Author Topic: Time millionaires: meet the people pursuing the pleasure of leisure  (Read 3089 times)

Alchemisst

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It is often a struggle just to stay afloat. But if you had enough money, would you pursue more of it – or should time now be our greatest aspiration?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/12/time-millionaires-meet-the-people-pursuing-the-pleasure-of-leisure

LetsRetireYoung

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Re: Time millionaires: meet the people pursuing the pleasure of leisure
« Reply #1 on: November 14, 2021, 08:54:31 PM »
What an interesting term. :) I've thought of that concept on my own, too, but never heard it called that before.

Good article. This particular bit is just heart-breakingly sad:
Quote
His mother didn’t bother inviting him to her 50th birthday, because she knew he would be busy. “She was probably right,” he says. “I wouldn’t have been able to get the time off.”

A lot of modern work can be done well in far less than 40 hours a week, but because there's tremendous bureaucratic inertia (coming also from the allegedly smart managers with their fancy MBAs), here we are, with people forced to be on the clock at least 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, even though realistically they're done with everything much, much sooner.

I hope that rigorous and outdated concept will change someday: maybe the Great Resignation will help, but I don't know that it will.

Personally, I declared lean-FIRE at 34 and walked away from a lot of opportunities. I was quite good at my job - in fact, I only really worked about 10 hours a week. :P If I stayed on for another 5-10 years, I would've become a multimillionaire... At the same time, though, I would've missed out on 5-10 optimal years of enjoying life (I won't stay healthy forever), I would've wrecked my health due to the work stress, and I would've missed out on all the sunsets, or hobbies, or lounging around.

So instead, I walked away from everything, even though my net worth is quite a bit lower than a million. (My frugality gives even the r/leanFIRE community nightmares hahaha) I did that because I can't buy back time, and I'd rather live frugally but get 10 extra healthy years - instead of having more spending money but a lot more stress and 10 less years. For me, this equation makes perfect sense. For people with other value systems, it might not. I just hope that we as a society will be able to have more discourse on this.

And before I forget, try to get your hands on "The tale of the man too lazy to fail" - it's a short story in Heinlein's novel "Time enough for love." It deals with this exact concept, with the guy who pursued "constructive laziness" as his life mission. :)

Metalcat

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Re: Time millionaires: meet the people pursuing the pleasure of leisure
« Reply #2 on: November 15, 2021, 05:56:28 AM »
It is often a struggle just to stay afloat. But if you had enough money, would you pursue more of it – or should time now be our greatest aspiration?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/12/time-millionaires-meet-the-people-pursuing-the-pleasure-of-leisure

Well, this being a FIRE forum, I would imagine that a lot of people here are not struggling to stay afloat, and have a very high value of free time.

That said, for some of us, MMM included, the line between leisure and work is very blurry. I personally won't touch work I don't want to do with a ten foot pole, but some of my favourite hobbies are work.

"Work" encompasses an enormous range of possibilities.

boarder42

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Re: Time millionaires: meet the people pursuing the pleasure of leisure
« Reply #3 on: November 15, 2021, 06:29:28 AM »
It is often a struggle just to stay afloat. But if you had enough money, would you pursue more of it – or should time now be our greatest aspiration?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/oct/12/time-millionaires-meet-the-people-pursuing-the-pleasure-of-leisure

Well, this being a FIRE forum, I would imagine that a lot of people here are not struggling to stay afloat, and have a very high value of free time.

That said, for some of us, MMM included, the line between leisure and work is very blurry. I personally won't touch work I don't want to do with a ten foot pole, but some of my favourite hobbies are work.

"Work" encompasses an enormous range of possibilities.

Work - activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result.

we all will work the rest of our lives by definition.  This is just buying the freedom to choose what that mental or physical effort goes to without respect to the dollars that come back.  A FIREee should in theory have a much more fulfilling life than the avg person b/c they get to focus on the purpose or results of the work not the monetary compensation placed on that work by someone else.  Most people focus on the results as the money their whole lives and spend all that money.  On the flipside more people on the path to FI put a large emphasis on the monetary side so the hardest part to break would be the tie to money for work and why would i leave this high paying job its so easy.  Well money doesn't buy happiness it can however buy you time freedom and exercising that freedom once you've made your number is the biggest step any one of us can take towards making our own lives better and probably the world better to at the same time.