This is definitely off-topic and relatively long, for which I apologise
in advance, but since it might be useful and I can speak about it from
experience, I will ...
I highly recommend retirement, most of all because it frees your mind;
it also frees your time, but that will get eaten up by the million&one
things that you will find out that you want to do.
A couple of years ago, I retired early because I could, not because I'm
wealthy but because I realised that I possessed "enough" to survive
without a job: "enough" being a complex & subjective set of factors.
I highly recommend saving huge lumps of your income, living frugally in
order to get to that point ASAP and doing the above calculation for
yourself sooner rather than later, iterating every time you decide that
you hate going to work.
Until I contemplated retirement I didn't truly realise how much of my
intellectual+emotional bandwidth as well as my chronological bandwidth
was eaten up by the "day job".
I am well aware that there may be very clever people on this list who
can do a job and do lots of other things without messing their brains
up, but I realised, too late, that my brain has been burned by too much
nonsense. If you've ever worked on lots of "mainstream" software you
may understand what I mean.
(TBH extreme abuse of so-called "recreational" drugs in my youth
probably played a part as well).
Sadly, all those years working on things I didn't like have soured my
brain to the point where I gradually moved away from liking software to
tolerating it.
I now regard myself as merely a user of software: I don't have the
intellectual/emotional energy to work on plan9 and other nice things;
I stay on this mailing list for intellectual pleasure (a true "9fan")
and look back nostalgically at the time when I organised the 1st plan9
workshop in a room in London :'(.
My pleasures are now: DIY, gardening, volunteering at repair cafés and
other such stuff. I don't regret my life, I'm happy, but if I'd taken
more care of my brain, I might have been happy *and* be typing this on
plan9 instead of Linux.
One caveat is that: if you have been working all your life, retirement
may seem strange: you have to manage all your own time; some people
tolerate it better than others: I am still adjusting to it after more
than a year and a half.
So maybe a good TL;DR would be: stay away from the ugly software as much
as you can and retire ASAP.
Dave.
On 28/03/2025 17:55, Brian L. Stuart wrote:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2025 at 07:47:02AM -0700, ron minnich wrote:
Off to my day job :-)
Ron,
I've heard rumors (perhaps apocryphal) that there exists
a state of being where there is no "day job" and you can
spend all your time on things that are more intellectually
satisfying than any suit could ever appreciate. I think
they call it "retirement." Of course, that may be as mythical
as "vacation." But I've got a basement full of unstarted
and half-finished projects that are calling out for me
find a path to this nirvana.
BLS
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