As someone who is going to have to get a job in 2-3 years, I’m dreading the day. Going to the same place 5 days a week coming home with no time and energy left for anything you actually like and doing this for FOURTY years or even more if you were unlucky, sounds HORRIBLE!! How could anyone actually like working?
I don’t understand people who do NOT want to work! Sure, it’s nice being home having nothing to do for a few days, but then what? I start feeling bored and useless and I want to contribute and feel useful again.
When people do retire, something like this usually happens. Either they solve it by joining into so many activities and hobbies they’re actually busier than before, they end up finding another job for the hell of it, or they decline into misery.
Doing nothing is like a covid lockdown that never ends, basically.
There’s ways the do all that without working a job?
And who said No Work = No Thing?
Volunteering, Arts, Hobbies, Crafts, Socialisation
And Jesus, you’re going to be depressed when you’re forced to retire, with no friends outside of work and no hobbies
The other way to look at it is what are hobbies and volunteering but work in of themselves? Human existence involves work, but every human should be able to find work that they can enjoy (or at least not actively hate)
Wow, that escalated quickly 🤣
Yeah I think I went a bit too hard on it
Yeah, avocation and vocation can both fill that hole. It is a hole that most people need filled, though.
Don’t let the fake world of earning money fuck you up. People want to move and dance and do great things naturally. Most need money to eat and stay warm though and those two things are rarely aligned. If you were a multi-trillionaire would you just want to lay on the beach all day doing nothing?
So here’s the thing, many people hate their jobs and just work them because they don’t really see any other option than to keep working the job they hate, but also plenty of people really enjoy their jobs. Depending on your interests you might have to get a little creative or try something you’d never thought about or something you’ve never heard of
If you enjoy problem solving (a very common human trait), there’s some lucrative corporate careers out there in things like project management, asset management or even just straight management. If you just want to zone out and listen to podcasts and audiobooks all day there’s tons of machine operator jobs that will absolutely fill that role (and often in small towns with very low costs of living as an added bonus) if you want to just get paid go hike there’s jobs to be had in surveying and land management. If you like working with animals the ag sector has you covered, and if you like working with your hands there’s always tons of jobs in trades. If you like helping people there’s the healthcare sector and if that’s too much blood there’s always medical coding or outside of the healthcare sector there’s tons of banks out there looking for loan officers who will talk to people and fill in the blanks on the forms. Sales is also very lucrative and very cushy if you can get into B2B sales. There’s tons of jobs that exist and every job is different, so there’s bound to be one out there that scratches an itch for you and you can enjoy (or at least not actively hate)
And this is all assuming you want to work for someone else, you can always start something on the side while keeping another job that pays the bills, or if you have a supportive partner who’s willing to cover the bills while you take you shot at a business. Go start a hardwood furniture business, or find an obscure thing that nobody makes anymore and start making those. Go create an event that people can buy tickets to attend. Open a bar or a store or a pilates studio! Buy an old building on some unfarmable land and create a winery or fish farm or wedding venue! Sell pancakes out of your garage! Paint murals for people! Grow mushrooms to sell at the farmers market! Start a commune or a bus tour company or a bike taxi! Is it hard? Absolutely. Will there be roadblocks and challenges to overcome? Indubitably! But overcoming these challenges is fulfilling in itself and plenty of people start businesses successful enough for them to retire off of (or at least successful enough to sell to someone else who can make it successful enough to retire off of)
People don’t want to work. They want to live and pay for shit. Work is the only way for people that weren’t born rich to get money. Well, either that or crimes, but some crimes can be seen as illegal work.
Most people don’t want to feel useless, so if you cut their access to cheap dopamine (phones with internet, social media) they might seek out some work out of boredom.
What really sucks is that society expects us to be “specialists” in one thing for the rest of our lives, as if we are fucking ant drones or gears in a complex machine. It’s great for economists and the rich and awful for our individual wellbeing, though some people do enjoy doing the same thing over and over for very long periods of time.
Well, either that or crimes, but some crimes can be seen as illegal work
Human existence requires work. Someone has to grow the food, someone has to fix the things, someone has to build the structures and plumb them and someone has to help fix us when we get broken. The only way to never work is to freeload off of everyone who is working.
What really sucks is that society expects us to be “specialists” in one thing for the rest of our live
Specialization is literally how humanity shifted from being hunter-gatherers who lived to be about 30-40 before getting mauled by a bear or killed by another tribe or dying of an infection because you slipped on a rock.
In the modern economy specialization doesn’t have to mean doing the same thing every day. Any kind of career where you fix things, you can easily find a job that varies wildly from day to day. A mechanic might be replacing an engine cylinder one day and rebalancing wheels the next and rebuilding the exhaust the next. An IT person can be troubleshooting a software error one day then tweaking network performance the next then imaging laptops the next. A project manager will have different work depending on what phase of the project it’s in, and the type of challenges and work will vary wildly by what kinds of projects they’re managing
The trick is, find something you don’t mind doing and that can turn into finding something you kinda enjoy. As long as you don’t wake up dreading work every day (which if you do it’s probably time to shake things up, both for yourself and for your loved ones!) you can have a pretty decent life
Good workplaces are like the after-school extracurricular classes, you go because you’re interested, it’s fun to problem-solve with people.
I have to be regularly told to go home at the end of the day.
Finally a positive answer! I completely agree, I enjoy working with competent people, solve issues, and improve myself. Extend my knowledge and experience, try out new stuff and help other people get better.
If your really worried about working do your best to find a work place that is fun rather than a workplace that maximizes your income. Assuming you have interests try and find a job that plays to those interests and it helps to feel like your actually helping people rather than being another cog in the machine.
Problem is there’s a ton of interests with jobs that just don’t exist really anymore or those jobs pay the absolute bare minimum. Like my main interest/hobby is film and writing my thoughts about every single one I watch (along with videogames, but film is easier for me cause it requires a lot less from me). I don’t have any interest in making a movie and becoming a paid critic nowadays is near impossible with how flooded the market is with hundreds of thousands of people doing it for free in their spare time. I could work in a movie theater or something similar, but then I’m back to making state minimum wage instead the almost double that I’m currently making.
I could work in a movie theater or something similar, but then I’m back to making state minimum wage instead the almost double that I’m currently making.
You could own a theatre. You could also create a local film festival, even if that means just booking the community room at the library and screening public domain silent films to start with. Or if you want to make a job out of it, maybe you can snag the screening rights to some indie/deep backlog films and do a traveling film festival, maybe setting up in small towns where there isn’t already a ton going on where you could also get the venue for cheap.
There’s also companies popping up that have bought the rights to reprint deep back catalogue films. Like I recently heard about one that buys the rights to reprint B movies from the 70s and 80s on VHS, so apparently there is a market for that kind of thing too!
Yeah man owning a theater at a time when they’re struggling sounds like a great idea, especially in my area where Regal had to shut down their only location (closest one now is 1.5 hours away) and the actual like best theater that didn’t just play massive blockbusters had to shut down once corporate decided to just never fix their concession area. So all we have is AMC and Marcus. Sounds like a great place to take out loans, go into debt to open a new one.
As for the film festival thing, I don’t got the business savvy or communication skills to even begin to know how to attempt that. Like social situations tend to give me panic attacks.
Any of the ideas I’d said above wouldn’t be solo operations. Sure they could be but finding a friend to be your business partner or creating a small organization to manage and run things both helps manage risk but also helps fill in the gaps in your own skillset.
The easy option is just to talk to the local library about running a film festival, get it scheduled in the community room and put on the library events calendar and just bring a laptop and a projector if the library doesn’t have one and watch some public domain films. This can grow into a larger indie film festival in time and in the short term you can get your feet wet and have some fun doing something meaningful in your community
Now if you wanted to go all out and do it for real with an actual budget (still only talking single digit thousands at the most though! I know folks who spend that much annually on their private hobbies, and if you play your cards right you can probably break even pretty easily) and really try to make something of the whole thing, this would be my gameplan if I were to try to set one up in my town:
- Enlist some friends/trusted family members to help run it, create some loose organization amongst your enlisted folks to help delegate tasks and share the responsibilities and costs, create a regular meeting/working session schedule and break out into task forces as needed
- Look around your local community and identify potentially suitable event spaces. Is there a local art gallery or community center you can rent out? Maybe an indoor/outdoor space at a park you can rent out from the city? What’s the cost to rent it out for an evening? How many people would be allowed in the space at once and what would it take to setup a projector, some speakers and a laptop?
- If you find a suitable enough space and have reached this stage, strongly consider officially registering your organization (a non-profit would probably be lowest-risk since businesses and governments love donating to non-profits and it makes it much easier to rely on volunteer labor and donated hardware and licenses further reducing risk) this is also the stage where you should have ideally identified your budget and general gameplan for running this thing
- Consult your local government and any local colleges for assistance. See if you can get any film, culture, English or even just liberal arts instructors on board with helping boost your event. Your city government may have resources they can offer as well, since boasting an indie film festival is usually a good thing for any city. This is one instance where living in/basing your operation in a smaller town is a big benefit because the local government will likely be excited to help however they can to build more local culture and draw to the town.
- Schedule it! Book your reservation of the event space
- Advertising! Post fliers, ensure its mentioned in the local paper and local news (if they exist) make sure its listed on the events schedules that would be relevant. Get any local/regional colleges aware of the event so that students might come attend. Contact the senior centers and make sure you’re on their event calendars so you get some bored retirees to attend too
- Get your equipment in order. If you went the non-profit route contact local AV/IT companies for donations of equipment/time. Many of these companies will donate both in exchange for plastering their company name on event as a sponsor. Also get your food vendor(s) in order. See if there’s a good spot for a food truck to setup shop and contact some local food trucks to gauge interest. This is also the stage to line up your tuxedo rental so you can look the part when you give your opening/closing speech about how proud you are to have seen this event come together
- Run the event! This is probably the hardest part because everything you thought would be fine will go wrong, while the parts you thought would catastrophically fail go perfectly, but ultimately its fine because its a brand new indie film festival and nobody expects it to have the polish of Sundance or the Grammys.
- Do it again the next year! Or even in 6 months! Once you’ve held a couple of festivals you’ll start collecting some regular attendees, made some extremely important contacts, and you’ll have started to establish a reputation. Maybe this is just a cool thing you do now, or maybe it grows into an actual big thing! (if it does and my comment inspired you, please let me know though! I’d love to know if my random brain dumps on weird corners of the internet actually impact people in meaningful ways!)
Important distinction between “working” and “having a job”. You do a job for someone else. You should always be working for yourself. Labor for ones own ends in enjoyable. Labor for someone else is a means to an end. Recognize it is something to balance and balance it the best you can for the life you want to have.
This should be higher up.
I think a lot of younger people today struggle to figure out what is important for them to balance and this creates a problem where they just jump from one short term gain to another until they die and if they recognize this pattern without knowing what’s happening they just feel hopeless and don’t want to change it or themselves and then struggle to be a functioning adult.
Hey look at that it did eventually get higher up haha
It’s either work or twerk and i aint got that kind of body
Place and purpose baby! Working for someone/being exploited sucks shit, sure, but doing stuff is awesome. What else are you gonna do?
I grew up on a subsistence farm. Everyone always worked. Every single day of the year. Some days were very long, some were short depending on what needed to be done. To survive. Of course we had fun and time off as well. It’s about balance. Most people don’t have to do back to the land subsistence living anymore because they substituted living in cities and taking paying jobs to buy what they need. No matter the path, you still have to do some sort of work to live. You can choose which path to some extent. There are small farms looking for people to come work for them in exchange for room and board.
It’s the money, generally. Life is expensive.
Yep.
I want to provide for my wife and kids. Its my purpose and I find it fulfilling.
He who does not work, neither shall he eat
When you ask a question like this in a place like this, understand that you’re going to be getting replies from people who have jobs where you can sit around and be bored on the internet
Or sad, unemployed people.
Find something you genuinely enjoy doing.
Also, having moneyz is nice.
The question is, what else would you be doing with your time?
if you do something you enjoy for a living, you will end up hating it. trust me on that one.
Yes! That happened to me!
I don’t want to work in order to survive but I want to be productive and keep my mind and body sharp while also contributing to the community. I like my job and while it seems mundane, it keeps me busy, gives me routine, gives my brain problems to solve, and is sometimes the most socializing I get. I just hate that I have to be afraid to lose my job or end up hungry or homeless because of it.
I just hate that I have to be afraid to lose my job or end up hungry or homeless because of it.
it’s not an accident that you’ve come to see it this way; controlled dissent and manufactured fear are effective ways at keeping a population under control.
That’s why I’m a communist, but most people are afraid of that term. I would settle for really good socialism in my lifetime though.
I hate being stuck as a wage slave creating wealth for the people standing on my shoulders, but I like to work and I like my job, it’s a strange place to exist.
same here; except i’m not a marxist (yet) and i’ve traded in my labor aristocracy slave status for a non-profit driven workplace that comes with union protections.
watching my union get their collective ass handed to them by starbucks; and others; makes it’s clear that union protection doesn’t mean much, but it’s the best i think i can get in this country.
