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I care more about the retiring part than the FI part. Expecting to be just fine sitting around playing video games all day. I appreciated the story to highlight that healthcare is still a big unknown, though that was a lot of words for not too many actionable takeaways. Overall, "be thoughtful about your finances" seems like a good message. I've gotten a lot of value from things like ChooseFI around tactical nonsense at the margins, and love reading through the detailed modeling that EarlyRetirementNow has put together. I've found the mental model of "Buying X luxury good (nicer car, hot tub, international vs domestic vacation, home renovation, etc) will extend my expected working timeline by Y days/weeks/years." to be pretty useful. Same thing the other way, "Busting rear end to get a better raise/promo/job change will cut down my expected working timeline by X." has helped me calibrate the effort I put in.
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Mar 18, 2021 17:45
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CubicalSucrose posted:I care more about the retiring part than the FI part. Expecting to be just fine sitting around playing video games all day. YMMV, but for me, I feel like this would only be fun for maybe a month or two. This past year has taught me that I really would like to have a reason to leave the house most days, which might just mean working part-time.
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Mar 18, 2021 17:48
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I think the biggest "secret" regarding FIRE that isn't just proclaimed enough is that it is done through revenue, not savings. To be clear, you still won't be able to FIRE if you literally just spend whatever you make. But the movement has a silly way of making a lot of people feel embarrassed if they aren't making GBS threads in buckets and collecting rain water to reduce utility bills. The reality is, once you reach a certain stage, how much you can reduce expenses is literally bounded by your core survival needs and the number zero. Going up a little from that (setting the heat from 68 to 70 F) is pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, though it is the type of thing some FIRE people like to obsess over. You are never going to save as much cutting basic expenses as you are simply from getting a $10-20k pay bump. If people really want to FIRE, they need to focus much more on the latter, and less on the former.
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Mar 18, 2021 17:48
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I just want to not have to worry about money. Not have to worry about a bad boss firing randomly meaning I have to scramble to make rent. Not have to worry about wiping out my savings because I get COVID or a kidney stone or cancer. Not have to worry about living on beans long enough to save up money for a down payment on a stupid expensive house that I have to maintain a high salary for 20+ years in the same place for or risk becoming homeless just for a place I can call my own that has a loving HEPA filter on its furnace, yes I’m still mad about that. Safety and stability is what we’re really looking for. In the US, that’s only achievable with a lot of money.
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Mar 18, 2021 17:52
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SlyFrog posted:I think the biggest "secret" regarding FIRE that isn't just proclaimed enough is that it is done through revenue, not savings. The alluring part of cutting expenses (or at least keeping them low) is that if you can freeze your lifestyle at the lower expense value you need to accumulate far less up front. If you can trim your spending from 100K a year to 60K a year you only need 1.5M instead of 2.5M if you're assuming a 4% safe withdrawal rate. You also get the bonus of more flexibility with taxes during your retirement if you can keep stay in the 0% capital gains tax bracket. I wouldn't personally want to cut 10K from our current spending goal because I value comfort highly but I also wouldn't want to add 10K because it would require a bigger nest egg in the first place in addition to making our savings rate slightly lower. edit: Another factor is that cutting your spending 10K is more like raising your income by 15K since income is taxed. Quick Stop fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Mar 18, 2021 |
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Mar 18, 2021 18:04
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Quick Stop posted:The alluring part of cutting expenses (or at least keeping them low) is that if you can freeze your lifestyle at the lower expense value you need to accumulate far less up front. I think this is saying the same thing. No one legitimately has core expenses of $100k (other than maybe places like SV). As I said, there reaches a point where you are fiddling with heat settings and collecting rainwater in buckets. You're not going to reach FIRE from that. You're not going to reach FIRE making $35k a year, and cutting your expenses from $25k to $23k. Once you reach a reasonable amount of expenses, you really can't bring it down much more. Avoiding lifestyle creep is almost a separate issue to me, as I don't really even see that as necessary expenses. It's just buying poo poo. Even in that case, everyone probably needs some splurge items that bring them real joy, but again, at some point people need to ask themselves if the leather option is worth working 40 hours a week for three months. SlyFrog fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Mar 18, 2021 |
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Mar 18, 2021 18:16
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I like the FIRE stuff as it motivated me to structure my budget and cut weirdly high travel and food related expenses. Total monthly expenses/consumption went from $4k to $3k avg, and so now I can put away $2k per month instead of $1k. I like this version of my finances much better! What I end up doing in 10 or 15 years I have no idea but the idea of working for the extra cash rather than for survival is super appealing. So FI is certainly the takehome part. RE... I think in order to not work at all I would need to spend much more than $3k to fill my time though so simple FIRE money isn't enough really IMO. I could cut that $3k way down by finding a cheaper rent but I find it worth every penny and I'm not really willing to compromise my life quality/consumption level substantially for 10 years either. Threadkiller Dog fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Mar 18, 2021 |
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Mar 18, 2021 18:29
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SlyFrog posted:I think this is saying the same thing. No one legitimately has core expenses of $100k (other than maybe places like SV). I think we're largely in agreement yeah, but there are many people who have already allowed their lifestyle to creep for whom it WOULD be a big deal to cut expenses from 100K to even 90K. It's all relative to your current spending which is why it's so key to never let it get there in the first place.
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Mar 18, 2021 18:32
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I think the obsession with cutting is down to the maths. $ values are irrelevant. If you save 60% of $500k a year or 60% of 10k a year the time you need to save for is the same. You can live off the 40% of whatever the starting value is because to save that rate consistently for the time needed you've already proven you can. This also leads to the assertation anyone can do it. The key differnece is the 500k guy can drop lifestyle and luxaries in a post retirement tough spot and the 10k guy really can't. Also people be people and competitive natures are what they are so time to poo poo my min maxed beans into a bucket.
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Mar 18, 2021 18:39
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Motronic posted:It's not a "gotchya", it's "not retired, rather I've started my own part time business or series of businesses" when you look at the way someone like MMM is doing it. Dude has never NOT had a job. He just stoped working for "the man" and pretends this is retirement. The whole thing is just disingenuous. That's basically how retirement works for many wealthy people, though. They stop doing full-time work, but pick up a few hours a week as a consultant, or sit on some advisory board that gives them nominal compensation (or is "unpaid" but offers first class flights and a generous per diem for conferences). They just get to choose the parts of their job that they enjoy, and say "gently caress you" to the rest, because they've got gently caress-you money. This also ties back nicely to the core problem that the "living a FI" guy had, and that plays out with a lot of people retiring at conventional ages as well. People who have passions and reasons to engage with the world tend to live longer and enjoy life more. If your concept of "lean FIRE" is "I love to write, I am going to find a way to write as much as possible, and all I need is a stack of paper and occasional replacement ribbons for my vintage typewriter" then great, you can probably find happiness at $35k/year. If you're more into restoring vintage sports cars or flying aerobatic planes, you might need a bit more, but you'll still probably be OK in retirement if you can get that money together. And, hey, if you can make an enjoyable-to-you hobby out of your old full-time job, then retirement gets super easy. The problem comes in when your hobby is literally just "optimizing your life to get to an existence-only retirement as fast as possible." The endgame there is just existing, without any further purpose, and without something to replace the goal of getting to retirement, post-retirement life will probably get unfulfilling and lovely. He turned into a very young version of the stereotypical "gold watch and a pat on the back at 65, nothing to do but watch Fox News and football, dead on a lazy-boy by 75" case.
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Mar 18, 2021 18:41
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This is a good discussion, thank you all!Quick Stop posted:Yeah agreed, to me the value of wealth is flexibility. Having options makes it tough to decide exactly how to proceed but it's certainly worth putting yourself in that position and figuring out what works best for you. "Have more money in order to have more options" is not really a revolutionary intellectual idea. I think one of the things that fundamentally bugs me about FIRE is that it's presented as some kind of solution for a lot of late capitalist / work culture related issues but it's really only accessible to the already-rich or at minimum people of means. You make six figures in America, you can do just fine no matter what. It's like, the ultimate American solution to a bunch of structural and social problems. Space Gopher posted:He turned into a very young version of the stereotypical "gold watch and a pat on the back at 65, nothing to do but watch Fox News and football, dead on a lazy-boy by 75" case. Guy was spending so much time figuring out to a point in his life where he could enjoy his interests that he never really figured out what his interests were. Severe min/max brain. No Wave posted:The thing that strikes me is the idea of saving 50+ percent of your income felt like this revolutionary idea back in 2012 or whenever MMM blew up but now it just seems normal for single people making 100k+ per year. Like this whole movement started because it made sense to save as much money as possible when you can (a great idea) and what I got out of MMM is it's just stupid to not save whatever you can. Is that just normal now? Is lifestyle adjustment for income increases less of a thing now for people <40 than it was in the past? Or was I just being dumb? I think there are a couple things going on here. I'm part of a cohort of people who graduated from a very good private university in the worst parts of the great recession - so it's people who, compared to similar, experienced additional economic stressors and yet make a lot of money. I've noticed significantly more trends towards frugality among my immediate peers than the Gen X ers above us. I do wonder if people sort of immediately younger than me who didn't have quite the same economic uncertainty factors have a different attitude towards the whole thing. But I do see peers lifestyles adjusting with suburban homes, newer cars, etc - mostly driven by having kids. I think lifestyle adjustment is much more predicted by kids/no kids, but even there the decision to have kids or not is probably driven, to a degree, by economics.
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Mar 18, 2021 18:54
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:This is a good discussion, thank you all! I think the part that MOST six figure earners do not do is make sure that they can do just fine indefinitely. I agree that none of it is revolutionary but it is certainly something that most people don't think about/aren't aware of/don't even really consider as an option.
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Mar 18, 2021 18:57
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Space Gopher posted:That's basically how retirement works for many wealthy people, though. They stop doing full-time work, but pick up a few hours a week as a consultant, or sit on some advisory board that gives them nominal compensation (or is "unpaid" but offers first class flights and a generous per diem for conferences). They just get to choose the parts of their job that they enjoy, and say "gently caress you" to the rest, because they've got gently caress-you money. One of my takeaways from that blog post is a reinforcement of the idea that retiring from your lovely job (or even your decent job) isn't going to magically fix all current and future problems, you still have to put in effort into other things like relationships and health and a driving purpose for your life. The other takeaway I had was that projecting 60 years into the future is impossible, so any plans should be built for providing options and flexibility, not rigid charts with minimal room for adjustment. Also, on top of how he treated his ex-wife, I can't imagine being the friend who was excited about a bonus and being told after 10 minutes "please, I really don’t care, stop" 
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Mar 18, 2021 19:02
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:"Have more money in order to have more options" is not really a revolutionary intellectual idea. I think one of the things that fundamentally bugs me about FIRE is that it's presented as some kind of solution for a lot of late capitalist / work culture related issues but it's really only accessible to the already-rich or at minimum people of means. You make six figures in America, you can do just fine no matter what. It's like, the ultimate American solution to a bunch of structural and social problems.
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Mar 18, 2021 19:06
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Fancy_Lad posted:Sure validate your numbers as best you can, anticipate the future as good as anyone can, and it's probably advisable to have some play in there for the unexpected. But unless you folks are advocating having 2x your actual FIRE numbers before pulling the trigger, in this case him going back to work doesn't seem that unreasonable to me given the circumstances. If I recall, the last couple years of the blog before he officially retired (the first time), his modelling told him he could retire but he didn't feel like he had enough of a margin. So he'd built in some wiggle room there, but in retrospect it wasn't enough. I don't think he was at all prepared to go back to work. Cast_No_Shadow posted:I think the obsession with cutting is down to the maths. $ values are irrelevant. If you save 60% of $500k a year or 60% of 10k a year the time you need to save for is the same. I think there's a bit more to it. Since you're presumably investing your savings, spending less will pay off non-linearly. If you think about your savings as "how many years can I live on this", cutting your spending in half gives you more than twice as many years. So it's not unreasonable to focus more on expenses than earnings. I'm not saying obsessing about expenses is healthy, and it depends on the actual numbers of course, but splitting the spending:earning effort like 60:40 instead of 50:50 makes sense to me.
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Mar 18, 2021 19:07
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I'm not saying FIRE people are inherently lovely, but what I am saying is that FIRE bloggers are inherently lovely. ObsidianBeast posted:Also, on top of how he treated his ex-wife, I can't imagine being the friend who was excited about a bonus and being told after 10 minutes "please, I really don’t care, stop" This is part of why I called him a misanthrope. If you read through that whole post again, every single time he talks about interacting with someone besides his current partner he's either being actively lovely to them (see above) or he denigrates them in some way, and a bunch of how he talks about his partner is how much better she is than the normies. I have colleagues who get a bonus and want to buy a boat. I don't give a gently caress about a boat for me but they like boats and I like it when other people like things, so I'm happy to talk about it with them!
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Mar 18, 2021 19:10
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Quick Stop posted:I think the part that MOST six figure earners do not do is make sure that they can do just fine indefinitely. I agree that none of it is revolutionary but it is certainly something that most people don't think about/aren't aware of/don't even really consider as an option. right but much like all nerd poo poo people have taken it entirely too far
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Mar 18, 2021 19:11
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I'm not saying FIRE people are inherently lovely, but what I am saying is that FIRE bloggers are inherently lovely. This is exactly the theme of my posts here for the last two days. Do what makes you happy, but don't pretend you can accomplish that by not already being privileged and don't pretend work isn't work and jobs aren't jobs. Space Gopher posted:That's basically how retirement works for many wealthy people, though. I've yet to run into someone who is working for pay calling themselves retired. I hear semi-retired a lot, but never retired. The semantics don't matter unless you're trying to misrepresent yourself to a wider audience in your FIRE blog where you are ostensibly giving "advice" on the topic.
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Mar 18, 2021 19:48
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:right but much like all nerd poo poo people have taken it entirely too far Sure, it's human nature. Now who is being misanthropic?  But seriously I think if you use a naive model where you spend your available funds on your sorted list of utility/$ items and you get more money it's very easy to just drop the utility/$ threshold. But money is weird in that it travels through time. So really you should compare your utility/$ to some discounted continuous stream of utility/$ in the future and that's kind of what I view people who (reasonably) seek FI as doing. And when you add in that the whole stock market is basically designed to incentivize your future consumption over current consumption it kind of wipes out the discounted part of that future stream of utility/$ and likely even goes in the other direction. "Build the life you want and save for it" seems to be the current FIRE model and I think that's a pretty healthy approach.
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Mar 18, 2021 19:51
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Motronic posted:This is exactly the theme of my posts here for the last two days. Do what makes you happy, but don't pretend you can accomplish that by not already being privileged and don't pretend work isn't work and jobs aren't jobs. I can't remember the name of the guy but there is some "FIRE guru" with books that my friend recommended me to look into FIRE and like a year later i saw a youtube video about the same guy with him talking about living with his parents to save money after retirement. Just.... What?
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Mar 18, 2021 19:54
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DoubleT2172 posted:I can't remember the name of the guy but there is some "FIRE guru" with books that my friend recommended me to look into FIRE and like a year later i saw a youtube video about the same guy with him talking about living with his parents to save money after retirement. Just.... What? I'll pick on MMM again: he wouldn't say how much his blog was making because it was 1.) very obviously a job and 2.) making more than his previous salary. How can you continue to pump that blog ad revenue saying you are retired and this is how you do it if you're making more net new income than ever before?
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Mar 18, 2021 19:57
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Pollyanna posted:I just want to not have to worry about money. Not have to worry about a bad boss firing randomly meaning I have to scramble to make rent. Not have to worry about wiping out my savings because I get COVID or a kidney stone or cancer. Not have to worry about living on beans long enough to save up money for a down payment on a stupid expensive house that I have to maintain a high salary for 20+ years in the same place for or risk becoming homeless just for a place I can call my own that has a loving HEPA filter on its furnace, yes I’m still mad about that. This is the "FI" part of "FIRE" that seems to get so often overlooked in these discussions on the wider internet. Folks get so bent out of shape debating whether someone truly "retired" or not if they have a part time hobby side hustle, but that's really missing the point. Like it's some sort of gotcha that invalidates the whole thing. Structuring your income and savings such that you reach a point of FI aka "gently caress you money" is liberating no matter whether you continue to work, work part-time, or go lie on the beach full time. Being on the path to FI changes the power dynamic in your relationship with your employer and gives you the safety net that our society fails to provide. You don't have to take lovely jobs to make rent. You don't have to uproot your life to move for a job to a place you don't want to. You can eventually drop the long-hours and stressful job for something that fits your lifestyle. Tying up FI and RE together into one concept I think shifts the focus too much onto RE. If that's what your goal is, great! If you want to leverage FI into other lifestyle changes, that's great too! The whole point is to achieve the freedom to do what you want and be intentional about your choices to avoid the consumerism and wageslave treadmill that is so prevalent in America even among high earners. FI is the endgame after you've exhausted all those personal finance flow charts. It's the fun part where you actually have some control over how you want to design and finance your lifestyle long term. It's the truly "personal" part of personal finance. Guinness fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Mar 18, 2021 |
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Mar 18, 2021 20:09
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Motronic posted:I'll pick on MMM again: he wouldn't say how much his blog was making because it was 1.) very obviously a job and 2.) making more than his previous salary. How can you continue to pump that blog ad revenue saying you are retired and this is how you do it if you're making more net new income than ever before? Yea I think this is why FIRE kind of died out. Enough time passed that people realized that there was more to it than the MMM type gurus/bloggers were letting on. It wasn't as simple eating beans/rice every meal and working really hard to get that $10k bonus at work. I think we also saw that FIRE isn't really feasible for people in their 30s (maybe even 40s) unless they (1)make a huge annual salary, (2)receive a large windfall ie. inheritance, startup equity, insurance payout etc., or (3)have a small business that supplements income or adds to your savings through the early retirement. There's just so much that can go wrong over the span of their remaining 50-60 year life. Honestly its better that the people like the blog poster failed relatively young when he could easily get a new job. Imagine draining your nest egg in your 50s or 60s when you've been out of work for a decade or two. Guinness posted:Tying up FI and RE together into one concept I think shifts the focus too much onto RE. If that's what your goal is, great! If you want to leverage FI into other lifestyle changes, that's great too! The whole point is to achieve the freedom to do what you want and be intentional about your choices to avoid the consumerism and wageslave treadmill that is so prevalent in America even among high earners. 100% this. FI is the tool. What you do with it is specific to each person.
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Mar 18, 2021 20:33
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I still don't understand the "retire and you will die in a year if you don't have something purposeful and meaningful to replace work" thing. I stand by my point that for a huge chunk of Americans at least, work isn't purposeful or meaningful. I mean oh no, is someone going to retire to the couch and watch TV all day? What a big change up from sitting in an office chair mindlessly stamping forms for the 10,000 time, or answering the 15th customer call of the day as to why my password isn't working. I just have a very hard time believing work is what keeps these people alive.
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Mar 18, 2021 20:34
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SlyFrog posted:I still don't understand the "retire and you will die in a year if you don't have something purposeful and meaningful to replace work" thing. Plenty of studies out there that show feeling useful and feeling like you have something purposeful to do as well as meeting people and being in a community have a big impact on life expectancy after retirement. Does it apply to 30 year olds or whatever? Who knows, but it certainly does for the over 60s.
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Mar 18, 2021 20:45
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It's not that most people find deep philosophical meaning and purpose in their work. It's that their work provides structure, some level of intellectual stimulation (even just filling out forms is better than having the TV yell at you), and most importantly, a distraction from wondering about that "meaning of life" stuff. It really doesn't take that much to provide that distraction. Plenty of people find it in building models or getting a perfectly average 5k time for their age or whatever else lets them put some effort into something and see results out of it. But if you don't have that at all, oooof, you are going to have a real bad time in retirement.
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Mar 18, 2021 20:45
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SlyFrog posted:I stand by my point that for a huge chunk of Americans at least, work isn't purposeful or meaningful. I don't think it's always the work itself that's meaningful or purposeful (although sometimes it is). Most people can't stay in stasis. We need to feel progress so we create aspirations and work to achieve them be it with jobs (progress up the career track) or in life (buy a nice house, pay for kids college). Having paid work gives people a framework to work towards these various goals.
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Mar 18, 2021 20:51
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I idly speculate that having to do poo poo that sucks that you don't want to do is fundamentally good for us at some level, at least in small to moderate doses.
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Mar 18, 2021 21:40
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I will substitute my job with cleaning my house and doing the dishes every morning. And maybe showering.
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Mar 18, 2021 21:51
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I went back to work after a couple of years because my brain was melting being a stay at home mom. Recently got to have a conversation with my kid when she asked "Why do mommies go to work and daddies don't?" Sorry, kid, I love you but it is so nice to drink hot coffee and talk about non kid stuff for a few hours and not have to have someone yelling "Mommy! Fart on me! Fart on my butt!!!"
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Mar 18, 2021 21:52
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It would be interesting to follow the lives of Saudi princelings, trust fund kids, and similar individuals who have never had to work from birth (and pretty much do not do any real work), and see whether their minds decay, whether they die earlier than normal, etc.
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Mar 18, 2021 23:07
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MMM refers to this terrible derail as the "Internet Retirement Police" and it's one of his few good posts. Literally no human likes to sit around doing nothing all day (despite what republican fearmongers would have you believe) so we need to acknowledge that people continue to seek fulfillment, purpose and challenge even after they've accumulated large amounts of wealth. We're not qualified to deem another person as retired or not retired because it's quite literally a state of mind and not just a level of wealth. My dad had a 35 year real estate career and then quit his job. He takes care of his grand daughter for 24 hours each week. Most would say he is 'retired' since he withdrew from his real estate career. What he's doing now is just childcare and not real estate, and he earns no money for it. But obviously 'nanny' is a real job, and the lack of compensation isn't what makes it retirement either - plenty of people have gainful employment, give every last penny of their compensation away, and aren't considered 'retired'. So what makes my dad retired? What I've found is a good antidote to this fruitless debate is just substitute the term "semi-retired" in place of retired. SlyFrog posted:It would be interesting to follow the lives of Saudi princelings, trust fund kids, and similar individuals who have never had to work from birth (and pretty much do not do any real work), and see whether their minds decay, whether they die earlier than normal, etc. Children of billionaires still want to Do Something. They often have overly inflated senses of self worth, so the stuff they do is dumb, like a good friend of mine who got daddy to buy her passage to North Korea so she could tell them their computers and internet aren't good enough. Overall though they're no exception to the "people don't like to sit around and rot" rule, although they scoff at anything with fixed schedules or that is boring (just like normal people)
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Mar 18, 2021 23:39
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I just had this conversation with my wife and came up with the same exact phrase semi retire as our plan. But now I realize that the FI part is really the only thing that matters. Who cares what you do once that part is true? It's almost like the entire movement would be better off as just FI.
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Mar 18, 2021 23:49
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:MMM refers to this terrible derail as the "Internet Retirement Police" and it's one of his few good posts. Literally no human likes to sit around doing nothing all day (despite what republican fearmongers would have you believe) so we need to acknowledge that people continue to seek fulfillment, purpose and challenge even after they've accumulated large amounts of wealth. We're not qualified to deem another person as retired or not retired because it's quite literally a state of mind and not just a level of wealth. This just is not true (well, depending on your definition of "doing nothing all day"). I know plenty of people who literally do that. Hell, I probably fall into the category too much myself. Is it most people? I don't know, I don't really want to hazard a guess. But there is certainly a substantial portion of people who, when left to their own devices, will kind of sit around watching TV and not really doing much. But I'm not sure why you're turning it into a criticism. So what if they want to sit around and not do much? Rather than say no one does that, perhaps the question that should be asked is, why does that bother people? If it is a problem for their health, then sure, perhaps address it. If it is caused by an illness like depression, sure, address it. But rather than say "No one wants to do that" (as though doing it is something horribly wrong), we should just question why people judge it so much. GoGoGadgetChris posted:Children of billionaires still want to Do Something. They often have overly inflated senses of self worth, so the stuff they do is dumb, like a good friend of mine who got daddy to buy her passage to North Korea so she could tell them their computers and internet aren't good enough. Overall though they're no exception to the "people don't like to sit around and rot" rule, although they scoff at anything with fixed schedules or that is boring (just like normal people) I've met and worked with plenty of children of billionaires (who are relatively rare, and certain nine figure parents, given my job) who fit into the "not really doing jackshit" category, the same as normal people. Difference would be their not doing jackshit tends to be much more comfortable. Is it all of them? No. Most? Probably not. But certainly a not tiny proportion. I think some of this also comes down to begging the question when you say "doing nothing all day". How are we supposed to describe what that actually means? Is it literally lying in bed all day? Sitting on the couch staring into space? Sitting on the couch watching television? Sitting on the couch reading? Making meals? Puttering around at home (maybe gardening, baking, etc.)? And again, why are we judging that as somehow being worse than processing car insurance requests all day long, or plucking the stray feathers off chickens that the machine didn't strip? SlyFrog fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Mar 19, 2021 |
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Mar 19, 2021 00:36
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SlyFrog posted:
Where am I doing any of this?
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Mar 19, 2021 00:48
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:Where am I doing any of this? Maybe you weren't intending to. I took phrases such "Literally no human likes to sit around doing nothing all day (despite what republican fearmongers would have you believe)" and the following statements that of course no one would want to do such a thing as a fairly strong implication that if anyone did, they would somehow be terrible people. Usually people aren't so adamant that "No one does that" if they think "that" is just normal and not a problem, but if you didn't mean to imply it, so be it.
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Mar 19, 2021 00:55
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SlyFrog posted:Maybe you weren't intending to. I took phrases such "Literally no human likes to sit around doing nothing all day (despite what republican fearmongers would have you believe)" and the following statements that of course no one would want to do such a thing as a fairly strong implication that if anyone did, they would somehow be terrible people. Oh no, far from it. I had hoped it would be obvious that I meant doing nothing all day [forever]. If "nothing" needs defining then let's consider it "leisure activities exclusively of value to the self". Everybody likes and needs to be a couch potato, or have periods of inward focus sometimes, but in my line of work we literally treat people for chronic avoidance of societal interaction or inability to care for something other than one's self. This is certainly not the same as thinking everyone needs to be a chicken plucker or a mortgage envelope licker. In a past life my sister and I ran a family psych practice for extremely-absurdly high NWIs and it was basically no different from general family clients we saw in school, in all honestly.
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Mar 19, 2021 01:04
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The millions of NEET men who are around these days kind of belie that argument. My guess is lots of them are unhappy though.
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Mar 19, 2021 01:17
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Fuzzy Mammal posted:My guess is lots of them are unhappy though. Ding ding ding! So to wrap it back on topic, you can see why people remain only semi-retired after they have All The Money
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Mar 19, 2021 01:20
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GoGoGadgetChris posted:Ding ding ding! Yeah, I guess I just equate "retired" with, "I'm not working for money." But I don't have some aspersion toward someone being retired, regardless of their age. Like if they can do it, more power to them. So I don't think we have to say that someone who is working on cars in their garage for fun is "semi-retired". They can just be retired, and gently caress anyone who has a problem with it. I sometimes wonder if Thoreau would have been labeled some kind of deadbeat without purpose or mission today for going to Walden and isolating and listening to the birds.
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Mar 19, 2021 02:34
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