6 ms·

I know a few retired business execs or owners who got bought out and for the most part they are miserable. No good hobbies, no schedule. For the most part they

I know a few retired business execs or owners who got bought out and for the most part they are miserable. No good hobbies, no schedule. For the most part they just boss around their families, driving them nuts. I think we're lucky in that for most of us our hobbies and work intersect, at least to some degree, such that even in retirement, if we're truly idle, we can still write software.

alexpetralia 5y ago
We need social relevance.
- dmos62 5y ago
  Volunteering can be good.
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    The menial work generally associated with volunteering is less satisfying than commanding your enterprise or just developing software. Though that itself, to an extent, can be volunteered. Can always start or join a non-profit that tackles problems of interest.
    - mattcwilson 5y ago
      You’re entirely missing the value of volunteering. If you don’t take joy, pride, humility, and reward in the feeling of genuinely doing good work for entirely no benefit to yourself, volunteering isn’t for you.
      - slothtrop 5y ago
        You could tell me that washing dishes for a crowd would cure cancer and it would not fill me with joy, pride, humility or reward. That doesn't mean I never find reward in helping others in-person or otherwise, and in some instances there's a sense of moral duty. Ultimately most people favor volunteer work that suits them, even if they don't admit it. An easy way to confirm this is that there are usually more effective ways to be charitable qua saving lives than chosen avenues; that doesn't mean it isn't meaningful, but there is a selfish element. I would also consider those aforementioned emotions you listed as personal benefit. Those aren't elicited through mere rationalization, but human contact, which releases Oxytocin. They scale not with real-world impact (which can feel too abstracted) but social contact. That's why charities struggle.
    - dmos62 5y ago
      Menial work less satisfying than commanding or developing is a pretty satirical definition of volunteering.
      - slothtrop 5y ago
        It would be, were it a definition of volunteering.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Find something that hurts you about the world, and find a way to make that better for other people. That is the overarching thesis around volunteering.
      - slothtrop 5y ago
        That's why I donate to charity.
        toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Everyone has a different path to fulfillment.
    - cafard 5y ago
      I teach ESL as a volunteer one night a week. I'm willing to hear that someone would find this less satisfying than some other activity. However, I don't see that it qualifies as menial. (I am not retired, for what it's worth.)
- 0des 5y ago
  I've never heard this term before, can you share more about your experience with it so I can understand it better?
  - retrac 5y ago
    Humans are inherently social creatures. We live for other people, mostly. Take that away and life gets damn pointless. Depression that eventually becomes catatonia, ultimately resulting in death from self-neglect in the extreme case, is a typical human response to complete long-term isolation.
    - 0des 5y ago
      I suppose I can see that, thanks for taking a minute to explain it. Sometimes these phrases can shoot right past me.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    The search for meaning and status through interactions with others.
merpnderp 5y ago
Nailed it. If I could retire, I'd write a lot more software and likely interact with a lot more people.
gremloni 5y ago
Are they genuinely miserable or are you viewing them through your world view?
- xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
  They are genuinely miserable. They are grumpy, irritable, and micromanage everything they can get their hands on. The only thing that keeps them happy is renovating stuff or travelling, and it's hard to do both constantly.
belorn 5y ago
It highlight the need for hobbies. I find it somewhat odd that in my own culture, hobbies has become less prioritized in the image of an well adapted healthy individual. It might be part of urbanization where the focus is on the job and less on side activities like growing things for fun, taking care of animals, hunting, fishing, walking in the forest and so on.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  I get that sense, and also an urgency that every hobby needs to be monetized as a side gig. I'm not sure if this severity loosens with age but it's as though people want to telegraph they are hustling all the way to the grave. There's a real freedom in fun or interest for its own sake and not needing to rationalize its usefulness. One way to accomplish this is to deal with those externalities in some other fashion, like through effective altruism, e.g. donating to favorite charities, and periodically (not constantly) being informed on what the big issues are.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    >an urgency that every hobby needs to be monetized as a side gig Of course it needs to be monetized. This is America - if you are good at it, it must make money BTW, this is SOLID sarcasm.
  - asoneth 5y ago
    > an urgency that every hobby needs to be monetized as a side gig I noticed this effect most prominently when moving from Pittsburgh to NYC. In Pittsburgh my circle of friends generally had noncommercial side projects, weird art installations, and hobbies that had nothing to do with their day jobs and no commercial potential. In NYC my circle of friends spent a lot more time discussing how much their rent cost (more than 2-3x the cost of comparable units in Pittsburgh) and it felt like people spent a lot more time "hustling", trying to monetize their side projects, or advancing their (or their children's) chances at earning more. I have no way of knowing if these two circles were representative, but I suspect the fact that NYC salaries are generally only ~1.5x higher than Pittsburgh salaries meant that many people had to devote more of their mental and financial resources to the cost of living.
tantalor 5y ago
Not everybody wants hobbies and schedules.
- falcor84 5y ago
  You can have either without the other
GordonS 5y ago
My grandad and grandma on my mother's side are like this. They retired 5 years ago, at 60. Now, they do literally nothing all day, apart from read the paper, watch TV, and become increasingly embittered. They both really do seem pretty miserable and depressed, like they've settled in their chairs to wait for death, despite their relatively young age and relatively good health. 5 years on, they still just do nothing, all day, every day. I'd they were actually happy doing that, fair enough, but as it is, I really don't understand their attitude. Personally, health permitting, I won't struggle for stuff to do when I retire, and I'll certainly be doing it!
- mrfusion 5y ago
  > read the paper, watch TV, and become increasingly embittered I think you found the cause. Corporate media.
TrackerFF 5y ago
Retirement is not for everyone. One thing (financial) retirement sometimes does, is removing the hunger/drive for becoming better. So many just end up as dilettantes in whatever hobbies or projects they're taking on. To become really good at something, most need to push themselves as though it's a full-time job. On the other hand, some people thrive doing nothing, or barely nothing - just tending to their hobbies in short bursts, and living a chill lifestyle. You really don't know before you're in that position. I'm saying this, because I've seen many people that took out early retirement, only to fall into those traps. They envisioned a grand life of hobbies, travel, and just fun times - then 1 month went by, 6 months, a year, etc. and they hadn't done jack sh!t. And it also hit them that 90% of their socialization came through work, and that their friends that still work, need to prioritize their own spare time.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  >And it also hit them that 90% of their socialization came through work, and that their friends that still work, need to prioritize their own spare time. When Covid hit and I was WFH, I was hit with this fact. I HAD to learn new ways to socialize. Best of luck to anyone who needs to learn this.
- kamaal 5y ago
  >>One thing (financial) retirement sometimes does, is removing the hunger/drive for becoming better. Put in other way humans need to score a win every now and then to keep moving forward, else you don't have anything to look forward to. You dread waking up in the morning because you need to carry around yourself the whole day without a purpose. This is more in the bracket of anything in life in general and not just retirement. For that matter continually failing at things in life without scoring a win for long has the same effect, even if you are not retired.
mpdehaan2 5y ago
I could write a few pages here and hope maybe they can help someone. Leaving the industry has been a hard adjustment (years) - but folks can get through it. I've been thinking about this a lot, so here goes. Ok, so, my theory is that when leaving a profession our brains have been hardwired for being really good at to the point where we dream about code - it's likely a large number of our brain cells don't know what to do with each other. Yet, if you get successful enough, you may also decide that you hate all the corporate drudgery and politics, and the reward of success is getting out, so you're out. And you have to adapt. It's important to remember why you left. Yes, remember those bad things. There is a reason you aren't there. But how to do you fill in and appease all those brain cells still grabbing on to the desire they want to do this thing, this thing that, especially when you were just starting, you really loved? Can you still program for fun? Yes ... but you'll miss many levels of social interaction, especially if you had a really big thing before. You have to be able to enjoy building things that people don't see or appreciate. This is very hard. You may struggle from not having the user interactions or interactions with other developers you worked with. After starting many things that you can't get an audience for, this can become pretty isolating. It does help to cultivate a degree of mindfulness - and ability to reframe negative thinking - and of course to cultivate hobbies. Everyone can do that now. But I would look at it not as a quest for "what's next" or a repeated success as this may be frustrating, but a chance for reinventing yourself (slowly) and enjoying various things in life with a bit more attention and interest. Maybe the addiction to the success was the problem. Maybe there's something about the Buddhist definition of "attachment". Still, I want to fix this - though I'm not working to anymore. I feel we feel the promise of open source in corporate settings but really the whole "anybody can make something and get lots of users to have fun with" isn't true really. There's too much noise. There is lost opportunity. In trying to do programming for fun, I ended up questioning all of my religion about open source communities. A weird experience. It's not really as real as I thought. We could fix this by making ways for people to discover projects around really niche interests - smaller forums, not sites that scroll by in a minutes. But I think success in adapting here is by letting those parts go and realizing you can reinvent yourself. If someday they want to code something different, they won't have the same inclinations and it will be more like when I wrote my very first programs - there was almost no one to show them to, but it was still fun. My advice I think is to be ok with letting that software part of your brain atrophy, because those pathways are likely attached to a lot of other things, and they are going to ... fight. There's a few people I've encountered where stockbrokers became potters or whatever. I don't really know if I want to do that. But I also know if I'm looking, I kind of feel desperate or something, and it's better to not be. I could start another company, but I want to avoid the whole VC game - and it's difficult finding people that have lots of time that CAN work for free, but I also know the huge opportunity cost - and once successful, it might create the thing I was happy to escape from. Do I even want to spend that many hours in front of a computer? It's a process. (twitter DM info in profile if useful)
kamaal 5y ago
>>For the most part they just boss around their families, driving them nuts. Not exactly a business exec or even a rich man. I know an uncle in my extended family who retired in late 40s-ish. We are in India, he used to work abroad in the middle east. Retired, returned and turned very grumpy, holier-than-thou and bitter towards kids. Add to this a range of business failures, and ensuing financial troubles. Eventually the problem just became too extreme and he would make things difficult for every one just for the heck of it(Just to show them he was still in control). You could visit them and see the whole home felt like every one was just walking around with dread, despair and depression just wanting an escape from all this. He also turned to religion and would lawyer his arguments from that perspective too. He eventually morphed into a very bitter, always-angry, jealous and envious man, hating anyone with a good life around him. That included people in extended family too. Eventually kids left for good. There is something wrong that comes to happen when a person begins to live without a purpose, work or hobbies.

alexpetralia 5y ago

We need social relevance.

dmos62 5y ago
Volunteering can be good.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  The menial work generally associated with volunteering is less satisfying than commanding your enterprise or just developing software. Though that itself, to an extent, can be volunteered. Can always start or join a non-profit that tackles problems of interest.
  - mattcwilson 5y ago
    You’re entirely missing the value of volunteering. If you don’t take joy, pride, humility, and reward in the feeling of genuinely doing good work for entirely no benefit to yourself, volunteering isn’t for you.
    - slothtrop 5y ago
      You could tell me that washing dishes for a crowd would cure cancer and it would not fill me with joy, pride, humility or reward. That doesn't mean I never find reward in helping others in-person or otherwise, and in some instances there's a sense of moral duty. Ultimately most people favor volunteer work that suits them, even if they don't admit it. An easy way to confirm this is that there are usually more effective ways to be charitable qua saving lives than chosen avenues; that doesn't mean it isn't meaningful, but there is a selfish element. I would also consider those aforementioned emotions you listed as personal benefit. Those aren't elicited through mere rationalization, but human contact, which releases Oxytocin. They scale not with real-world impact (which can feel too abstracted) but social contact. That's why charities struggle.
  - dmos62 5y ago
    Menial work less satisfying than commanding or developing is a pretty satirical definition of volunteering.
    - slothtrop 5y ago
      It would be, were it a definition of volunteering.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Find something that hurts you about the world, and find a way to make that better for other people. That is the overarching thesis around volunteering.
    - slothtrop 5y ago
      That's why I donate to charity.
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        Everyone has a different path to fulfillment.
  - cafard 5y ago
    I teach ESL as a volunteer one night a week. I'm willing to hear that someone would find this less satisfying than some other activity. However, I don't see that it qualifies as menial. (I am not retired, for what it's worth.)
0des 5y ago
I've never heard this term before, can you share more about your experience with it so I can understand it better?
- retrac 5y ago
  Humans are inherently social creatures. We live for other people, mostly. Take that away and life gets damn pointless. Depression that eventually becomes catatonia, ultimately resulting in death from self-neglect in the extreme case, is a typical human response to complete long-term isolation.
  - 0des 5y ago
    I suppose I can see that, thanks for taking a minute to explain it. Sometimes these phrases can shoot right past me.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  The search for meaning and status through interactions with others.

merpnderp 5y ago

Nailed it. If I could retire, I'd write a lot more software and likely interact with a lot more people.

gremloni 5y ago

Are they genuinely miserable or are you viewing them through your world view?

xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
They are genuinely miserable. They are grumpy, irritable, and micromanage everything they can get their hands on. The only thing that keeps them happy is renovating stuff or travelling, and it's hard to do both constantly.

belorn 5y ago

It highlight the need for hobbies. I find it somewhat odd that in my own culture, hobbies has become less prioritized in the image of an well adapted healthy individual. It might be part of urbanization where the focus is on the job and less on side activities like growing things for fun, taking care of animals, hunting, fishing, walking in the forest and so on.

slothtrop 5y ago
I get that sense, and also an urgency that every hobby needs to be monetized as a side gig. I'm not sure if this severity loosens with age but it's as though people want to telegraph they are hustling all the way to the grave. There's a real freedom in fun or interest for its own sake and not needing to rationalize its usefulness. One way to accomplish this is to deal with those externalities in some other fashion, like through effective altruism, e.g. donating to favorite charities, and periodically (not constantly) being informed on what the big issues are.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  >an urgency that every hobby needs to be monetized as a side gig Of course it needs to be monetized. This is America - if you are good at it, it must make money BTW, this is SOLID sarcasm.
- asoneth 5y ago
  > an urgency that every hobby needs to be monetized as a side gig I noticed this effect most prominently when moving from Pittsburgh to NYC. In Pittsburgh my circle of friends generally had noncommercial side projects, weird art installations, and hobbies that had nothing to do with their day jobs and no commercial potential. In NYC my circle of friends spent a lot more time discussing how much their rent cost (more than 2-3x the cost of comparable units in Pittsburgh) and it felt like people spent a lot more time "hustling", trying to monetize their side projects, or advancing their (or their children's) chances at earning more. I have no way of knowing if these two circles were representative, but I suspect the fact that NYC salaries are generally only ~1.5x higher than Pittsburgh salaries meant that many people had to devote more of their mental and financial resources to the cost of living.

tantalor 5y ago

Not everybody wants hobbies and schedules.

falcor84 5y ago
You can have either without the other

GordonS 5y ago

My grandad and grandma on my mother's side are like this. They retired 5 years ago, at 60. Now, they do literally nothing all day, apart from read the paper, watch TV, and become increasingly embittered. They both really do seem pretty miserable and depressed, like they've settled in their chairs to wait for death, despite their relatively young age and relatively good health. 5 years on, they still just do nothing, all day, every day. I'd they were actually happy doing that, fair enough, but as it is, I really don't understand their attitude. Personally, health permitting, I won't struggle for stuff to do when I retire, and I'll certainly be doing it!

mrfusion 5y ago
> read the paper, watch TV, and become increasingly embittered I think you found the cause. Corporate media.

TrackerFF 5y ago

Retirement is not for everyone. One thing (financial) retirement sometimes does, is removing the hunger/drive for becoming better. So many just end up as dilettantes in whatever hobbies or projects they're taking on. To become really good at something, most need to push themselves as though it's a full-time job. On the other hand, some people thrive doing nothing, or barely nothing - just tending to their hobbies in short bursts, and living a chill lifestyle. You really don't know before you're in that position. I'm saying this, because I've seen many people that took out early retirement, only to fall into those traps. They envisioned a grand life of hobbies, travel, and just fun times - then 1 month went by, 6 months, a year, etc. and they hadn't done jack sh!t. And it also hit them that 90% of their socialization came through work, and that their friends that still work, need to prioritize their own spare time.

geoduck14 5y ago
>And it also hit them that 90% of their socialization came through work, and that their friends that still work, need to prioritize their own spare time. When Covid hit and I was WFH, I was hit with this fact. I HAD to learn new ways to socialize. Best of luck to anyone who needs to learn this.
kamaal 5y ago
>>One thing (financial) retirement sometimes does, is removing the hunger/drive for becoming better. Put in other way humans need to score a win every now and then to keep moving forward, else you don't have anything to look forward to. You dread waking up in the morning because you need to carry around yourself the whole day without a purpose. This is more in the bracket of anything in life in general and not just retirement. For that matter continually failing at things in life without scoring a win for long has the same effect, even if you are not retired.

mpdehaan2 5y ago

I could write a few pages here and hope maybe they can help someone. Leaving the industry has been a hard adjustment (years) - but folks can get through it. I've been thinking about this a lot, so here goes. Ok, so, my theory is that when leaving a profession our brains have been hardwired for being really good at to the point where we dream about code - it's likely a large number of our brain cells don't know what to do with each other. Yet, if you get successful enough, you may also decide that you hate all the corporate drudgery and politics, and the reward of success is getting out, so you're out. And you have to adapt. It's important to remember why you left. Yes, remember those bad things. There is a reason you aren't there. But how to do you fill in and appease all those brain cells still grabbing on to the desire they want to do this thing, this thing that, especially when you were just starting, you really loved? Can you still program for fun? Yes ... but you'll miss many levels of social interaction, especially if you had a really big thing before. You have to be able to enjoy building things that people don't see or appreciate. This is very hard. You may struggle from not having the user interactions or interactions with other developers you worked with. After starting many things that you can't get an audience for, this can become pretty isolating. It does help to cultivate a degree of mindfulness - and ability to reframe negative thinking - and of course to cultivate hobbies. Everyone can do that now. But I would look at it not as a quest for "what's next" or a repeated success as this may be frustrating, but a chance for reinventing yourself (slowly) and enjoying various things in life with a bit more attention and interest. Maybe the addiction to the success was the problem. Maybe there's something about the Buddhist definition of "attachment". Still, I want to fix this - though I'm not working to anymore. I feel we feel the promise of open source in corporate settings but really the whole "anybody can make something and get lots of users to have fun with" isn't true really. There's too much noise. There is lost opportunity. In trying to do programming for fun, I ended up questioning all of my religion about open source communities. A weird experience. It's not really as real as I thought. We could fix this by making ways for people to discover projects around really niche interests - smaller forums, not sites that scroll by in a minutes. But I think success in adapting here is by letting those parts go and realizing you can reinvent yourself. If someday they want to code something different, they won't have the same inclinations and it will be more like when I wrote my very first programs - there was almost no one to show them to, but it was still fun. My advice I think is to be ok with letting that software part of your brain atrophy, because those pathways are likely attached to a lot of other things, and they are going to ... fight. There's a few people I've encountered where stockbrokers became potters or whatever. I don't really know if I want to do that. But I also know if I'm looking, I kind of feel desperate or something, and it's better to not be. I could start another company, but I want to avoid the whole VC game - and it's difficult finding people that have lots of time that CAN work for free, but I also know the huge opportunity cost - and once successful, it might create the thing I was happy to escape from. Do I even want to spend that many hours in front of a computer? It's a process. (twitter DM info in profile if useful)

kamaal 5y ago

>>For the most part they just boss around their families, driving them nuts. Not exactly a business exec or even a rich man. I know an uncle in my extended family who retired in late 40s-ish. We are in India, he used to work abroad in the middle east. Retired, returned and turned very grumpy, holier-than-thou and bitter towards kids. Add to this a range of business failures, and ensuing financial troubles. Eventually the problem just became too extreme and he would make things difficult for every one just for the heck of it(Just to show them he was still in control). You could visit them and see the whole home felt like every one was just walking around with dread, despair and depression just wanting an escape from all this. He also turned to religion and would lawyer his arguments from that perspective too. He eventually morphed into a very bitter, always-angry, jealous and envious man, hating anyone with a good life around him. That included people in extended family too. Eventually kids left for good. There is something wrong that comes to happen when a person begins to live without a purpose, work or hobbies.