking just beneath the surface" to describe what total freedom looks like on bad days speaks to me. I also agree with your assessment of his partner. Keeping up with the Joneses sounds shallow at first, but I think it belies the true human desire to be respected by others. Maybe his partner felt like they weren't "accomplishing much" in life, which doesn't mean a 9-5 per se or an annual income $ per se, but that accomplishments were the best way to get respected by other people. We're social creatures, so I don't think it's wrong to seek social validation by others. I think when one is single and looking for a partner, what other people think does matter a lot. I think if the author was still committed to not working, finding a partner would be much harder.

fossuser 5y ago

I think people need purpose to feel fulfilled. Work serves as a default purpose for lots of people. Family and children are a pretty good built-in biological one. Learning things, building a company, making things can all serve that need. Working on big unsolved problems can too. I think most people feel uneasy and unhappy if they're not part of a community doing something they think is valuable. A lot of religion serves this purpose for people (though I personally find religion to be a net negative). Finding different things that motivate you and are worth dedicating your life (or some subset of your life) to work on is hard, but I think knowing that it's worth trying to find something is the first step. True financial independence is a way to make the search more possible without anxiety of financial ruin, but it doesn't remove the non-money related anxieties and it doesn't fix all the other sexual selection incentives that remain.

jseban 5y ago

I don't understand how you can wake up with nothing to do and panic over it. I would always have some hobby or sports project going that I know I'd always want to work on, I seriously can't understand how someone can run out of things to do when there's painting, music, cooking, sports etc, just one of those would keep me busy and socially connected for a lifetime.

WA 5y ago
Because if you drop out of the work force, you get a different perspective. There's painting and music and they are a good contrast to your work, a good way to spend time not thinking about work. But if there is only painting and music and cooking, it becomes kinda pointless, especially if most people you know don't have time during the day. You're doing this all alone.
- eloisius 5y ago
  Well said. Try quitting work and indulging those activities for a while. I don't think of myself as a particularly boring person. I love bike touring, and I live in a foreign country with all kinds of interesting places, food and culture to explore, yet doing it months on end I started to question whether _this_ was what all my hard work in years past was meant for. Did I save up all this money and liberate myself for this particular stroll around the neighborhood to take pictures? It felt unsettling. I've been thinking about this all day, and I realized another experience it gives me similar feelings to. at 15 I absolutely hated public high school. I had been alt-schooled (home schooled, unschooled, something like that) up until 9th grade. After one year in regular school, learning at a mind numbing pace, I knew with conviction that I just wanted to finish school and get on with life, so I withdrew and enrolled in the local night school. I blew through classes and would have graduated in no time, but something started gnawing at me. I could finish school for the day at my own pace and then leave, but to do what? After leaving regular high school, my classmates were mostly troubled kids, or people trying to get their life back on track by getting a diploma. I fairly quickly realized that I was going to miss out on being in the rat race of high school for 4 years, and went back to regular school halfway through the school year.

stay_pattern 5y ago

A shift in mindset is required. We value our time too much. It's true that it's finite and non-replenishible, but we still value it too much. Once we can see our time for what it's really worth (not much), anxieties about potentially pissing it all away disappear, replaced with ideas and possibilities (most of which may have previously have been classified as "a waste of time").