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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

I can only assume the "nothing to do" retirement crowd didn't do much when they were working, and therefore have no idea how to fill the time. Personally:

1. More volunteer time at the dog shelter.

2. More reading.

3. More music playing, and finally really spend time on that violin that is currently a secondary instrument.

4. More time at "church" (read: Zen practice), yes, just like other old people.

5. Might finally have time to hike the Appalachian Trail, or at least large parts of it.

6. Finally find the time to sit down and decide what I want to do when I retire, 'cuz there's no way this list is complete.

All but #5 should be able to be done by all but the most feeble. I hope I live so long as to get bored in retirement.

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> I can only assume the "nothing to do" retirement crowd didn't do much when they were working, and therefore have no idea how to fill the time. Personally:

Loads of folks derive personal value and meaning out of their work, and I'm one of them. I've been out of work once for a few months, and that was with a job waiting for me at the end of the tunnel.

It was eye opening how depressive it was, to be robbed of your big "thing." I'm saying this as someone with a boat load of little "things," reading, outdoorsmanship, sports, etc. The second that surety of purpose is gone, so goes my wider motivation.

There's no reason your "thing" can't be volunteering or working for a cause that you find important pro bono.

Most people would define "retirement" as "no longer working for money, while using savings or other existing means of income to pay for living expenses"

> There's no reason your "thing" can't be volunteering or working for a cause that you find important pro bono.

There absolutely is a reason that it can't be my "thing," it's because it isn't!

What is it about working that makes it so depressing for you to not do it? Is it the earning of money for yourself? If so, you're greedy. That's fine. Be greedy. Not a great look, but we're just being honest with ourselves.

If it's "doing work that changes the way things are", once you've reached a point where you are able to retire and no longer need to work for money, there's plenty of options in just about every sector (I'm assuming yours is tech or tech adjacent being on HN and all that) where you can do meaningful work and which people would gladly accept the help of an expert on even if they can't pay them.

If it's some other 3rd thing that you feel differentiates jobs from non-jobs, I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.

You're coming across as being purposely offensive/antagonistic, FYI. To borrow your words, "not a great look".

I'm posing a hypothetical set of emotions for OP to try and understand is POV. If someone was to tell you "I get depressed if I don't work for long periods of time, because I my life feels meaningless if I'm not making money" How do you describe that person, if not "greedy"? I don't think calling greed "greed" is offensive. That isn't even saying OP actually is greedy, but that it was a possibility. To each their own.

I'm trying to figure out what OP feels provides him meaning at work. If it's the money, and he gets depressed when he doesn't make money, I'm fine calling that greedy. If it's the lack of meaningful "work" you can do the work without the money. If it's a 3rd thing, I genuinely don't understand what it could be since to me work is simply "doing a task for money".

Just speaking for me, what I like about work is that I'm doing important things for other people. Things that actually matter.

Society is built on division of labor. I enjoy the fruits of so many people's labor in uncountable ways all day long. It's only fair that I too participate in this wonderful system and give something back.

You're right that the payment is important. Calling that "greed" is a misunderstanding of that word, aside from the attempted insult. Among several things, it does serve as a check that what you do is important. That someone is willing to pay you money, shows that the work is important to that someone!

(I don't write the following to impugn your choices; I'm only drawing a contrast between your view of the world and mine so we can discuss the differences.)

It's interesting to me that you wrote the payment is important to you because it shows that what you are doing is important. My outlook is that the thing I am paid to do is arguably the least important activity out of any I do in the world. I'm paid to ensure that a particular set of bits are turned on and off in the appropriate way so that other people can manipulate those same bits to influence how data is represented elsewhere. In essence, I feel as though I'm the digital version of a paper-pusher, merely moving reports from one end to the other. It's not bad, as such, just not something I imagine as an important thing. But, it's what the market / society / the invisible hand has decided is deserving of almost outlandlishly wealthy levels of pay, so I do it.

On the other hand, the things I find most important are the activities I either don't get paid to do or I actively pay to do them. Volunteering at my library showing kids and older adults how to read and find information. Being a guide at the zoo, hanging out with animals and encouraging others to see them as worth conserving. Knocking on doors for my preferred candidate in local elections. These are all things that, should I deduce some way to continue to pay my usual bills without having to digitally-push-paper, I would happily do for the rest of my days and let someone else occupy my chair at work. That I don't get paid to do them is almost part of the charm, though I wish society valued the work highly enough that I could get paid to do one or more of those instead of dealing with the latest wrinkle in "site reliability engineering."

Let's be careful here: I'm not saying getting paid is the only important thing. Far from from it!

But what I am saying is that it shows what I'm doing is important to other people. It's not just something I'm doing for myself.

> it's what the market / society / the invisible hand has decided is deserving of almost outlandlishly wealthy levels of pay, so I do it.

That's true, but I prefer to deabstractify it a bit. There are real people, who have decided to spend substantial money on paying you and me to do what we do, because they think it's important. That makes it very real to me. And confirmed by an independent outside "reviewer", so to speak.

I came into this way of thinking after being a stubborn youth who hated work and dreamt about never having to do it. But I couldn't get the ethics of it all to add up. So this is how I made sense of things.

Of course, what you describe sounds like working for the benefit of others as well.

Counterpoint: It's a singular way to know that your work is appreciated. It's not the only way. It's far from the only way in fact. Here's a short list of ways to see that your work is important:

-Direct comments from people saying as much -Visible effects of your work changing things around you -People providing you with physical, yet solely sentimentally valuable tokens of their thanks

The money is one way of keeping score, but it's not the singular way of keeping score. It's only important if you feel it's important. You can volunteer at an old folks home or help maintain an important, widely used OS project, and pretty easily understand that what you're doing is valuable to your society. There are all sorts of tasks that you can perform that have an overt and direct impact but which will not provide you with any financial income. Within the context of the discussion, being retired (which we earlier defined as existing in a state in which you no longer need additional financial gain in order to support your lifestyle) you could still perform meaningful task that aren't jobs.

OP hasn't commented on what it is that makes "working jobs for money" his thing. We can only speculate what his answers would be. I'm still of the opinion that it's either avarice and a love of money as a way of keeping score of your life, or a misunderstanding of what non-work activities look like.

How do you define greed? What do you feel I'm misunderstanding about the concept? Just so we can further this discussion, I'll put down my thought: Greed is the desire for money for money's sake. Using money as a way of proving that something is important. It is the desire to posses more than one needs. The crux of our disagreement here is likely that, defining what "needs" are. I believe capitalist societies are inherently greedy and therefor flawed. I'm not singularly condemning OP, I wish a pox upon the whole enterprise.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/greed says "a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed"

I would add "at the expense of others" to clarify that.

Getting paid to work is making money by helping others, which to me is the opposite of "greed"!

The trade of exchanging labor for money is one of the cornerstones of civilization, and everything that's good in the world, as I see it. So we seem to have some discrepancies in our world views :)

I have no quarrel at all with your other ways of knowing your work is appreciated. They all sound good and healthy.

All wealth is a 0 sum game. All money you have is money someone else doesn't have. I agree we have a pretty great difference in world views. I have no problem with markets, but "trading labor for money" is one of those paradigms that I think doesn't have to exist, and is a large part of our problem.

No quarrels though. You seem like a nice enough person.

Read it as "didn't do much outside of work when they were working". I believe you understandably misread a poorly-worded sentence.

I believe you've fundamentally misunderstood my point, there exists people for whom work is a large part of their identity and sense of purpose. Robbed of that, no amount of "Just do X" is going to matter.

Neither of you seems to be offering a particularly charitable interpretation to the other. Launching with "that's a pretty bold assessment" sets the tone for your own first response.

The comment reads far better without that sentence. As it is, you and mikestew appear to be in violent agreement.

> Neither of you seems to be offering a particularly charitable interpretation to the other.

Not a lot of room for uncharitable misinterpretation when one starts off with "I can only assume..."

> The comment reads far better without that sentence.

It certainly would!

I probably should have mentioned that as well, yes.

You had the choice to interpret charitably yourself, however ;-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I understood your point just fine, it seems. What I'm saying is, "go find something else to do". If you can't do that, I understand, but I'll also point out that it just illustrates my point.

Just work until you die. I don't see the problem.

That's not the only way to "derive personal value and meaning" out of your life. I take year-long breaks after each major job switch. You do experience loss after leaving a job you enjoyed, but it passes after a few months (about 6 months for me). Then you kind of wonder why you didn't leave sooner.

This is all predicated on not needing money too much. I can see how someone who doesn't have a financial cushion would feel depressed about not only having to spend savings, but also not making money to cover the living expenses. That was the hardest part to come to terms with (at least for me), even though I'm not in any way struggling financially.

I'm kind of close to a point where I'd be fine to not ever even search for another job. I got plenty of other things (perhaps too many) to derive meaning from, and I don't need to get paid to properly derive it.

Your comment intrigues me. Care to elaborate on what kind of passive income structure you have established, to give you that "financial cushion"?

He didn't mention passive income at all, he's just comfortable with eating away at his savings until he's employed again.

Pretty much. You can't make all the money in the world. There's more to life than slaving away on someone else's bullshit for a buck. And make no mistake 99% of what we do at work is ultimately irrelevant bullshit that will be gone and forgotten 10 years from now. When I work, I charge pretty penny though, to sustain that kind lifestyle. I do consulting at the moment. Already made enough money this year to last me 3-4 years. Mortgage is paid off, and I have no debt at all.

US tech workplace is super unfriendly to part time work, unfortunately, so instead I just "part time" by not working for a while every 3-4 years. My wife does the same thing. She left her job over a year ago, so she's not working at the moment, though she's more of a social animal, so she'll start looking in September. Me? If the tech industry disappeared today, I'd breathe a sigh of relief, and switch to brewing beer (which is something I'm pretty good at as well). As things are right now, tech is the easiest possible way for me to make the most money per hour (and therefore maximize my downtime).

1. Not possible due to failing health.

2. Do you mean Braille? Yes, large print can suffice sometimes... Audiobooks if your hearing is adequate.

3. Add some motor coordination problems and this is not happening.

4. It is boring for many.

5. Sure, with failing healthy and being less able to move. Not impossible, just not likely.

6. Too late for many things.

Most people forget that were talking 70 years old people or so. Some remain spry, but they are a minority.

6b. And what makes you think you will have better ideas then? Or have any actual energy?

By the time they're 60, most people attain at least one chronic health problem. If they're lucky, it's manageable for normal full energy life without such excesses.

Some fade much earlier than that.

Finally, the main problem is gradual loss of connections, friends, family etc.

Personally, if I found myself toward the end of my life retired and hopelessly frail, confined to a bed all day, with no children or even a friend worth seeing, I’ve decided I’ll just live out the rest of my days hacking into systems, creating botnets, ransoming data, just seeing what’s out there and trying to build some sort of malware network that can live on for a while after I’m gone. For what? Who knows. I’m just cashing in on a lifetime of skills and knowledge that I never got to use to it’s full extent, simply because I wanted to live an honest life. It’s better than laying there watching a TV all day falling asleep with a dry gaping mouth.

And if I slip up and get tracked, and I hear the law breaking down the door to get in, I’ll just swallow a pack of pills and be done with it, by the time they get to me, they’ll just find a deflating old corpse sunken into a bed, while thousands of compromised machines stand by to execute their final orders once the dead man’s switch goes off.

This is how I fade.

I would read this novel.

Maybe he should write a novel instead of the botnets.

You're in luck! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel_series)

I enjoyed them.

I've read somewhere that there's a increasing trend of bitter, lonely old men in France who try to rob banks (yes!) because they're so bored and antisocial from lack of human connections. This would be a hacker version of that.

It might be hard to build ransom botnets when you can barely read the soup menu and have trouble remembering what year it is.

I've always just read the site and never posted. But what is wrong with you? You are clearly a disturbed individual with some serious moral failings. By the time you retire hopefully you've grown up enough to not give into your childish impulses.

If you were being sarcastic then I'm sorry and I'll feel like a total idiot.

I agree! Stick it to the Man.

Thanks to this post, they will be knocking soon. Well done.

The world is a gigantic place. Boredom is never caused by not having things to do. It's caused by not wanting to do anything, and that is a very different problem.

Different people have different things that they love. And people has different levels of access to doing the things they love.

If you are really passionate about driving racing cars but you can't afford to do so, people telling you that you can play games or instruments doesn't really help.

You are absolutely right about the "nothing to do" retirees. My grandfather was just like that. Fortunately for my mum and dad, both of them are as busy now in retirement than when they were working.

Take for instance my dad....

- He was offered an early retirement package at age 55, hated being idle, and six months later returned to full-time work as a consultant.

- Fast-forward 15 years, to age 71, when he finally decided to properly retire, ...

- ... to do a full-time Masters of Mechanical Engineering. He just graduated, at 75 the univesity's oldest full-time student.

- After a six month's break (to focus on gym circuit training and boxing classes), he has returned to university again, doing a 50% Masters of Aeronautical Engineering.

Oh man, going to university again when I retire actually sounds like a great way to spend time.

Some states have free tuition for senior (typically 60+) students to audit [and sometimes to attend] courses at the state public universities.

When the university wanted him to pay the standard course fees, he somehow convinced them to give him a postgraduate scholarship so he could do it for free.

During the course he got two concessions:

- He was given 4 hours to do the 3 hour exam papers. After all, it had been 53 years since his undergrad math days.

- Exemption from the engineering work experience requirement. Instead in the Project Management course, he did a guest lecture slot on 'real-life project management in the offshore oil and gas industry'.

Programming term projects done in one evening, haha!

A masters at 75?

That is the most awesome thing I've read all week! Congratulations to your dad.

I admire his tenacity a lot! He worked enormously hard to learn Master's level math properly. I hope I am half as switched on when I am his age.

P.S. One other thing I just remembered is he and my mum live in a country town 90km outside Melbourne. They weren't just round the corner from the university... It was a 90 minute trip by public transport each way. That's a major effort each day just to get to class if you are 18, let alone 75.

I tried this. What happened was that I was so lonely, I didn't have the focus to do any of it. I couldn't sit and read a book, I was so anxious all the time. I missed my "tribe" of coworkers however superficial that may be. I ended up watching lots of tv and movies all the time and was glad when I started a job again.

Yea, I can’t wait to retire. There are so many things I’m missing out on because I commute 4 hours a day and work 8. Off the top of my head I can think of at least 4 or 5 hobbies I’d do daily if I ever manage to retire—stuff I have to frantically cram into nights and weekends now. This idea of having nothing to do is so foreign.

Four hours a day? You need to do something about that ASAP, don't just wait for retirement, have a shorter term plan.

Key is to maintain physical and mental health into retirement. Then you can really enjoy it.

> I can only assume the "nothing to do" retirement crowd didn't do much when they were working, and therefore have no idea how to fill the time.

Well, the common pattern seems to be for those who retire early that it was preceded with a lots of work. That was also my case. At some point I just realised that I want to do something else, and I had enough savings for lifetime so money wasn't any kind of motivator any more. So, previously I was working 24/7, then suddenly I was working only couple of hours a week. Slowly I started picking things to do, but it takes a lot of time to find hobbies etc.

I thought I had things I wanted to do if only I had time.

When I had the luxury of taking the last year off I found out that the idea of doing those things was far more appealing than actually doing them. I started to go a little crazy.

Now I’m looking for work, not because I have to right now, it because I’m bored.

Are you actually retired?

Oops, too late to edit, but it does read as if I'm already doing those things. No, that's the wish list I hope to start working on in about four years.

But to answer directly: yes; money is no longer the motivator, and one does not have to do those things to eat. Which, I suppose, a jobby-job once you have enough saved counts as "retirement". But as much as I like my work, there's a lot of other things I like, too, and don't do them as much as I'd like because I'm not yet "retired".

There's a pretty broad range of what "enough" is in the phrase "enough saved". For some people, it might be $1MM in investments plus a paid off house and the promise of Medicare and Social Security. For others, that might be a small integer multiple for that $1MM figure to be either multiplied or divided to be "enough".

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