The moral of the story: Don’t quit your job unless you have an employment contract for another one or if you have a reliable, growing side hustle that generates enough income to live on. Real life bites hard, and $80k is peanuts.
There’s a lot of different ways to live. Personally I like taking periods of voluntary unemployment to explore other interests. Finding a job after has never been a problem.
A large percentage of the population has at least some safety net. Probably the average 25 year old could move back in with their parents for a year if things got really bad.
What would you want for your own kids? 45 years of grudging corporate toil, then death?
What’s the point of become a wealthy and prosperous society if we’re so goddamn uncreative about how we live in it?
and that is what i want to give to my kids as well. not privilege. i want them to learn that not everyone has it as good as we do, and that we need to work in order to have a better life, and that we need to help others do the same. perhaps this is itself a position of privilege to be able to do that instead of living in a comfortable place in europe where my neighbors would like to go to to have a better life.
My Eastern European grandfather never finished high school, and his whole purpose in life was to provide opportunities for his kids. They worked hard and built good lives with the advantages he gave them. Now he’s in his nineties and one of his kids visits him basically every day. He seems happy.
He’s also outlived my English grandfather by almost ten years, but that could be coincidence or genetics.
And yeah, this is a very privileged take. Is there some other way you’d prefer that I use my privilege?
This essay is kind of radical but outlines a few amazing points of unstructured work time: https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/quit-your-job/