I live in Sweden where taking 5 weeks off in the summer is the rule. Never got used to it, I take just 2 or 3 and leave the rest of mu vacations for the winter… but I almost never take the full 5 weeks and end up accumulating it over the years. I think I have over 12 weeks pending even after already having taken 3 weeks in July. I just get too bored and start coding anyway, so why not just work and get paid for doing it !
From the Netherlands and not having had to work since I sold my first company at 25 (over 25 years ago), I cannot do more than a week vacation before getting annoyed and bored. I like building stuff: programming, welding, soldering, guitar playing, cooking. But I have no patience for doing one thing: normally I code myself and vibe with multiple claude codes on the boil, my electric guitar is on my lap, there is either YouTube presentations from meetups/events or science podcasts on in the background and then there is cooking and soldering when I happen to get up from the desk. Or I go for a run or meet up with friends. When my friends tell me about their vacation, I fall asleep listening to it, let alone having to live through it. It is a Me thing and nothing wrong with them or me and luckily my wife is even worse, so we work almost nonstop generally. Never makes us exhausted though; quite the opposite.
Indeed. Saying the working is not the exhausting part sometimes, like the Swedish GP also indicated. You won't mind working a lot if you like the work and your life doesn't depend on it. In the EU (and nordics), depending on your wishes and choices, your life doesn't depend on it.
I also don’t like stereotypical vacations and get bored on day 1.
Vacations don’t need to be stereotypical though. To me vacation nowadays means simply taking a break from my main money earning activity (typically a job, but I had a business before too).
When I travel these days I don’t even plan anything. Just land in the city and let it be. Just wonder around and explore. That’s it.
The deal was made before the bubble burst here in the Netherlands and was completed after the collapse; the buyer paid the agreed upon price in cash and went on to be successful with it. It was a sign-of-the-times heavy Java (J2EE/EJB etc) enterprise XML catalogue/content management product.
> I almost never take the full 5 weeks and end up accumulating it over the years.
Companies should have a policy to limit accumulation of unused vacation, such as 3 weeks maximum. The problem with unlimited accumulation is that it essentially allows the employee to assign themselves paid overtime[0] without any business reason or management oversight. For example, if the company policy is to have you work 49 weeks and take paid time off 3 weeks a year, but instead you work 51 weeks and carry forward 2 weeks vacation, you have just assigned yourself 2 weeks of overtime.
I used to work for a large corporation that finally implemented such a policy to address exactly what this person has done: 12 weeks of paid overtime that no one asked for and that the company probably hasn't budgeted for.
[0]I don't mean overtime in the sense of time-and-a-half pay or anything like that, rather overtime in the sense of working more paid hours than you were hired for.
In the US, the only common use of the word "overtime" implies three things:
1. Working outside of your normal shift hours or days on a non-routine basis to meet some deadline or specific business goal.
2. Working overtime is not generally voluntary on the part of the employee.
3. However, most companies acknowledge that overtime is an unwanted burden on the part of the employee and thus usually compensate overtime at a higher hourly rate. This is partially a reward for putting up with that burden, and also discourages managers from assigning overtime on a regular basis.
One of the reasons companies are hiring a higher percentage of their workforce on salary is that they can ask them to work longer hours and occasional weekends without the downside of paying them more.
This is why I had to footnote what I (didn't) mean by "overtime". The overtime I'm referring to does not meet any of your 3 implications -- it is entirely voluntary and self-administered by the employee. If there is a better term for it, I would like to use it. And yes, it is only feasible for salaried employees, not hourly-paid.
Yes, paying out the unused vacation time upon leaving the job is what I meant. It is especially pernicious in the case of public employees (police, fire) who spike their pension payments by adding all that unplanned paid time to their final year salary, which distorts the pension calculation.
> Companies should have a policy to limit accumulation of unused vacation, such as 3 weeks maximum.
I hate this. My company lets you accumulate unused vacation, but it has a cap of 300 hours, or 7.5 five-day weeks. After you reach the cap, you stop accruing. I'm constantly at the cap, so I just take a Friday off every time another 8 hours accrues, and spend that time putzing around the house doing routine chores and maintenance. I'd much rather just accrue and accrue, and then get all that accrual paid out when I leave or retire.
I understand that companies would rather I not do that, so they implement this "cap" that allows them to stop providing the benefit they promised during hiring.
In Romania I also have some 5 weeks of vacation, but never take more than two at a time. Two in the summer, two in the winter (Christmas - New Year period) and the rest, sprinkled throughout the year, either for errands or bridge days. Like when there's a holiday on Thursday, I'd take Friday off as well.
Honestly two weeks at a time seems enough and conversely, being absent at work for three-four weeks or more, seems excessive to me. I also have stuff to maintain and new developments to meet a schedule promised to customers, two weeks plus or minus isn't affecting those but I couldn't leave for a month and meet the schedule without killing myself with overtime, effectively negating the whole idea of unwinding during vacation.
But ... speaking of Sweden, one colleague is taking 3 months off. Indeed, Sweden is something else :)
I'm from Norway, and we have 25 days a year, which also comes out to 5 weeks. I had 7 extra day transferred from last year, so 32 days this year. This year was the first I took out 4 weeks of summer vacation, but usually 3 is enough for me. Travel is fun, but after 2-3 weeks of traveling I start to get a big exhausted, and want to focus on hobbies, house work, or similar stuff.
My routine has been: 1 week vacation during spring/Easter, 3 weeks in summer, 1 week fall or Christmas vacation.
On the other hand, I've also worked in other countries where there's much less focus on vacation. I like our balanced view very much.
“ I used to think that once I made it I’d finally feel free”
How you do one thing is how you do everything and once the baseline shifts to your new normal (most likely after a few weeks or months) you will feel the same as you did on your old baseline before the big change.
This is the human condition, you have to figure out how to improve your baseline to improve life.
((or at least, that has been my experience living life))
This is why I highly suggest every once in a while go on a cruise. Specifically a cruise. You’re trapped on the boat. Forced to face the moment, forced to let it go, and party until you get back to reality.
Positive vibes where you have no choice but to shed the stress. It’s worth it. Even a cruise to no where for 5 days.
I don't think you have to waste your money or time on a cruise.
Just being on a boat does it, in fact a blow-up boat for three people (for a good friend and cooler bag with snacks and drinks) will completely detach you from the realities of land life.
There may be other ways to experience this. Cruise ships are some of the most polluting way to experience a vacation there is. It’s also not for everyone, like an all inclusive vacation.
I refuse to not experience life because of some social justice reason. I get that they’re polluting but you only live once. I think one trip is fine. Airlines pollute too and yet millions fly everyday. Are we to go back to sailing across ye oceans to lands yonder so as to not harm our planet? It’s not going to happen in this lifetime.
Whether it’s a retreat in the rain forest in Costa Rica or a cruise around the Caribbean for a week. A cabin in Alaska or a yurt in the Norway countryside. Get out there somewhere where you can’t escape your fate. The point is to succumb to the moment, and things become clear. Personally, I like a party. Not a crazy carnival but a sophisticated one - so I went on Norwegian. It was worth it.
It’s not an all or nothing proposition. There is a gradient between going on a cruise ship (which is multiple times more polluting than even flying, disturbs everything living in the sea, are epidemy hotbeds, routinely reject untreated water into international waters, have questionable working conditions for the crew) and not experiencing life. Most people have never been on a cruise. I don’t think they’d say they haven’t experienced life.
There are places nearby wherever you live that you can visit and that don’t require sailing across the ocean in ye olde ship, flying, or taking a cruise to experience. And they’re just as beautiful, relaxing, and would provide the clarity/relaxation discussed in this article.
True, but instead of saying “cruise ship bad” how about instead offer those alternatives. I get that cruise ships pollute but out of the couple cruises I’ve been on, I would say it’s less carbon than if I owned a truck. Or a car at all. So to NOT do things simply because of some moral stance on something entirely unrelated is bogus to me. I’m a fan of saying yes, not no, to new things.
Thank you for this, what a great perspective! I've never been on a cruise because I always figured "but what is there to do?". But you're right, that's the point. I might actually book one now.
Just remember, you’re just as much a stranger to them as they are to you. Just make sure you buy the drink package because you don’t want to be paying per pour.
Life isn't inherently easy - or fair. For most, it is much easier today because of the efforts of those who came before us. We are lucky for those efforts because they afford us moderation and comfort that are not guaranteed.
To expect results without hard work is presumptuous and pretentious, of which this author has in spades.
It’s a bit trickier than that imho because Hard work doesn’t guarantee results either. And since, as you said, life isn’t fair, we are faced to… randomness. True story, working hard/intelligently does buy us some tickets to a decent life, but it’s not 100% jackpot. I know plenty of people that worked hard, they studied things that are not in demand, and so they are work in whatever they can with shitty salaries. I worked as hard as them, but studied (by luck I guess) something with demand (software engineering), and so I can afford some more niceties in life. And I know people who didn’t work as hard as others, and live a better life than many. So, it’s more complicated than “work hard”.
There’s plenty of productivity to afford all of us housing, utilities, food, and healthcare.
The only real reason we don’t do that is because we take hard work as a virtue, it’s not; ignore the effects of luck, the capacity for hard work is derived by luck; and like to imagine ourselves being rich one day and think that hard work is enough.
Homelessness is not a bug, it’s a feature, and so is every other aspect of society that directly or otherwise forces us plebs to be obedient cogs in the wheel unless!
Great things demand hard work, there is nothing great about basic needs.
> I used to think that once I made it ... stashed away some savings to weather a health crisis or creative drought ... I’d finally feel free to slow down ... Instead, accomplishment—and the sense of “arrival” I imagined would come with it—proved elusive.
I mean, yes? You do indeed need an emergency fund, and the theory, which various retirement vehicles are designed to support, is you set up your affairs to permanently slow down at around 65.
Before that is outside of the reach of most people, but if you want to do it sooner, the way is straightforward: increase your savings rate.
It's math and economics... once you don't need the income anymore, you get to slow down, until then, you manage your stress and anxiety as best as you can.
I am also self employed, fortunate enough to be in the technology profession where we're relatively well paid - I hit the "I could stop at 65" number a few years ago and the way I see it every year I put in at this point, is just bring that number down lower. At some point my age and that number will meet in the middle.
I used to think like that too (because it seems like rational thinking and nobody around me could prove me wrong). But as I get older I start to think about the things I’m putting “aside” for when I have time when I’m retired. Doesn’t sound as good as before anymore. I still save for the future, but I don’t delay things anymore because I may not make it (accidents happen), or the people I love may not make it, or some other things can happen in between. You never know. So yeah, I’m trying not to put aside things for the future anymore, even if that means not saving as much as I could.
Prior to an actual diagnosis, an excess of this type of fear is irrational. You have two powerful tools at your disposal.
#1, most people who take care of their bodies will live long and healthy lives. So the first tool is just to take care of yourself through diet and exercise and watch your risk of deadly diseases plummet.
#2, insurance exists and the medical field is extraordinarily effective. Rich people beat all kinds of conditions. Worried your insurance isn't good enough? Buy more. Keep making more money, and keep buying more insurance. Insurance is tool #2.
This may sound harsh but I really don't know a lot of people, in America or elsewhere, who take care of their body, have a Cadillac fantastic insurance plan, and are worried about illness destroying their life. People who are already unhealthy, on the other hand, or don't have great insurance, are worried about this constantly. Now it's unfortunate that society can't guarantee that optimistic state of mind and health for everyone but until it can, it's diet, exercise, and more income that you funnel into more insurance, for you and your family that are the solutions.
After a diagnosis these tools, especially #2, start becoming less effective because now you've got a pre-existing condition and in particular you're kind of stuck with whatever insurance you had when it happened. So the urgent message here is to get on this stuff now, and sleep better tomorrow (and live longer) because you did it.
People of course can have a family history of a certain kind of cancer (for example). They probably ought to worry about this.
To your point though enough insurance and regular visits (and screening — does insurance always pay for that?), you might dodge a bullet that your ancestors caught.
I’m near that magic number age with a few million but I also have health issues and I’m terrified all of it will be spent on treatment because of how the USA is being governed into flames by the current corrupt administration. It never ends, when I was young and healthy I saved as hard as a could for my old age and didn’t vacation. Now I’m there and there’s zero guarantee of safety because of the rightward shift of politics in this country. Maybe you just have to say “fuck it” like gen z. Because being a paranoid gen x sure sucks.
Same here. I may be thinking about this wrong, but in my view, that "magic number" is a constantly increasing target, increasingly unapproachable. I once thought I could retire on $1M saved--at a 4% withdrawal rate, that's 40K per year... add social security and I could probably do it in a very low cost of living state. 5 more years later, when everything costs a little bit more, and my lifestyle inflated a little, I started thinking that the number I could safely retire with was $2M. A few more years of inflation and cost increases later, plus a kid that needs college, I started thinking I had to shoot for $5M in order to be safe. Some more years pass, more societal safety nets are burning down, and now I'm starting to feel the pangs of old age and potential health problems, I feel like that number is even larger and further out of reach....
You can move to somewhere that has a lower cost of living. It's not unusual at all for people to move when they retire. There's a whole big amazing world out there and one of the best decisions I ever made was squeezing in enough travel when I was young, that it totally altered my mindset.
(That, and reading The 4 Hour Workweek. Once Tim Ferriss became famous, legions of people picked it apart and called him a bullshit artist. I took inspiration from that book, and went and lived it. 20 years after he published it I bumped into him completely by chance in a cafe in Phuket Thailand, which was an incredible moment, here were two guys, for decades just doing the thing that everyone had said was impossible or impractical, and we were two of the first to have the exact same idea and end up in the exact same place once Covid restrictions started to relax around the globe.)
I'll grant that kids significantly alter the numbers.
How did this climbed to hard into the first position is out of my reach, truth is, without so much effort around me I feel like I've outdone myself in a dream, so powerful and clean, that I even shadow myself into irrelevance. /s
This whole post is so self-serving and iconoclastic it kind of feels like satire, and if it was, it would be gold, but it's not.... I mean, I don't think it is...
The post ends with a "read me or not, but if you want more of my genius, pay me", which I guess it's alright, since I would pay Carmack to write about Doom all day long, but some guy with dogs "curled" around it, writing about how hard it is to conceptualize his next "Sistine chapel"? GTFO
We used to infer one’s mind from their writing. Nowadays?
I’m surprised people are too lazy to even remove them dashes.
Well, in fact it might actually be a good thing for one can spot when something was AI generated much easier.
I feel like original writing is pretty much dead these days. We’re all best selling authors now.
I've been (over) using em-dashes ever since I discovered them. I have no intention of changing.
Curiously, I find in editing my dad's auto-biography that a certain generation went crazy over-inserting commas — wherever they think you might want to pause to take a breath or something. To my eye (ear?) the result is a staccato sentence.
But the truth is I know nothing about grammar rules — I slept through sentence diagramming in elementary school.
>The author's core message is about breaking free from a lifelong pattern of tying self-worth to constant productivity and output, realizing that true creativity and well-being require intentional rest and "revery" (contemplation/dreaming), rather than relentless striving.
I live in Sweden where taking 5 weeks off in the summer is the rule. Never got used to it, I take just 2 or 3 and leave the rest of mu vacations for the winter… but I almost never take the full 5 weeks and end up accumulating it over the years. I think I have over 12 weeks pending even after already having taken 3 weeks in July. I just get too bored and start coding anyway, so why not just work and get paid for doing it !
If your work projects are as interesting as your free time projects, I congratulate you to having a great job.
From the Netherlands and not having had to work since I sold my first company at 25 (over 25 years ago), I cannot do more than a week vacation before getting annoyed and bored. I like building stuff: programming, welding, soldering, guitar playing, cooking. But I have no patience for doing one thing: normally I code myself and vibe with multiple claude codes on the boil, my electric guitar is on my lap, there is either YouTube presentations from meetups/events or science podcasts on in the background and then there is cooking and soldering when I happen to get up from the desk. Or I go for a run or meet up with friends. When my friends tell me about their vacation, I fall asleep listening to it, let alone having to live through it. It is a Me thing and nothing wrong with them or me and luckily my wife is even worse, so we work almost nonstop generally. Never makes us exhausted though; quite the opposite.
"Working" but not having to worry about money certainly doesn't sound very exhausting.
Indeed. Saying the working is not the exhausting part sometimes, like the Swedish GP also indicated. You won't mind working a lot if you like the work and your life doesn't depend on it. In the EU (and nordics), depending on your wishes and choices, your life doesn't depend on it.
I also don’t like stereotypical vacations and get bored on day 1.
Vacations don’t need to be stereotypical though. To me vacation nowadays means simply taking a break from my main money earning activity (typically a job, but I had a business before too).
When I travel these days I don’t even plan anything. Just land in the city and let it be. Just wonder around and explore. That’s it.
Wow, I would like to hear the story of building and selling a company pre y2k
The deal was made before the bubble burst here in the Netherlands and was completed after the collapse; the buyer paid the agreed upon price in cash and went on to be successful with it. It was a sign-of-the-times heavy Java (J2EE/EJB etc) enterprise XML catalogue/content management product.
> I almost never take the full 5 weeks and end up accumulating it over the years.
Companies should have a policy to limit accumulation of unused vacation, such as 3 weeks maximum. The problem with unlimited accumulation is that it essentially allows the employee to assign themselves paid overtime[0] without any business reason or management oversight. For example, if the company policy is to have you work 49 weeks and take paid time off 3 weeks a year, but instead you work 51 weeks and carry forward 2 weeks vacation, you have just assigned yourself 2 weeks of overtime.
I used to work for a large corporation that finally implemented such a policy to address exactly what this person has done: 12 weeks of paid overtime that no one asked for and that the company probably hasn't budgeted for.
[0]I don't mean overtime in the sense of time-and-a-half pay or anything like that, rather overtime in the sense of working more paid hours than you were hired for.
In the US, the only common use of the word "overtime" implies three things:
1. Working outside of your normal shift hours or days on a non-routine basis to meet some deadline or specific business goal.
2. Working overtime is not generally voluntary on the part of the employee.
3. However, most companies acknowledge that overtime is an unwanted burden on the part of the employee and thus usually compensate overtime at a higher hourly rate. This is partially a reward for putting up with that burden, and also discourages managers from assigning overtime on a regular basis.
One of the reasons companies are hiring a higher percentage of their workforce on salary is that they can ask them to work longer hours and occasional weekends without the downside of paying them more.
This is why I had to footnote what I (didn't) mean by "overtime". The overtime I'm referring to does not meet any of your 3 implications -- it is entirely voluntary and self-administered by the employee. If there is a better term for it, I would like to use it. And yes, it is only feasible for salaried employees, not hourly-paid.
How is it paid overtime, if your salary is the same whether you take that vacation or not?
I can see how it can be paid overtime if company has to pay out the unused vacation when you quit, but I don't know if that's what you meant.
Yes, paying out the unused vacation time upon leaving the job is what I meant. It is especially pernicious in the case of public employees (police, fire) who spike their pension payments by adding all that unplanned paid time to their final year salary, which distorts the pension calculation.
> Companies should have a policy to limit accumulation of unused vacation, such as 3 weeks maximum.
I hate this. My company lets you accumulate unused vacation, but it has a cap of 300 hours, or 7.5 five-day weeks. After you reach the cap, you stop accruing. I'm constantly at the cap, so I just take a Friday off every time another 8 hours accrues, and spend that time putzing around the house doing routine chores and maintenance. I'd much rather just accrue and accrue, and then get all that accrual paid out when I leave or retire.
I understand that companies would rather I not do that, so they implement this "cap" that allows them to stop providing the benefit they promised during hiring.
In Romania I also have some 5 weeks of vacation, but never take more than two at a time. Two in the summer, two in the winter (Christmas - New Year period) and the rest, sprinkled throughout the year, either for errands or bridge days. Like when there's a holiday on Thursday, I'd take Friday off as well.
Honestly two weeks at a time seems enough and conversely, being absent at work for three-four weeks or more, seems excessive to me. I also have stuff to maintain and new developments to meet a schedule promised to customers, two weeks plus or minus isn't affecting those but I couldn't leave for a month and meet the schedule without killing myself with overtime, effectively negating the whole idea of unwinding during vacation.
But ... speaking of Sweden, one colleague is taking 3 months off. Indeed, Sweden is something else :)
I'm from Norway, and we have 25 days a year, which also comes out to 5 weeks. I had 7 extra day transferred from last year, so 32 days this year. This year was the first I took out 4 weeks of summer vacation, but usually 3 is enough for me. Travel is fun, but after 2-3 weeks of traveling I start to get a big exhausted, and want to focus on hobbies, house work, or similar stuff.
My routine has been: 1 week vacation during spring/Easter, 3 weeks in summer, 1 week fall or Christmas vacation.
On the other hand, I've also worked in other countries where there's much less focus on vacation. I like our balanced view very much.
Save it up for when you have kids ;)
Something dystopian about regarding rest as something that just helps you work harder later.
“ I used to think that once I made it I’d finally feel free”
How you do one thing is how you do everything and once the baseline shifts to your new normal (most likely after a few weeks or months) you will feel the same as you did on your old baseline before the big change.
This is the human condition, you have to figure out how to improve your baseline to improve life.
((or at least, that has been my experience living life))
This is why I highly suggest every once in a while go on a cruise. Specifically a cruise. You’re trapped on the boat. Forced to face the moment, forced to let it go, and party until you get back to reality.
Positive vibes where you have no choice but to shed the stress. It’s worth it. Even a cruise to no where for 5 days.
I don't think you have to waste your money or time on a cruise.
Just being on a boat does it, in fact a blow-up boat for three people (for a good friend and cooler bag with snacks and drinks) will completely detach you from the realities of land life.
That may be true. I just know what worked for me. I lack a lake or blow up boat to try but I guess that’s why so many people like paddleboarding?
There may be other ways to experience this. Cruise ships are some of the most polluting way to experience a vacation there is. It’s also not for everyone, like an all inclusive vacation.
I refuse to not experience life because of some social justice reason. I get that they’re polluting but you only live once. I think one trip is fine. Airlines pollute too and yet millions fly everyday. Are we to go back to sailing across ye oceans to lands yonder so as to not harm our planet? It’s not going to happen in this lifetime.
Whether it’s a retreat in the rain forest in Costa Rica or a cruise around the Caribbean for a week. A cabin in Alaska or a yurt in the Norway countryside. Get out there somewhere where you can’t escape your fate. The point is to succumb to the moment, and things become clear. Personally, I like a party. Not a crazy carnival but a sophisticated one - so I went on Norwegian. It was worth it.
It’s not an all or nothing proposition. There is a gradient between going on a cruise ship (which is multiple times more polluting than even flying, disturbs everything living in the sea, are epidemy hotbeds, routinely reject untreated water into international waters, have questionable working conditions for the crew) and not experiencing life. Most people have never been on a cruise. I don’t think they’d say they haven’t experienced life.
There are places nearby wherever you live that you can visit and that don’t require sailing across the ocean in ye olde ship, flying, or taking a cruise to experience. And they’re just as beautiful, relaxing, and would provide the clarity/relaxation discussed in this article.
True, but instead of saying “cruise ship bad” how about instead offer those alternatives. I get that cruise ships pollute but out of the couple cruises I’ve been on, I would say it’s less carbon than if I owned a truck. Or a car at all. So to NOT do things simply because of some moral stance on something entirely unrelated is bogus to me. I’m a fan of saying yes, not no, to new things.
Thank you for this, what a great perspective! I've never been on a cruise because I always figured "but what is there to do?". But you're right, that's the point. I might actually book one now.
Just remember, you’re just as much a stranger to them as they are to you. Just make sure you buy the drink package because you don’t want to be paying per pour.
I have some wonderful memories of my trip.
[dead]
Life isn't inherently easy - or fair. For most, it is much easier today because of the efforts of those who came before us. We are lucky for those efforts because they afford us moderation and comfort that are not guaranteed.
To expect results without hard work is presumptuous and pretentious, of which this author has in spades.
It’s a bit trickier than that imho because Hard work doesn’t guarantee results either. And since, as you said, life isn’t fair, we are faced to… randomness. True story, working hard/intelligently does buy us some tickets to a decent life, but it’s not 100% jackpot. I know plenty of people that worked hard, they studied things that are not in demand, and so they are work in whatever they can with shitty salaries. I worked as hard as them, but studied (by luck I guess) something with demand (software engineering), and so I can afford some more niceties in life. And I know people who didn’t work as hard as others, and live a better life than many. So, it’s more complicated than “work hard”.
There’s plenty of productivity to afford all of us housing, utilities, food, and healthcare.
The only real reason we don’t do that is because we take hard work as a virtue, it’s not; ignore the effects of luck, the capacity for hard work is derived by luck; and like to imagine ourselves being rich one day and think that hard work is enough.
Homelessness is not a bug, it’s a feature, and so is every other aspect of society that directly or otherwise forces us plebs to be obedient cogs in the wheel unless!
Great things demand hard work, there is nothing great about basic needs.
Also the sacrifices of those before us.
Weekends, 8 hour work day, paid time off, etc.
> I used to think that once I made it ... stashed away some savings to weather a health crisis or creative drought ... I’d finally feel free to slow down ... Instead, accomplishment—and the sense of “arrival” I imagined would come with it—proved elusive.
I mean, yes? You do indeed need an emergency fund, and the theory, which various retirement vehicles are designed to support, is you set up your affairs to permanently slow down at around 65.
Before that is outside of the reach of most people, but if you want to do it sooner, the way is straightforward: increase your savings rate.
It's math and economics... once you don't need the income anymore, you get to slow down, until then, you manage your stress and anxiety as best as you can.
I am also self employed, fortunate enough to be in the technology profession where we're relatively well paid - I hit the "I could stop at 65" number a few years ago and the way I see it every year I put in at this point, is just bring that number down lower. At some point my age and that number will meet in the middle.
I used to think like that too (because it seems like rational thinking and nobody around me could prove me wrong). But as I get older I start to think about the things I’m putting “aside” for when I have time when I’m retired. Doesn’t sound as good as before anymore. I still save for the future, but I don’t delay things anymore because I may not make it (accidents happen), or the people I love may not make it, or some other things can happen in between. You never know. So yeah, I’m trying not to put aside things for the future anymore, even if that means not saving as much as I could.
> At some point my age and that number will meet in the middle.
Hopefully.
The author mentions: "The leukemia diagnosis and relapses certainly intensified the urgency I feel around work…"
Ouch, I feel terrible for having missed that. Well for the rest of us...
... we might pop up with cancer tomorrow under a routine checkup.
Prior to an actual diagnosis, an excess of this type of fear is irrational. You have two powerful tools at your disposal.
#1, most people who take care of their bodies will live long and healthy lives. So the first tool is just to take care of yourself through diet and exercise and watch your risk of deadly diseases plummet.
#2, insurance exists and the medical field is extraordinarily effective. Rich people beat all kinds of conditions. Worried your insurance isn't good enough? Buy more. Keep making more money, and keep buying more insurance. Insurance is tool #2.
This may sound harsh but I really don't know a lot of people, in America or elsewhere, who take care of their body, have a Cadillac fantastic insurance plan, and are worried about illness destroying their life. People who are already unhealthy, on the other hand, or don't have great insurance, are worried about this constantly. Now it's unfortunate that society can't guarantee that optimistic state of mind and health for everyone but until it can, it's diet, exercise, and more income that you funnel into more insurance, for you and your family that are the solutions.
After a diagnosis these tools, especially #2, start becoming less effective because now you've got a pre-existing condition and in particular you're kind of stuck with whatever insurance you had when it happened. So the urgent message here is to get on this stuff now, and sleep better tomorrow (and live longer) because you did it.
People of course can have a family history of a certain kind of cancer (for example). They probably ought to worry about this.
To your point though enough insurance and regular visits (and screening — does insurance always pay for that?), you might dodge a bullet that your ancestors caught.
I’m near that magic number age with a few million but I also have health issues and I’m terrified all of it will be spent on treatment because of how the USA is being governed into flames by the current corrupt administration. It never ends, when I was young and healthy I saved as hard as a could for my old age and didn’t vacation. Now I’m there and there’s zero guarantee of safety because of the rightward shift of politics in this country. Maybe you just have to say “fuck it” like gen z. Because being a paranoid gen x sure sucks.
Same here. I may be thinking about this wrong, but in my view, that "magic number" is a constantly increasing target, increasingly unapproachable. I once thought I could retire on $1M saved--at a 4% withdrawal rate, that's 40K per year... add social security and I could probably do it in a very low cost of living state. 5 more years later, when everything costs a little bit more, and my lifestyle inflated a little, I started thinking that the number I could safely retire with was $2M. A few more years of inflation and cost increases later, plus a kid that needs college, I started thinking I had to shoot for $5M in order to be safe. Some more years pass, more societal safety nets are burning down, and now I'm starting to feel the pangs of old age and potential health problems, I feel like that number is even larger and further out of reach....
You can move to somewhere that has a lower cost of living. It's not unusual at all for people to move when they retire. There's a whole big amazing world out there and one of the best decisions I ever made was squeezing in enough travel when I was young, that it totally altered my mindset.
(That, and reading The 4 Hour Workweek. Once Tim Ferriss became famous, legions of people picked it apart and called him a bullshit artist. I took inspiration from that book, and went and lived it. 20 years after he published it I bumped into him completely by chance in a cafe in Phuket Thailand, which was an incredible moment, here were two guys, for decades just doing the thing that everyone had said was impossible or impractical, and we were two of the first to have the exact same idea and end up in the exact same place once Covid restrictions started to relax around the globe.)
I'll grant that kids significantly alter the numbers.
How did this climbed to hard into the first position is out of my reach, truth is, without so much effort around me I feel like I've outdone myself in a dream, so powerful and clean, that I even shadow myself into irrelevance. /s
This whole post is so self-serving and iconoclastic it kind of feels like satire, and if it was, it would be gold, but it's not.... I mean, I don't think it is...
The post ends with a "read me or not, but if you want more of my genius, pay me", which I guess it's alright, since I would pay Carmack to write about Doom all day long, but some guy with dogs "curled" around it, writing about how hard it is to conceptualize his next "Sistine chapel"? GTFO
> I would pay Carmack to write about Doom all day long
That just shows that each of us have different tastes.
You can keep yourself pretty busy if engaging in wondering how every post makes it to the front page of HN.
The amount of em—dashes in there exhausted me lol
We used to infer one’s mind from their writing. Nowadays?
I’m surprised people are too lazy to even remove them dashes. Well, in fact it might actually be a good thing for one can spot when something was AI generated much easier.
I feel like original writing is pretty much dead these days. We’re all best selling authors now.
I've been (over) using em-dashes ever since I discovered them. I have no intention of changing.
Curiously, I find in editing my dad's auto-biography that a certain generation went crazy over-inserting commas — wherever they think you might want to pause to take a breath or something. To my eye (ear?) the result is a staccato sentence.
But the truth is I know nothing about grammar rules — I slept through sentence diagramming in elementary school.
This reads like original writing to me. Too creative for LLMs, at least based on my experience.
I used em-dashes before ChatGPT became a thing, I will keep using them.
I have started using —ahem— em dashes more regularly so people think I am as smart —well clever at least— as AI.
I'd like to do a study whether there's a correlation between liking emdashes and disliking curly brace languages.
I find emdashes hard to parse and I don't like them without extra spacing.
The punctuation in English feels kinda sucky (and implicit variables suck) compared to some programming languages.
It's not just about using well placed em dashes — it's about creating a sense of awe and enlightenment.
I agree. I could drop using em-dashes. I feel though like the narrative feels broken up. It stops and starts too frequently.
So much fluff
Thank goodness for LLMs
>The author's core message is about breaking free from a lifelong pattern of tying self-worth to constant productivity and output, realizing that true creativity and well-being require intentional rest and "revery" (contemplation/dreaming), rather than relentless striving.
As a counterpoint, I quite enjoyed the writing style. Not everything has to be summarized. To me, it was more about the human experience.
The author is literally an artist though. What you call fluff may be a worthwhile artistic and emotional expression.
If someone stopped at this summary they would have missed out on a nice poem by Emily Dickinson for example. Oh wait, let me summarize it:
> The poem describes how a prairie can be made using clover, a bee, and imagination.
there, that's better. no more fluff.
Oh, this is lovely! It's rare that I see such a clear cut argument for how _not_ to use llms.
People do argue for and against, but usually less effectively than what you did here. Kudos to clarity!
You're born, you live, you die. There, I have freed you from the rest of this mortal coil.
https://maalvika.substack.com/p/compression-culture-is-makin...