Is Retiring Early Really a Good Life Goal?
Now as it had ever been, there are many advertisements of get-rich-quick schemes, on TV, on shady websites, and as inline ads for social media. Along with the texts claiming Mr. xxx had made $yyy in the course of just few years, many of these unbelievable figures also add in that the new wealth allowed Mr. xxx to retire in his 30s or 40s. Without saying so explicitly, the ads assume that logically, what someone who earned a massive quantity would do is to immediately retire, so that s/he does not have to slave for some heartless employer or work hard for him/herself anymore.
The notion of retiring early does sound appealing when one first hears of it. The target audience of the get-rich-quick schemes, after all, is probably people who work jobs they hate and feel frustrated by the slow pace their savings are accumulating even though they work so hard in conditions they consider so unpleasant. For these people, perhaps the very notion of having to work for money has become so imbued with negativity that they will do anything to not have to do it ever again. Hence the temptations of get-rich-quick scheme. Appealing to their frustrations must be effective for the scheme creators.
But it is worthwhile to take a step back and really think about just how the average person spends time. During the waking hours, most people generally spend more than half of the time doing something related to work (whether it be actually spending time at the workplace or spending time commuting to it), while recreational activities are often limited to the less productive part of the day and week. One take up and develop hobbies that fit that schedule and the level of energy available at those less productive times. They constitute main activities that one will undertake when one is not working.
A person might argue that that if s/he is not working, s/he can spend as much time as s/he wants on activities that s/he really wants to do (i.e. hobbies). But the reality is that a person's hobby simply does not come from nothing. It is an extension of a person's routine, cultivated after years of self-understanding of how this particular person live and play in particular ways. And work, perhaps even more so than any hobby, is the biggest portion of that routine. To suddenly take out the work component then, would mean the hobbies, the things the person really enjoys doing, also becomes different, sometimes in not so enjoyable ways.
To put another way, if the work part of a person's daily routine is completely removed all the sudden, the hobbies from before may not only not fill in the void left behind by work, but also may not be kept up at all anymore because they no longer seem so enjoyable when work no longer needs to be done. A good example is the idea of drinking after work as a hobby for many Japanese salarymen. The drinking can take place because all the coworkers are in the same place before (at the workplace) so can be easily congregated, and they can complain about work as a "common language" during drinking.
For these people, if the workplace is no longer there, then they would see neither the need to really meet up (since it would be less convenient to get together frequently) nor will they have anything to really talk about (since they never explored any personal connections aside from work-related ones). The hobby will quickly fall apart and discontinue despite everyone have more time to partake in it. To fill in their now abundant free time, people will then have to find new hobbies, ones that can take up all of the dozen or more waking hours a person has each day, and be enjoyable enough to carry on day after day.
Many would dismiss finding new hobbies as easy. After all, a non-working person not worried about money have all the time in the world to figure it out. But the reality is that the world is not tailored for people who play all the time. Businesses offering recreational activities operate with the assumption that most of their traffic does not come from timeframes when people are in the office. And a person who is partaking in some hobby day in and day out for many hours during the day would certainly get plenty of weird looks, and possibly even ridicule from behind the back, ostracized for setting a bad example for "lack of diligence."
All this is not even mentioning just how one defines the value of life. Is "creating value for society" not something that should be part of consideration for living a productive life? While spending money on hobbies would certainly create value for society, the action is very passive in that it has little potential to lead to innovations, new ideas and ways of doing things that enable human progress. Only productive work, however unpleasant they may be, have potential of achieving those innovations. It is fascinating if one is willing to give up all that passion just for hobbies.
The notion of retiring early does sound appealing when one first hears of it. The target audience of the get-rich-quick schemes, after all, is probably people who work jobs they hate and feel frustrated by the slow pace their savings are accumulating even though they work so hard in conditions they consider so unpleasant. For these people, perhaps the very notion of having to work for money has become so imbued with negativity that they will do anything to not have to do it ever again. Hence the temptations of get-rich-quick scheme. Appealing to their frustrations must be effective for the scheme creators.
But it is worthwhile to take a step back and really think about just how the average person spends time. During the waking hours, most people generally spend more than half of the time doing something related to work (whether it be actually spending time at the workplace or spending time commuting to it), while recreational activities are often limited to the less productive part of the day and week. One take up and develop hobbies that fit that schedule and the level of energy available at those less productive times. They constitute main activities that one will undertake when one is not working.
A person might argue that that if s/he is not working, s/he can spend as much time as s/he wants on activities that s/he really wants to do (i.e. hobbies). But the reality is that a person's hobby simply does not come from nothing. It is an extension of a person's routine, cultivated after years of self-understanding of how this particular person live and play in particular ways. And work, perhaps even more so than any hobby, is the biggest portion of that routine. To suddenly take out the work component then, would mean the hobbies, the things the person really enjoys doing, also becomes different, sometimes in not so enjoyable ways.
To put another way, if the work part of a person's daily routine is completely removed all the sudden, the hobbies from before may not only not fill in the void left behind by work, but also may not be kept up at all anymore because they no longer seem so enjoyable when work no longer needs to be done. A good example is the idea of drinking after work as a hobby for many Japanese salarymen. The drinking can take place because all the coworkers are in the same place before (at the workplace) so can be easily congregated, and they can complain about work as a "common language" during drinking.
For these people, if the workplace is no longer there, then they would see neither the need to really meet up (since it would be less convenient to get together frequently) nor will they have anything to really talk about (since they never explored any personal connections aside from work-related ones). The hobby will quickly fall apart and discontinue despite everyone have more time to partake in it. To fill in their now abundant free time, people will then have to find new hobbies, ones that can take up all of the dozen or more waking hours a person has each day, and be enjoyable enough to carry on day after day.
Many would dismiss finding new hobbies as easy. After all, a non-working person not worried about money have all the time in the world to figure it out. But the reality is that the world is not tailored for people who play all the time. Businesses offering recreational activities operate with the assumption that most of their traffic does not come from timeframes when people are in the office. And a person who is partaking in some hobby day in and day out for many hours during the day would certainly get plenty of weird looks, and possibly even ridicule from behind the back, ostracized for setting a bad example for "lack of diligence."
All this is not even mentioning just how one defines the value of life. Is "creating value for society" not something that should be part of consideration for living a productive life? While spending money on hobbies would certainly create value for society, the action is very passive in that it has little potential to lead to innovations, new ideas and ways of doing things that enable human progress. Only productive work, however unpleasant they may be, have potential of achieving those innovations. It is fascinating if one is willing to give up all that passion just for hobbies.
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