Dave, over the last century a rapidly increasing number of jobs that keep peoples' noses on their desks and away from the truly beneficial state you describe are make-work jobs. People fear algorithms replacing meaningful work in the future without realizing that much of it has already happened, and so various mandates and commercial pressures yield a harvest of fake jobs.

I'm working with a group that is going to try to get public acknowledgement of this naked emperor. We want to replace fake jobs with mechanisms that facilitate work that is both compensated and fully driven by individual initiative, with the notion of an assigned "job description" made obsolete.


On 4/1/25 08:32, Dave Lukes via 9fans wrote:
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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