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Comment by xirdstl | Hacker News Reader

This is a concern for me as I consider "early" retirement. I'm not sure what I would do with all that time.

I took a bit of a sabbatical a few years ago and ran into some of the problems described in the article. After a few months, it did have some pretty negative effects on my mental health.

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Open a little shop, work in a bike store or book store, build houses for habitat for humanity, build trails, work for production companies, be a teacher's assistant, be a barista, do all the cool low-paying jobs that you couldn't afford to do before.

Volunteer. There are so many good opportunities most places, you just have to find ones that interest you.

Speaking of which, why hasn't anyone built Uber for volunteers

If you are a programmer, now you have your next project for when you take some time off. ;-)

I have thought about doing that, but as with any ideas I have, I assume that if it was a good idea, someone would already be doing it!

"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken

If you want help with something like that, I'd love to. Oh, the dogfooding possibilities..

I've thought about it a lot, also. Came to the same conclusion as yourself. If only I wasn't already currently working on N other side projects...

What do you mean by that?

On-demand volunteers? Hmm.

Find a problem to solve in your local community and do what it takes to fix it, no matter how small. You'll learn, do good and get involved with your community more.

I recently took six months off to try and solve some local problems. There hasn't been a dull moment. :)

What kind of problems were you working on?

Lots of the work is just me identifying problems that I see and trying to fix them. Most of it is just exploratory and can be stressful at times, but it's overall very rewarding. I just accepted an offer in the infosec field to get out of the stress and to, well, get out of a financial hole.

-Heck of a lot of FOIA requests to get the Chicago mayor's office's phone records.

-Went to a hackathon a couple months back and made a domestic violence shelter map which has since been taken over by a small team of volunteers.

-Got some wrongful parking tickets and started a project to map out Chicago's parking tickets using FOIA data.

-Started setting up a LAN party with some friends which we hope will have 160+ people.

-Freelance work here and there for some cash to help pay the bills.

-Found some security vulnerabilities that could have impacted comcast's network which I helped fix. Did the same with Northwestern, but they didn't fix it.

-Lots and lots of learning of random things.

Please expand on some of what you're working on! I've been thinking about just this sort of "work" to start dipping my toes into, don't quite know where to start.

A lot of it is me getting annoyed at something that certainly impacts many others. It's gone down some interesting paths. What I've found in general is that the small things not only add up, but they help find where the root causes are. So, if you can help fix the small things and enough people do it, the better the world becomes in general.

Things like, "Why has that lamp been out for a month?" can become very interesting if you pursue them to a certain depth. :)

You sound exactly like my mom, and I mean that in an incredibly positive way. She has fixed so many issues in public facilities just by picking up the phone and persisting. She can expedite anything, and she'll go to great lengths to help others. Her social network is massive as well. She hasn't worked in years, but I have insane respect for her and I envy her a lot!

Hah, thanks. She sounds like she's had a lot more success than I have, though. :)

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