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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

Is it such a bad thing to dream of a life which values things outside of a workplace? To spend time with friends and family. The older generations cling to positions of power and refuse to make room for the newer generations, so it is upon them to find meaning and purpose through other avenues.

Retiring seems important for allowing younger generations to take their place. But if all you have is your work and you've lived for nothing more then I guess it makes sense to cling onto it until the end.

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Its not a value judgement on my peer group for wanting out of the workplace.

Its more of a value judgement on the meaningless of so much of modern work.

All the people I mentioned above are involved in work that’s probably more gratifying than making giant corporations richer. One is a playwright, one is a professor, one is a top pulmonologist in the country.

I don’t know what their day to day entails, but I can’t imagine it being as mind numbing as what I do.

This. My friends' father is approaching 92. He worked in his auto repair shop until the age of 89. He was a pillar of the community, known everyone and their cars, and had generations of customer coming with cars to get them serviced.

I don't think he became a rich man from this. He had a house, raised his family, and that's all. He just enjoyed fixing cars.

Yea I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I think us fixating so much on monetary richness can b harmful to society and too little is made of general “wealth” (drawing some inspiration from pg’s how to make wealth).

There’s a lot of folks that make more than ur buddy’s dad, but I’m sure a lot of them are miserable in their jobs. In standard jobs u spend the majority of ur non sleeping hours in ur job. Are you rlly more “rich” if u can splurge on a few things on occasion but everything else is a chore compared to someone with an adequate amount to get by but enjoys the work?

Idk I find framing it this way and thinking about the dichotomy between short bursts of gratification and more subdued but consistent well being is interesting

> Is it such a bad thing to dream of a life which values things outside of a workplace? To spend time with friends and family.

Friends and family are great reprieve between working hours and obligations. I wouldn't want that to be the only thing going on. Stay at home moms and retired people around me are not the image of fulfilment.

The few retired people I've met that were happy and engaging are the kind that didn't stop working past retirement.

It doesn't have to be work, but instead of word hobby I would use word passion. For me its various sports and activities mostly in the mountains and backpacking around the world. This keeps me sane and cca happy.

My father worked an extra year so he could buy his lifelong dream - Harley Davidson. Few years later, he is still very much into it, found new friends and community he enjoys being part of, going out on various adventures.

Hobby for me is something I like doing sometimes. Passion is something that defines at least part of me, think about it a lot in my free time, train for it etc. If you have proper passion(s), retirement means just more time for them. Like say rock climbing.

The idea of having free time to finally travel around the world in slow pace, or climb rock whenever I want sounds like paradise.

There’s a big difference between having a purpose in your life, something you love doing, that happens to be done at a work place; and being an employee.

IMHO it is absolutely a good thing to dream of a life which values things outside of employment.

We just happen to use the same word - “work” - for both kinds of situations.

Related - My friend group is a bunch of (predictably) nerds, and describing the times I want to keep working on an interesting tech problem for my employer as "wizarding" has been fairly successful. It's specifically a D&D reference, since what I'm usually doing is figuring out a new pattern ("spell") to add to my repertoire ("spellbook") that I can then use in many other situations.

It's... difficult, to convey to people what it's like having a job you like doing, working for people that treat you with respect, when they've pretty much only ever had jobs they didn't like and working for people that treated them poorly.

Yea it’s pretty disheartening that these r common experiences. Admittedly, I don’t kno a ton about UBI but I’d imagine the idea of giving people more security so they can pursue their interests in careers and not have to suffer thru a daily grind solely for a paycheck is a tenet of it

100% yes. I usually think of / describe that aspect of UBI (theoretically) as "the job all other jobs have to compete with."

Like - there's a floor on how shitty a job can be, if no job is a valid alternative.

I like that framing, thanks. And thinking about that vision, I think people all too often conflate being a cog in a corporate machine with being “a contributing member of society.” Not discrediting the notion of everyone pulling their weight in a community, but the frequency that I encounter that take in the mainstream always irks me

That isn't how welfare works. You're actually presenting the "welfare queen" argument even if you're saying it's good, but it was bad because it wasn't true.

Welfare is good because people like being employed and supporting them gives them more time and resources to find a better job. It increases employment because of this. (this is search/matching theory.)

Conversely, the kind of non-working people who are poorest and most need support are children and the elderly, not early retirees.

Do you think that full employment is necessary in today's society? Note I did not use the word economy. I wonder if people who have "welfare queen" adjacent perspectives believe that people would not be happy in a situation where we have a smaller economy and a society where the average person isn't forced to compromise their values or submit themselves to abuse just to afford rent and food.

I think it's the only choice because entropy exists. "Everyone should be retired" doesn't work when you need sewage workers, or even sewage robot maintenance workers.

That said, you don't have to work 120 hours a week just because you're employed, and hours worked has also been trending down over time.

> the average person isn't forced to compromise their values or submit themselves to abuse just to afford rent and food.

This is what happens without full employment; full employment means you don't have to do this because it's hard to hire new people (they're all already employed) so it's easy to change jobs.

Just because you'd be uncomfortable working on sewers when you could be sitting on your couch watching TV doesn't mean we will run out of sewer workers.

Full employment comes with a whole host of other problems for the kind of economy we inhabit today -- a sure enough sign that things aren't working under the current paradigm. We need a change if something like 'full employment' is expected to be a positive thing.

We've only had near-full employment in the 90s and this year. (Japan also only just got there by improving employment of women.)

I'm not seeing the problems.

Near-full employment and full employment are very different, in the same way that carrying a 95% full glass of water and a 100% full glass of water are very different.

The "cushion" of unemployed people, according to economists, is very important for staving off runaway effects that drive bad macroeconomic dynamics.

100% employment is impossible to achieve since it means eg there are no full-time students and nobody on maternity leave, so it's not a problem.

This thing you were advocating for is not actually the thing you were advocating for? I find this argument specious at best.

If someone talks about how they love to work and don't want to retire it's not a judgement on any other choices.

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