Our Father’s Retirement and the Shared Fear Of Uselessness | Hacker News Reader

Our Father’s Retirement and the Shared Fear Of Uselessness

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19 pointsfrankcaron9 comments

Honestly, in the grand scheme of things aren't most people pretty useless? I'm comfortable being pretty much useless. I go to work, come home, spend money, eat, sleep, repeat.

I have no illusions that I'm particularly useful or contributing anything to the world and just plan on passing the time until I die.

I think it's funny that more people can't accept the truth about themselves. It's not a bad thing being useless, it's just reality for a huge number of people, myself included.

"Fear of uselessness" seems to be a euphemism for the fear of dying, both the process and the ending.

I'm not sure there is a great answer here, so I'm just going to post the Alan Watts talk that brings some perspective for me.

Alan Watts - Music and life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4

"[..] but we miss the point the whole way along, it was a musical thing. You were supposed to sing or dance while the music was being played".

simple he needs a hobby he has a passion for, took my dad years of contracting after retiring to realize he could be happy with his wood working hobby, oh and traveling.

it isn't so much not being useful but being idle with nothing to do which isn't the same thing

This sounds to me like a disappearing problem. Increasingly, people do not need an employer to be useful. Technology enables an individual to accomplish amazing things of great value with minimal cost. When a software engineer retires, what would prevent him from continuing to be a useful member of a software team? A software team is only handicapped by the presence of a centralized corporate structure that requires the team to live in the same geographic area, to be productive enough and lowly paid enough to compensate for the monumental inefficiency of maintaining an office building, multiple layers of management, open floor plan offices in spite of mountains of research showing how detrimental it is to productivity, retention of a 40 hour work week even when 40 hours of productive knowledge work is neither possible nor necessary, etc.

Retirement is the state of discontinuing employment and living off one's investments/Social Security instead. What's to stop him is that if he continues to be productive towards the ends of some business he is by definition not retired.

There are modes of living other than just employment and idleness. Entrepreneurship is one, but even if you consider that employment by another name, it's not the only one.

Yes, and those which involve working for money are not retirement.

But the essay, such as it is, was about usefulness or uselessness, not money. And in any case, there are hundreds of millions (more probably billions) of humans on this planet who neither have nor need money. Your concept of retirement is narrow and necessarily bound to a particular mode of living, as well as largely unrelated to whether someone is useful. The idea that the three phases of life are childhood (idleness), employment (saving money), and retirement (spending money) is both historically and culturally anomalous. It's more constructive to think about the many modes of living and their relationship to one's personal utility and sense of worth than to dwell on labels, especially since so many people live in ways that are hybrids or entirely outside the system your labels assume.

I think for the average person it's easier to be an employee than an independent worker. Working independently requires much more skills (e.g. permanent negotiation).

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