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Comment by vkk8 | Hacker News Reader

How would you go about unschooling yourself as an adult?

I've been "in the system" my entire life (like most of us). Thanks to Covid and remote working, I've recently found myself with a lot of free time. I still have a job, but I don't really care about it at all nor derive any fulfilment from it. Since it pays well and doesn't require very much of my time (again, thanks to remote work), I've decided to just keep doing it and try to find meaning in my life from other things. This has proven to be very difficult, most likely due to lifetime of being "in the system".

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I sorta did this from 2020-2021 after I graduated university. Lived at home for a year while learning topics that interested me. It was one of the best things I've ever done and my confidence and outlook on life improved significantly as a result. I was always in "the system" but I never thrived in it. Felt like I was always doing stuff on other peoples time and penalized for deviating from whatever rigid guidelines they dictated. Being able to do stuff for myself and on my own schedule was liberating. Motivation I lacked for most of my life was present because I actually had a personal stake in my learning.

And with that being said, I have no idea how you unschool as an adult without having significant capital. I wanted to unschool for a long-time prior to 2020 but working/doing school 8 hours a day left me with little energy. I was fortunate to be able to live under my parents roof rent-free in 2020 and the COVID relief money I received from the government was enough to let me purchase the resources I needed (lots of books). If I didn't have these benefits I doubt I could do such a thing. I definitely couldn't do such a thing if I still had to work full-time - believe me I tried many times.

Not to mention there is a lot of stigma around doing this as an adult if you don't have capital. I'm young and don't have any dependents so the consequences of potential failure weren't as significant. But if I did? I think that would create a lot more crippling self-doubt throughout the entire process.

Unfortunately this ties in with the source article above. Idleness is key to the ability to figure out what you want to do in the first place. What gives you joy and meaning has to come from a combination of the idleness, and within.

I guess, the first thing would just to start being ok with "Doing nothing". Accept that your inability to work on projects outside of work is not an inability, but a necessary outlet for your brain to relieve itself of the multi-decade long stressors that have been building up. But I don't know how long it would take or even if it would work, having that interspersed with that enforced structure. Each time you get to the point where you might start being ok with it, and maybe able to start learning and developing the skill, the PTO you have for the entire year is very likely exhausted. And that's assuming it only takes your brain a month to experience some incredible, miraculous form of relief from these stresses.

It's an incredibly depressing state of affairs.

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