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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

I read it a while back. The story is probably fiction, but I have no trouble believing there must be shitload of people who must have worked an arrangement like that for themselves—taking paychecks without work. What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it. Ex: a programmer who outsourced his job to China and used his free time to watch cat videos and Reddit[1].

I am not deriding that choice, just that it's a curious thing. We all blame our day jobs for eating most of our time. But when we do get total freedom, we hardly remain as productive as we imagined ourselves to be. I thought I was different. But no! Recently, I took a career-break and I thought I would use the newfound free time to learn all the things I was putting on the back-burner. Instead, I found myself to be dramatically less productive compared to when I was working. Lacking objective, or structure in the day, I found myself playing video games or surfing web pretty much all day.

I realized maybe 9-5 isn't as bad as it sounds and early retirement isn't as good.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693

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I'm curious: how long were your breaks? I've had two rather long (>6 months) breaks in my career, and I've enjoyed them immensely and have been very productive: finished personal projects, made music, YouTube videos, learned new skills.

However, both times it took at least a couple months of passive life before I could do anything productive at all: I just slept, cooked, read, played video games, and scrolled Reddit. Almost as if I had to first flush out all the accumulated stress and get rid of the "muscle memory" around work.

My break was almost 5-6 months. It's not like I didn't do anything. I revamped my website, shipped a puzzle game, wrote articles. But I had months where I basically didn't do anything. And it was hard to climb out of the stretch of unproductivity. The main issue was that I didn't have any concrete goals. And while theoretically I could have done anything, my mind was digressing everywhere and ended up doing nothing.

It was a good experience for sure and would definitely do it again. But I would keep my goals concrete and ideally have one project to dedicate myself to.

I think it’s basically that a lifetime of being told what to do with your time atrophied your ability to direct your time when you had control.

I have experienced similar things over shorter periods.

> I think it’s basically that a lifetime of being told what to do with your time atrophied your ability to direct your time when you had control.

I also think humans need to do nothing occasionally and that it's actually extremely valuable. If you look at the entirety of human history this whole 5 days of work 48 weeks of the year is very new. For most of human history we would have had intense bursts of activity (hunting, harvesting, planting etc.) followed by quite a bit of nothing. I think even as recently as the middle ages the average person was working about 150 days a year (though often in bursts from sun-up to sun-down 6 days a week until the work was done).

I took a year off of work, i traveled some, spent time with my now ex-wife, kept up on the latest skills and did a couple personal projects. But most of the time i rested, had a lie-in every morning, worked on my cooking skills, and played video games.

At some point i aim to do a similar thing again and spend a year slowly re-modeling a house (this has the dual benefit of being fun, gaining me new skills and not being anything close to a year of full time labor)

I had the good fortune of being able to work that schedule once, and there is a lot to be said for it.

I believe that a lot of our current employment arrangements revolve around the primitive data management and "ERP" technologies of 100-200 years ago. Anything but the simplest arrangement (everyone works 40 hours every week with very limited exceptions) was hard enough at scale.

I think its not only that but also the nature of the work.

Historically most labour was rote physical labour with bursts of problem solving thrown in. Now we spend all day doing problem solving with very little physical labour. I think the mind gets tired just like the body.

What were you actually doing during the periods of nothing? Just internet browsing, watching TV, sleeping? Any offline non-tech hobbies?

It makes me wonder if humans are aligned much more to primitive life than we believe. I wonder if our ancestors spent long stretches of time living off reserves and waiting for spring to come. Then in spring they started working hard to replenish store. Maybe it's natural or instinctual to do very little when we aren't motivated by the need to provide for ourselves?

I have a plan to semi retire and do nothing until j get bored out of my mind and start doing something. I feel years of being a corporate employee in high stress function takes away your ability to do self directed things and to know what you really want to do. I would love to find that again.

It is interesting that you approach time off as a way to prevent burnout so you can ultimately be productive. I have done it a handful of times and struggle with what the overall goal of a >6mo break is.

Traveling and having experiences is great but it is stressful to burn cash that fast, sitting around the house is cheap but leads to ennui, working hard on projects makes me wonder why I don't just go back to work. I usually end up just rotating between those three things which is a nice freedom to have.

Ahh yeah, I guess I should specify that these were not breaks I took "on purpose": one was while waiting for some documentation to go through, and the other one was parental leave, and at least one of them was partially paid.

"The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance." - The CryptoNaturalist

We think ourselves as a stone monument "I'm productive" "I'm this or that", but the truth is what we do daily defines who we are, without the forcing procedure of work we lose our daily rituals and just become something else. People see this at retirement as well when they lose the structure of a regular job and need to manage their own time.

You are what you eat, and you are what you do regularly.

i do the same thing work or not. Think.

Right now i think about how to re-define technical processes and patterns to reduce CFR, increase deploys etc.

When i was off work for a while i think about cooking, video games, restoring a car, emerging tech, how i can help others, refining social patterns etc.

There's not that long that I'm not thinking about something, just usually people pay me to think about something.

I do this too, and could exist indefinitely just thinking. But isn’t just thinking about restoring that car ultimately unsatisfying unless you actually get to doing?

“You aren't what you eat - you are what you don't poop.” -Wavy Gravy

You are what you don't breathe out would be more accurate.

https://youtu.be/vuIlsN32WaE

I noticed the same thing in myself. Free time, especially a long block of it can just be wasted. Sometimes that’s a sort of necessary mental reset but it made me think about what I’d do when i retired.

I came to the conclusion, like you, that structure is good. Without structure it’s really hard to get started on things or feel a sense of progress.

Now if i take a long break i treat it like i used to back in college days. I have a schedule, high level goals and daily to-do lists. Those lists have productive things as well as free time or gaps of a fixed length to fill with whatever i want.

Sounds hellish when i write it out but without it I’m all about cat videos and noodling around on my guitar. Suddenly a month has passed.

Time enjoyed is not time wasted

I disagree. I might enjoy 2 months of sitting on my couch, smoking weed, and playing video games stoned out my gourd.

That time would still be very much wasted.

Not sure if you meant it as a pun, but if so: slow clap.

That's just because you limit your view to 2 months and look at it in a vacuum.

If you extend your timeline, you may find that you get bored or restless and want to change things up. That "wasted time" is necessary in order to get into a different headspace. It's the equivalent of riding an elevator for your brain... It takes you to a different stage of life.

Doubtful. I had severe mental trauma happen to me when I was 19 and I basically become an emotional wreck who played video games until I was 26 or so. It was just a way to avoid confronting my issues and I became an exceptionally good World of Warcraft player. I hate that I wasted so much of my prime years “self medicating” with video games. It wasn’t until I quit World of Warcraft that I met my wife (maybe a week after!)

I wish I’d gone to therapy or done literally anything else. It took years for me to finally feel disgusted enough with myself to make any sort of change and I was a wreck when I did. I’d barely improved at all, if not gotten worse than I was when I got emotionally messed up at 19.

Ok, but that's an extreme case - that may have been bad whereas someone taking half a year off after working extremely high pressure job for a decade can be good.

I think you’re right. There is a heck of a lot to be said for enjoyment regardless of productivity.

It becomes problematic, for me at least, when the thing i enjoyed becomes a sort of default mode. No longer for enjoyment, more of a reflex. Then it feels like it might be wasted.

That's exactly the point where you become able to decide for yourself what you'd like to do. I would say that seeing that point negatively and reflexively going back to work your standard job is what makes that period a waste.

While this is true it's also easy to do things you're not really enjoying just because they require low activation energy.

In the dot-com heyday my team had nothing to do. A manager explained that they had hired extra developers “just in case they needed them later”.

I couldn’t take the boredom and quit to do a round the world backpacking trip.

My co-worker stayed and wrote a novel. It was a perfect setup: he got payed to come in and sit at the computer all day typing, and always looked busy. I think he played his hand well.

I'll add that I'm pretty sure reading a novel in a terminal looks like work to anyone non-technical (and probably a fair amount of technical people who don't look too close).

What's the point of productivity? What if I just want to enjoy myself as much as I can? Spending my time playing games and reading stories and learning new things and such sounds pretty great.

And as someone who is trying to do early retirement, the main reason is so I can own myself... I'll never have enough energy to do everything I want, even without a day job taking a tremendous amount of it.

And just to add another anecdote: I quit my job for 9 months (for burnout). I never felt the need to "go back to work" other than the bank account running out.

I think for me, I enjoy a sense of accomplishment, but real accomplishments don’t tend to come without the motivation of others depending on the product of my work. Feels like a personal failing, but I’m old enough to recognize I should just accept it. I could retire right now* but I like being kept busy because of this (and having my retirement account get bigger doesn’t hurt either).

* kind of lousy timing, money-wise, so it’s fortuitous that I don’t have the urge to start burning through the retirement fund yet.

I've never gotten a sense of accomplishment from work that lasted more than a couple hours, so I can't really relate

> Lacking objective, or structure in the day, I found myself playing video games or surfing web pretty much all day.

I think the key is to identify these timesinks and to eliminate them one-by-one. Often these are dopamine-hijacking activities.

So, suppose you decided to yourself that you are not going to be surfing the web at all, or limit it to a strictly scheduled timeslot, or only use the web when you have a specific purpose in mind.

Suppose you did the same with videogames - limit it to a specific timeslot in your week, or eliminate it altogether.

What would you do then? What would you find yourself doing if you found yourself in living conditions where you do not have access to such easy entertainment?

You would probably get very bored at first. That's great! The first step is to stop seeing boredom as something to be avoided at all costs. It is ok to be bored - in fact it is good to be bored. Sit with it and do not allow yourself to fall back onto the easy entertainment options.

You will find that after a while you are actually just going to pick up that physics textbook you meant to study off the shelf - or end up doing whatever interesting project you thought you would be doing. It will be easy, interesting and natural. Just like it was when you were a child on summer holidays and probably didn't have access to unlimited video games, broadband internet or other dopamine-hijacking forms of easy entertainment!

Just eliminate the timesinks from your life one-by-one and allow yourself to become bored.

And what's the end goal?

Eudaimonia

Thanks for that!

I wonder how much of it is because people start out wanting to not do anything too big because they feel like they could be confronted about it at any second and that just becomes the norm. Random screwing around is easier to justify as a temporary thing you were caught in than some other activities. If you had a work area and it's been turned into a study area for your BAR exam prep with books and papers spread all around, that's a bit harder to explain away as them just coming at a bad time than you watching cat videos would be.

> What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive

Relatable.

I am at a job currently where I can get past by working 3 hours a day. But what do I do with rest of time...well not much.

And I felt the same way during Covid when WFH started. If you had told me a month prior to that that I'll be able to save 3 hours extra every day from mindless commute, in office chatter etc I'd have told you about my grand plans of how I'd make the best use of those 3 hours taking that course I have been meaning to take or reading that book that's lying unread. BUT when I did have those extra 3 hours, I didn't really do much of it.

I guess it's some version of Murphy's law - aimless surfing expands to take the time available for it? Not sure.

Parkinson's Law actually--although the original version was a little different. (Expansion of British Admiralty staff even as the navy was shrinking.)

We're very social animals, I wonder if the aimless surfing is the "interact with people" instinct misfiring.

I've noticed that when I have a choice, the tasks that I pick first are the ones that somebody else will see the results of. It'd be interesting to hear the experience of a couple friends who'd taken a couple months off and worked together on a project. I bet they'd be pretty productive. Although it would be hard to coordinate.

I guess people are different. I know a few people who are extremely productive and do not seem like they need someone to discuss it with. But for me, it is exactly as you describe. Taking a few months off and working together with a friend seems like a perfect plan.

I wonder if this might be related to ADHD. I mean, difficulty to focus on the task, unless there is someone else who you know will want to see the results.

I have been experiencing the same thing you are describing in terms of procrastination/free time being spent in the less productive ways than one wants to or imagines them, as well as productivity being inverse correlated with free time.

I think it is definitely psychological. Probably something to do with subconsciously feeling guilt for not doing what one is "supposed to", so they feel too guilty to embark on something else that's productive or educational (like reading that one textbook they planned for a while). And instead just go "ok, that one educational thing i wanted to do is gonna take a while, and i am already wasting a lot of my free time, so instead i will just check out a few cat videos and then get back to productive stuff". And then it just becomes a positive (aka self-reinforcing) feedback loop that keeps on feeding onto itself.

As for being productive with the least amount of tree time, I can confirm that my best GPA in college was during semesters when i had the heaviest workloads on top of a part-time job. Reminds me a lot of what many parents on HN say in the comments, how they became way more productive in their efforts and focus after having kids (as soon as they get to about 1-2 years old). No experience with that one myself, but seems very similar.

> Probably something to do with subconsciously feeling guilt for not doing what one is "supposed to", so they feel too guilty to embark on something else that's productive

Absolutely. I have found myself in this exact loop (or is it a downward spiral). I cannot give myself "permission" to do what I want in times when I know there's no chance I'll do what I'm "supposed to" anyways. This only makes the guilt worse the next time.

I used to work at a gov job where there was this one guy that literally just walked from dept to dept all day chatting. So one day this guy I worked with decided to just lay into him. Asking direct no BS WHAT DO YOU DO HERE questions. Not taking any deflections that the guy tried. He never gave us an answer. We also never saw the guy in our dept again.

I suspect that guy didn't do anything and probably still is getting paid to do nothing.

The story is probably fiction

I can believe it is real, if possibly embellished or simplified. Crazy things happen in larger organizations, especially before every department's computers were all tied together.

I was once the subject of a dispute between three departments in a large company, and ended up spending several months at work with nothing to do but browse lolcats. I had to put on a suit and come to the office every day, but I was prohibited from doing any work.

I was NOT popular among the people who knew that I was collecting a paycheck all that time.

Being productive all the time isn’t a goal shared by everyone. I’d honestly be surprised if it was even a majority view. Hedonism has been a goal of the financially independent since antiquity

> What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it.

Do you actually have any data on this, or is this pure conjecture? You seem to have a sample size of 1, and perhaps 2, if you include the fictional story. Both indirect sources.

> But when we do get total freedom, we hardly remain as productive as we imagined ourselves to be.

Speak for yourself. Please don't lump us into your behavior types.

> I realized maybe 9-5 isn't as bad as it sounds and early retirement isn't as good.

For you, perhaps.

Thought the same thing

> I have no trouble believing there must be shitload of people who must have worked an arrangement like that for themselves—taking paychecks without work. What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive

OP seems to go from being unsure if this group exists (thinking it highly likely but having no reference data to back it up) to knowing something intrinsic about them (everyone who does it has this trait). The two sentences seem to be at odds.

Also seems like projecting their personal experience onto everyone else.

We like to believe ourselves capable of anything if we just tried. If we never try, we die thinking we may have squandered our potential. If we give ourselves space to try and succeed, we die knowing what was on the other side of trying. If we give ourselves space to try and we fail, we die knowing there wasn’t any potential to squander.

Is it really that strange people would squander it?

Look how kids are raised. The majority of them have decisions made for them all the way to the grave, no wonder so many 'squander' their free time. It takes most people years to deprogram themselves to a significant point. First year is mostly recovering from something akin to burnout.

> What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it.

I agree that this story is probably fiction, but I feel like I broadly fit into this category of collecting a paycheck with minimal work. I feel it takes one or two days of effort per week at work to station keep.

I spend nearly all of the "extra" time on a few work Slack channels, goofing off with work friends, occasionally doing internal tech support, and reading the web. I feel regret that I'm not making better use of this windfall of time, but I haven't been able to take the step to working on my own startup or pursuing hobbies during work because it feels outright dishonest while "be available, but not very productive" doesn't hit quite the same way.

>I am not deriding that choice, just that it's a curious thing. We all blame our day jobs for eating most of our time. But when we do get total freedom, we hardly remain as productive as we imagined ourselves to be. I thought I was different. But no! Recently, I took a career-break and I thought I would use the newfound free time to learn all the things I was putting on the back-burner. Instead, I found myself to be dramatically less productive compared to when I was working. Lacking objective, or structure in the day, I found myself playing video games or surfing web pretty much all day.

I know the sensation! I'm currently taking a week vacation, and, although I've gotten a lot of work done around the house, my primary motivation for taking the vacation was to study cybersecurity stuff. I had been putting in 2 to 3 hours a night but had found it frustrating to have such a limited window after work/before bed. Now that I have that time, I'm either walking the dog, cutting up unused boxes, sweeping and cleaning, or watching random stuff on Odysee. It's not that those things are necessarily bad, but it is such a poor misuse of time.

It's almost a sense of fear of productivity. I can't quite put my finger on it. It's like an apprehension to get started. That, if I begin, maybe I won't want to stop. Or that, maybe if I do it, I won't make the sort of progress I would expect to make with the amount of time I can devote to studying. I justify this misuse of time as being "Time to relax, no wrong choices" Etc. Yet somehow, I know that that isn't true. I can feel the regret in the time I've already wasted. Come Sunday night, I'll probably be back to studying, wishing I "just had a few more hours".

I have to imagine that part of the issue is conditioning. We get into our various habits and when those conditions change - even when we ourselves make those changes, intended to benefit us - it puts us in a kind of state of paralysis, leading to indecision. Perhaps it's that we need meaning to define what it is that we're doing, and know that it could have been done better.

> But when we do get total freedom, we hardly remain as productive as we imagined ourselves to be.

Where does that imagination come from? Or in other words: why do you feel such a strong need to be productive?

Self-improvement takes change and effort. It requires an investment of energy larger than the one required to overcome life's usual busyness. If you really want to write a novel, you will write it, even if you have to burn sleep to do it, even if you have to get it done by spending your days daydreaming about the plot and your evenings furiously typing. Plenty of works of art were created in this way. If you really want to learn a new skill, you will learn it -- perhaps not as well as if you could focus on it, but bits and pieces here and there, a podcast on a drive, a few rounds of practice over lunch. Plenty of people have mastered life-changing skills while holding down the proverbial two jobs with three kids.

It is possible to be so busy that this is really what holds you back. But very few life situations outside of the gulags are really so grueling that work is really able to squeeze your free capacity down to nothing. It is like wanting to go to space, and being intimidated by having to drive over a hill. It is possible for a very high hill to be a practical problem, but if an ordinary one looks insurmountable to you, you very likely never had the energy to go to space.

That's not to say you never need to quit a job to give an extraordinary venture your full attention. It's more to say that if you are doing nothing right now, if you tell yourself work is the problem, work almost certainly isn't the problem. If you have the drive to do something once you have more free time, you'd be doing something with your free time right now. You wouldn't be able to not. Don't wait; start now. Can't? There's your problem.

I have noticed, with myself, this scales right down to tasks that literally take one minute to do, like loading the dishwasher. If my energy is high, I do it almost without thinking, while I'm waiting for water to boil, while I'm thawing hamburger. No big deal. If my energy is low, I don't do it at all, and I spend those same minutes staring at the floor. I tell myself I don't take care of the house because I don't have time, but as a lot of people found out during COVID, that was never the problem. I didn't have the drive. Free time turns out to matter, once I get going and want to do big things. But it matters little if I can't do little things that take no time.

If they would be the kind of person to always thrive to do something productive, they probably wouldn't end up with such a job in the first place.

(Clarification, just in case: I'm not saying that this kind of person is better or worse than the other.)

Their goal is time free to do nothing. It's been realized and they enjoy it.

I've been thinking about how people do retirement and I think the ones that do it well make exercise a goal, and treat it as a job

also good nutrition and have commitments to do things

I had a year long break in 2014. I did many different things in that time.

Learned to play the bass guitar, found a partner, contributed to Firefox, took a few CS courses, etc.

Time spent the way someone freely chooses to spend it is not squandered. Each of us is the authority on the best use of our time.

>probably fiction it's literally a fictional story isn't it? Why the "probably"?

See also: "I am taking a year off to write a novel". Seldom successful.

I once took a few months off to write a computer game. Guess what stage that project is in.

You say you don't deride it but you just made a judgement call by calling it "squandering".

I guess time spent relearning to walk after a traumatic injury is also squandered time as well then?

Saw a comic recently (xkcd? old one?) where a person was visited by a muse, who said "Working hard and slacking are not the only two things there are in life"

Reminded me to make plans for some of my personal time, not just piss it away.

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