[Closed] working all your life. whats all that about?

However last week we'd planned a few outdoor jobs so when the snow and cold arrived we were in the house at a loose end.

Boy, that was grim. Although we resisted the temptation of daytime TV, we resolved never to retire.

Yep, same here. Without a job, I'd go mad quite quickly....

Boy, that was grim. Although we resisted the temptation of daytime TV, we resolved never to retire.

Yep, same here. Without a job, I'd go mad quite quickly....

Netflix, playing an instrument and workouts if weather is poor. I’d quit working tomorrow if money allowed. Spend my time with my wife and kids, learning new skills and just generally living life rather than spending my time simply doing something out of necessity.

just generally living life rather than spending my time simply doing something out of necessity.

I quite enjoy my job. In fact a huge chunk of my self worth comes from my work.....

I was reading some research suggesting that younger generation weren't as committed to work as anticipated, partly in reflection of there's no point in flogging yourself senseless to earn money to buy a house you can't afford, and then fill it up with expensive goods that you work all hours for when you can be spending time doing stuff you enjoy. It appears they are rejecting the post-war ideas of materialism and consumerism. In many industrial sectors there's going to be a huge problem in 10-15 years time when as much as half of the workforce reach retirement - with defined benefit pensions there's no incentive to work longer. Combined with poor investment and productivity the UK is no longer as an attractive place to invest. Some investors are already down-grading some well-known UK businesses because austerity no longer. An anti-immigration agenda doesn't help and expect many young people will leave as a consequence - stagnant wages, poor productivity and the prospects of accruing a £50k debt to do a minimum wage job looking after miserable pensioners?

If you didn't work for a living I presume you'd want to do something with your time? If so then whatever it is you want to do consumes materials/products/equipment/knowledge etc. You can't do something with nothing. So we all work to provide the stuff we need to live our lives, it's a self-serving thing.

If you think a life of no work is some form of utopia then go to one of the extreme poverty developing nations...they ones where you have to walk 7 miles to get your water every day, don't have time for education, graft and toil in some desert scrub land to scrape together a meagre existence. You think your life has no meaning, then take a look at those poor souls. At least things are getting better. In China 30 years ago 88% of their population were living in extreme poverty, now is down at around 6% - over 500 million people living better lives in as little as 30 years. they're still working hard, but at least they're grafting for their own benefit and building a life for themselves and their family and not scraping a meagre existence in some paddy field somewhere in the middle of nowhere just struggling to survive with no access to education, medicine, communication or technology, not even electricity or a source of clean water.

It aint a perfect model, but it's the least worst.

Moving to a 12 hour roster in the new year, hello 3 day week

I've taken the plunge and discussed some flexibility in my work patterns. End result is i've taken a modest pay cut and now have 12 weeks leave PA which is a total result. Will be much better than 4 days pw which would never have happened.

I quite enjoy my job. In fact a huge chunk of my self worth comes from my work.....

Fair play, you’re an extremely lucky individual.

Have a read of this! Explains all...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/1846558239

Food for thought https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/623922.How_to_Be_Idle

I don't rate that Sapiens book. He starts from a preconceived ideas then retro justifies it with some pretty sweeping and apparently unjustified claims.

[quote=footflaps ]I quite enjoy my job. In fact a huge chunk of my self worth comes from my work.....

Traffic warden, eh?

The reason humans are so successful and technologically advanced

How are you defining successful? By technology? Human society has resulted in destruction of eco-systems, the pollution and poisoning of the natural environment, overpopulation, poverty and misery in much of the world, extinction of countless species, and potential/probable irreversible damage to the climate and natural systems on which human civilisation depends. I'm struggling to see how a tiny minority of people living an unsustainable and ultimately self-defeating lifestyle could be deemed as successful.

At 50 I now have a full compliment of 35 yrs NI contributions

Same here, but only 4.5 years to go. I don't mind my job or the people and company I work for but it's the whole work concept I'm not keen on. My wife took very early retirement in June and I honestly don't know how we managed to get things done when we both worked full time.

In the next couple of years I'll probably go down to 3 days a week.

molgrips - Member
I don't rate that Sapiens book. He starts from a preconceived ideas then retro justifies it with some pretty sweeping and apparently unjustified claims.

Interesting, I read the book from a theoretical perspective. As such, it suggests that we work as we do to keep the system/illusion going, upon which we rely and that the Agricultural Revolution really kick started the whole trade thing some 10,000 years ago.

I'm currently reading The Silk Road, which also touches on our requirement to use a unit of value to whatever we do, the more we do... in theory anyway.

Why spend a working life despising the activity or its environment? As has been mentioned before, follow your heart, your passion, be true to yourself and others, then your activity's position on the 'work' spectrum changes.

Sometimes, we get so caught up in the system that sustains our lives, our ability to shift becomes more difficult without major sacrifices, which ultimately means the system has another foot soldier.

However last week we'd planned a few outdoor jobs so when the snow and cold arrived we were in the house at a loose end.

Boy, that was grim. Although we resisted the temptation of daytime TV, we resolved never to retire.

Seriously? I've been unemployed/retired (it's debatable which) for 15 months now and haven't been bored for one minute, no matter what the weather. There are zillions of things to be done that are far more useful/rewarding/enjoyable than working.

As someone involved in graduate and internship recruitment, young people are better qualified, better prepared and better skilled and they work harder than my generation

I'm struggling to see how a tiny minority of people living an unsustainable and ultimately self-defeating lifestyle could be deemed as successful.

There's an awful lot of turkeys out there that just can't wait for Xmas.
Sadly we've spent so much time flexing our technologically 'superior' muscle power that the most important part of the body, the brain, has completely failed to evolve in many people.

I have worked for myself for nearly 10 years now. The main issue is getting the balance right.

There is always the niggling feeling that I just have to take that next student on in case work dries up and then I end up with more work than I can realistically handle which wears me out.

I am hoping this next year to be able to stop working Saturdays and to drop the evenings to just one per week.

Doing the maths, I can get away with doing 20 hours a week which, with travelling time, will be about 30 - 35 hours.

If the greedy minority weren't land grabbing all the time, forcing us peasants to pay our lives away simply to place our feet on it let alone take up residence, life would be a lot easier.

Land should be free and worked on by all not horded like goods and services.

In my opinion everyone needs to go back to working in agriculture and people shouldn't have to pay rent to take up residence where ever it is they want to stay. Common land for common people!

Unfortunately, machinery, for all it's efficiencies, has made our labour unnecessary. Working on the land is what humans are best at in my opinion. Have you ever seen an unhappy gardener? Farmer's don't count as it's their greed that makes them unhappy.

In my opinion everyone needs to go back to working in agriculture

**** off.

No internet, no cars, no doctors, no tractors, no books.. and I don't want to dig fields and milk cows all day every day for my whole life thanks.

There are zillions of things to be done that are far more useful/rewarding/enjoyable than working.

I used to say things like that all the time, but then in my current job it can get quite interesting. It's rewarding to come in, be an expert, fix some stuff and help people out. Which is what I'd spend a good chunk of time doing anyway, in different areas, if I didn't have to work.

Try being a hunter gatherer for a while. I suspect you'd kill to get your job back. You'd also have to kill and eat your children to make it through the first winter...

There was promise that "in the future" modern technology and robots would mean we wouldn't have to work any more.

Which is fine other than we'd also all be poor and starving. Unless the state provided everything. Kind of like communism, but with robots doing the jobs. Can't have that though in Corbyn's world. Not unless the robots paid taxes 😉

How about Star Trek's utopian Federation? Though it does involve work, but not for money, it's all for the betterment of one's self and mankind (yeah, feel free to throw up 😀 ). The state provides everything, you just work for the love of it. Hmm.

There are options to not be a drone in life. Just drop out and be a bum. Drift around from place to place. Solve crimes along the way and you've got a hit TV show.

I used to say things like that all the time, but then in my current job it can get quite interesting. It's rewarding to come in, be an expert, fix some stuff and help people out. Which is what I'd spend a good chunk of time doing anyway, in different areas, if I didn't have to work.

I guess I was talking mainly about my own job which was decent money (and very fun people) but dull and not very fulfilling. If you have a job you really enjoy then I'm (genuinely) quite envious.

Why stick to a 7 day week. My favorite working rota was 6 days on and 4 days off.

Sit down with a spreadsheet, work out much money you need for the rest of you life, stop working when you hit that.

Basically, well unless you are on the breadline, work out your buying shit/work balance.

[i]you could camp in scotland near the coast, forage for seafood, hunt game etc, get water from streams/lochs etc.[/i]
I'd take a guess and say you would expend more calories than you'd take in if you tried this long term and you'd eventually starve to death.

I doubt the issue is starving to death for lack of calories, but it might be scurvy or other nutritional illness.

Seaweed would see you through. Plenty of that up there.

Am I allowed to enjoy working?

If you don’t like your job change it.

work out your buying shit/work balance.

Good way to look at it. I am looking to reduce my hours as my buying shit is going down.

bigblackheinoustoe -...Have you ever seen an unhappy gardener?

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Just saying...

thestabiliser - Member
Subsistence farmers work 4-5 hours a day. The march for more has **** us all.

The Sapiens book isnt perfect but it is thought provoking.

I like the way it puts our present society into context of the 300,000 year history of our species rather than the last 2,000 which usually happens including in the thread.

When looked at over the longer time span we were hunter gatherers for 95% of that time. We must have been happy, we were definitely successful we wore clothes kept dogs had families and organised society, told stories.

Who knows what great dramas unfolded in the year 162,018bc ?

I think it more clearly makes the way we live now seem unusual, not normal and most of all optional.

Surely people have to "work" in order for the society we see around us to exist. Think of any service you expect to exist (food conveniently on supermarket shelf, money stored safely in a bank, nice shiny bike available, fast internet so this website works, roof over head), and they all involve people having jobs.

This....

I've some great friends but they have massively idealistic views...
"Grown your own food - forget shops"
"Why need money..do everything yourself or barter etc"

Yeah, there's 'hating the man'...but they forget the 'man' takes away our waste, pushes pooey water through filters to make it clean, cuts the hedges on the highways, fixes the roads...

I kind of get the idealism of growing your own food (if and when you can), but in reality, we need money because otherwise, no-one would do the shitty jobs, and how would you assess the 'barter value of one job compared to another.
What if i DON'T need my car serviced there and then, but the man from the garage has an illness that needs treating..what do I do - refuse to treat until i need something from hi,...or.. make him 'promise to give me soemthing in return, when I need it..' (i.e.. a bearer promise... MONEY!)

I think we need to reduce consumerism, but actually, in an advanced society, we do need money, work, different skills etc...

DrP

Quite right DrP. I mean I'm idealistic and all, but some people seem blissfully unaware of the need for money to exist. Money isn't the problem, our attitudes to it are.

I think we need to reduce consumerism, but actually, in an advanced society, we do need money, work, different skills etc..

+1

People complain about the service economy, but it's the only way we could continue to improve living standards without also increasing drain on natural resources. People go on about manufacturing, but how's that great for the environment>

Sit down with a spreadsheet

Or spend your working life doing a job that doesn't involve things like spreadsheets... 8)

While you have the spreadsheet out just work out what the cost of having a job is. That can be quite an eye opener.

you could camp in scotland near the coast, forage for seafood, hunt game etc, get water from streams/lochs etc.
I'd take a guess and say you would expend more calories than you'd take in if you tried this long term and you'd eventually starve to death.

I often wonder about this. I think if you were well equipped to start with and nobody was chasing you along you could survive doing this. Especially if you could plant up some tatties somewhere. All assuming you have the knowledge/skill and taste/open-mind to make do.

I doubt the issue is starving to death for lack of calories, but it might be scurvy or other nutritional illness.

I remember reading about this once after one of those alone in the wilderness/survive a year alone type series. There was that much to do in terms of building and maintaining camp, fetching water, setting traps, hunting for food, processing the food once you got it, repairing and maintaining kit, keeping firewood supply etc etc that it was pretty much hopeless doing it alone. Instead it was far better to do it as a small group, even with just two people as the overall work required remained pretty much the same to support one as it did two or three people, but the effort was shared.

Or spend your working life doing a job that doesn't involve things like spreadsheets...

Things like spreadsheets and spreadsheets themselves can be great fun you know.

seosamh77 - Member
Sit down with a spreadsheet, work out much money you need for the rest of you life, stop working when you hit that.

Basically, well unless you are on the breadline, work out your buying shit/work balance.

I had a bit of a revelation when I did this about 7 months ago. Since that time, I have had a much clearer idea of the balance and what I'm working for.

In my case, as part of a family of 4, the answer is that I can "retire" (aka achieving financial independence) just before I'm 50 - in 13 years' time.

That's going to be 17-19 years of life before I assume I will get the State Pension and revised public sector pension I'm a member of. I can decide to do what I want with that time; whether to work or not.

Obviously that means I'm saving a lot and forgoing various things now, including XTR-spec carbon wonderbikes. Many will roll out the "but it's all gone if you die early" argument, which is quite fair - but ignores that I will pass on my savings to my family if this happens, which I'd be happy knowing on my deathbed.

I just need to sit out the next 13 years and make sure my body is ready to do lots more MTB'ing in my 50s. 😆

Things like spreadsheets and spreadsheets themselves can be great fun you know.

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My plan is to work steadily now, get back some financial security then when I'm a really big cheese I'll go contracting.

I know a guy a bit older than me, he's one of a small pool pool of proper experts in a product that is fundamental to enterprise IT architecture, and he does work when it comes to him and relaxes the rest of the time. He drives a Porsche.

At the beginning of last month I was diagnosed with afib, it was actually pretty bad and I spent a couple of weeks hospitalised with the symptoms. While I was there and with the tests they did, they also discovered that my thyroid hormone was low (that explains why I can't shift the weight) and a my kidneys are not functioning fully (still more tests to be done on that).

So at 48 I am evaluating my life and thinking about asking my boss if I can go down to a 4 day week. I have only had a "good" job for the past 5 years, most of my life has been on relatively poor wages, and periods being unemployed. So I haven't been able to get on the property ladder or put much into a pension.

I will not be able to retire before the statutory retirement age. So now I am thinking should I potentially sacrifice a more comfortable retirement that I may never reach or be able enjoy in order to live a more fulfilled life now.

Everything I enjoy/love involves being active and if I don't have that then I don't know what the point of my life will be. Is there any point having years onto my life if there is no life in my years.

I know a guy a bit older than me, he's one of a small pool pool of proper experts in a product that is fundamental to enterprise IT architecture, and he does work when it comes to him and relaxes the rest of the time. He drives a Porsche.

I never seem to get those opportunities, maybe I am just not as good as I think I am. I am useless at selling myself and networking, I just get on with my job and do it well. I have spent to many years being the go to guy who solves the problems works hard but always gets past over by those with the gift of bullshitting.