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Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

This assumes the purpose of life is to do nothing, that sitting on a beach forever is somehow heaven. Not everyone sees life that way (interestingly such views of work = hell is probably negatively correlated with success).

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Who said anything about "doing nothing"? Retiring is not the same as doing nothing; in particular, retiring does not necessarily imply only "sitting on a beach forever". There are people for whom life means more than just work, and for whom the end of working does not mean the end of living.

For what it's worth, turk73's attitude regarding work only being a means to earn money is just as misguided and narrow-minded.

Retiring is about finally doing something purely out of personal interest, rather than for enough profit to pay your bills.

Sitting on a beach forever is okay, if you like that sort of thing. It's also okay to write a novel that no one will ever read, or to crash remote controlled helicopters and then repair them. It's also okay to plant a hummingbird, butterfly, and honeybee garden, and buy a big macro lens. Or maybe ride a motorcycle all over the continent. Or move to Florida and do Florida things. Or move to Wyoming and manage a herd of 15 cattle on a plot that the real ranchers call "Flyspeck Ranch". Or open an ice cream shop that turns a profit only 20 days per year.

Retirement is as varied as the people who are no longer bound to conform to a work standard.

Someone recently pointed out to me, that if your idea of bliss is to just lounge and do nothing, you might be depressed. Certainly if you hate what you're doing so much that the best thing you can think of is to do nothing, Office Space style, that is a pretty bleak outlook.

I think the point with being able to lounge forever is that you're free to pursue whatever interests you have. You're not shackled by having to make ends meet, so your passion projects don't have to suffer.

Warren Buffett’s passion project is investing though.

Reaching nirvana is far from depressing.

It's a shame to see a community so enthusiastic about hobbies and open source and self driven personal improvement to vote up a notion that not working = doing nothing, and that wanting to retire is a view that "work = hell" and is "negatively correlated with success." Retiring isn't to do nothing. Retiring is to uncouple my productivity from the economic value I produce.

I think what some people are missing here is that, for people like Buffet, the stuff they do for work IS their "hobby".

Try this thought exercise: if you suddenly became a billionaire, and didn't need to work for a paycheck any more, would you continue to write software (I'm assuming you're a developer like most on here)? Personally, I would. I probably wouldn't do it 8 hours a day, but I'd find some fun project to work on, and spend some time on that. It'd be my hobby, when I'm not doing something else I enjoy like traveling or skiing or whatever. I didn't get into this field just for the money, I did it because I like computers.

Buffet likes investing. What else is he going to do with his spare time?

I wish there were more part time opportunities for professionals. Yeah, I'd keep doing ML (my day job), but I wouldn't do it 8 hours a day. Unfortunately, nearly all of the ways to to do it require that it's either a fulltime job or not a job at all. If there were a way to work 4 hours a day, or 8 hours a day 9 months of the year or something, turning off my email/slack/meetings outside that window, I'd be all about that. I'd love to slowly retire, putting in less and less time every year.

But the job market doesn't seem to support that, so it's full time or no work for me (unless I put in the huge effort to build up a freelancing portfolio, which doesn't seem to be as much of a job market in ML yet?). Given the choice, I'd choose no work, and make my own work for fun.

Maybe you should look into some other kind of programming hobby? Any why can't you do ML on your own anyway? Does it require too many computational resources? (serious question, I know almost nothing about the field)

Personally, I could easily work on some kind of OSS project if I suddenly found myself with lots of free time. I can do C, C++, Python, etc., so it wouldn't be hard for me to find an existing project to contribute to, or make my own.

I think I was unclear. We're in agreement. I already do plenty of it in my spare time, like you suggest, and I'd love to expand the spare time stuff. What I was trying to add was that since I'd prefer to do it less than 40 hours per week, I wish there was a paid way to do it less than 40 hours per week. The status quo doesn't have much room for paid part-time work in this line of business, and that makes me sad.

And depending what you're doing, it can require ridiculous computational resources (like hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a model), but that's far from the norm. If you aren't trying to advance a couple particular states of the art, you can get by with a fancy computer and patience, or a pretty reasonable AWS/GCP bill, probably comparable to any other fairly expensive hobby.

I see.

I agree about the part-time thing too; considering how much of a skills shortage the industry is constantly crying about, and how well-paid developers are (which means that, if they live frugally and don't have kids, they don't really need to work to retirement age if they don't want to), it really should be possible to have part-time positions for people who want to stay current and work on interesting problems but not have to dedicate themselves to it full-time, and not be stuck only doing OSS stuff (which is great, of course, but not really doable with some fields).

That's practically a tautological argument though. People who don't like expending a lot of effort on certain things will necessarily have less success at performing said things.

And people will also necessarily have different preferences on how to spend their time and energy, and different amounts of time and energy as well.

Would also like to point out that "sitting on a beach forever" is not the negation of spending all your time an energy on solving the problems that the capitalist economy rewards.

There's plenty of people out there who have a passion for things that aren't expected to earn money, but for whom the best option for actually making money is something that's quite boring.

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