I find myself very unhappy while coasting
+1
I've worked at a couple jobs where I was coasting most of the time. It makes me not engaged . . . which eventually makes me bored. There is a limit to the amount of internet surfing at work you can do in a day. Eventually you just get dissatisfied with everything as you quietly stagnate. It's hard to take pride in mediocrity.
Time really flies when I'm working hard on a problem. I look up and four hours have gone by, I feel satisfied that what I'm doing makes a difference, and I feel sharper.
+1
I still feel like the weird twist of "mustachianism" is that people spend large portions of their time in fields they aren't passionate about in order to make money they don't spend so that they can get their time back.... If you really value your future time why don't you value your current time by working a job that motivates you?
This is a fair comment, and it pops up a lot so I think it deserves a response because it denotes a bit of a blind spot despite its good intention. I don't mean this as a criticism; it is just that it has at times made me feel bad (why can't I figure this out?), so I wanted to reflect on it a little bit for my own benefit and perhaps to that of others.
The short answer is circumstances vary. I’ll go through my “case” as an example.
I was on an intellectually stimulating professional track that barely paid me subsistence wages while I was a foreign student in the US, with a view towards academia (Philosophy, so you can imagine the job prospects there). In progress to that career, I learned that one could become a philosopher of law, and that going to law school would enhance prospects in the always dismal market for professional philosophers. Off to law school goes Mr. Smarty-Pants.
I get to law school and learn that everyone is above average, which makes me less of Mr. Smarty-Pants. Philosophy of Law was looking unlikely, and then I learned how much lawyers make. I am beginning to realize that the stuff is dull, but faced with a tight academic market and a prospective legal market where firms were courting me and my colleagues, off to become a lawyer I go. The dot com bust intervened, but I was still able to salvage a decent job as a competent, but not stellar lawyer.
Other than for the very top of the profession and the people who love the minutia, law is very repetitive. But for do or die issues that get farmed out to those who bill in the neighborhood of $1000 an hour (often more), the day to day requires a lot of cutting and pasting and looking up mind-numbing bits of information and not making any mistakes (no typos, no ambiguous sentences, no documents overlooked).
Why did I do it? Because for the first time in my life I am making decent money and my visa is tied to this gig. But I’m unhappy.
I tried to escape a couple of years in, and after 2 years trying to be an entrepreneur (less of this) and caring for aging parents (more of this) in my shithole home country, I decided to get back to law and save myself from returning to poverty. This one burned, but I learned a valuable lesson. My employer takes me back, and ships me to the other side of the world. Cool with me, I like to see new places, and maybe law won’t be as bad.
Why did I do it? Because I failed spectacularly at something else and need to regroup.
Having been burned before, I bite the bullet, save a bit, and 4 years later I have 2 houses I rent on AirBnB under my belt. I decide to take advantage of my experience in the place where they are, and take a leave of absence from work to try my hand at fitness as a potential escape from law. My due diligence shows me that the plan would not work, and that fitness people work much longer hours than I do for a lot less and still have to schmooze and sell snake oil. Not for me, but I have a grand old time for the rest of my leave. Back to the grind.
Why did I do it? I don’t want to leave a sure thing for speculation given that I am not sure about what alternative would make me happy.
Why not double down on AirBnB? Because I cannot live in the country where the houses are for longer than 180 days a year, and my own country is unstable so investing there would have been bad.
This made me realize that I don’t really know what I want, so I start saving again to see if I can come up with a different escape. A year later, I found MMM. Plowed my savings into one of the mortgages (balloon loan, needed to be paid off or refinanced and the latter would have been hard). Rationalize my spending (wasn’t bad before, but I also did not think twice about where it all went), and save save save. One of the houses sold, so I am again sitting on some cash which I will re-invest early next year. I could go part time now, but I don’t because I want to preserve a work relationship in a good firm (basically work 9 to 5- that is incredibly rare in law). By mid next year, I could probably FIRE.
Will I do it? No, but I will take another leave and then come back.
Why keep doing this if I dislike it? Because in a couple more years I will have permanent residency in a place where health care is virtually free and good enough, unlike my own shithole home country. Mustachian retirement is my alternative for a job that does not fulfill me.
So, here is the list of reasons (mine) why someone may continue in a job they dislike:
• Financial security
• Previous failure
• Uncertain or unknown alternative options/desires
• Immigration considerations
• Healthcare
• Being close enough to the goal to make the grind manageable with some creativity
I want to pursue my own unicorn, but right now it makes sense to buckle down and push through the discomfort. A good shrink helps.