@Metalcat
I think about my professional friends in major cities who live in suburbs and work demanding full time jobs. They're working 60ish hours a week plus 45-90 minute heavy traffic commutes each way. Plus they have kids with schedules.
That was us for a long time. It led to burnout. That is what drove the pursuit of FIRE and did in 2019. Fortunately or unfortunately I went back to work last November as mentioned elsewhere on this site and I can confirm the commute is awful - an hour+ each way and just drains me leaving me with no motivation or energy to do anything else, not to mention the 9 hours in the office in-between said commute. Working from home on Fridays helps though I am pretty unproductive those days from being drained. It was supposed to be more flexible than it has turned out to be.
Committing 11+ hours a day (not including getting ready for work) is too much time of my life on top of all the other demands (kids stuff mostly). All of this makes me realize that "Not needing the job" doesn't make the job more tolerable/enjoyable. Maybe it would be different if there was some sort of purpose feom the job other than helping rich people get richer.....but then if that were the case I probably wouldn't have made the money in the last year to satisfy what I needed it to.
It served its purpose and once bonus hits I will be out again.
Good luck with return to work and bc it is something you pursued, invested a lot of time in, and find purpose in it I hope it brings you a lot of satisfaction (and pay).
Thank you!
Yeah, it's all work from home, extremely meaningful and satisfying work, and pays over $100/hr and I can work as much or as little as I want with full autonomy and control over my schedule.
When I decided to retrain and go back to work, I spent 2 years figuring out exactly what I wanted.
That's terrific.
Serious question....how does that work exactly? I don't want to do, nor am I interested in, anything.....really, it's more of I am a jack of all trades /float like a butterfly where the wind take me kind of person. I fell into my career not out of interest but it fit my natural or innate personality and skill set and was the easiest path to $$$$ but at my core dabbling in a bunch of things is my jam.
How does one find what they want?
Also curious about this as I fell into all my jobs. Applying to jobs has always felt like throwing darts to me, hoping that I'll hit the bullseye ,but never knowing until I dive in to it.
I'm...not quite sure how to answer this question...
It's like figuring out any complex question, unfortunately most people do what their parents tell them is a good idea, but most people's parents have no idea.
My parents were incredibly knowledgeable about careers, skills, and job markets. My mother ran a large national staffing agency and I worked for her for awhile, so I learned A LOT about the basics of job markets, supply and demand of skills, and what different jobs and industries were like and how talent moves through them.
I then used that foundational knowledge while I was in school to research and understand various careers and jobs. In undergrad I was trying to figure out what grad programs to apply to and probably invested hundreds of hours into researching various careers.
I researched *everything*. I wanted to know career trajectories, skills that were most in demand, skills that were more rare, niche markets within the field, what the day to day of the job is like, what the path to promotion is like and what the pain points are along the way, what the management culture tends to be like, whether it's a high or low barrier to entry career, what does the success distribution look like, etc, etc. All just basic career info that can be found with enough research and networking.
I would connect with people in every field I had even remote interest in and ask them a bunch of questions including a classic interview question: what does a great day at work look like and what does a horrible day at work look like. People generally like to be helpful and talk about their own careers, so it's not hard to get a ton of information out of them. Plus networking is the best way into jobs.
By the time I figured out what I wanted to do the first time around, I had a pretty robust network and a pile of job offers.
So when I retired I basically did the exact same thing. I just explored literally every possible job option that was compatible with my physical limitations. Even then, there were still a TON of options. I settled on a career path that had actually been my original Plan B and just happened to be very disability-friendly.
Then the whole process started again. There's the research needed to decide what career to pursue, but then there's all the research to figure out *how* to pursue that career. Once I got in to the program I wanted, then I started on connecting with professionals in the field and figuring out career trajectory. I connected with dozens of successful professionals and asked them a ton of questions about their experience, what their good and bad days look like and what advice they would give themselves at my stage of the game. This helped me figure out what areas are probably best for me to focus on and what early career decisions will most impact my trajectory, etc, etc. Within a few months of starting school, I had a very solid sense of the market, the role of independent businesses vs corporate, the market saturation, the rare skills that were becoming more valuable, the different business models and their pros and cons.
I've almost never mass applied for jobs and never gone into a job without having a solid understanding of the industry and how people move through it, so I've always had a strategy as to how to position myself within the field from day 1,.which I just build upon as I continue networking and researching along the way.
My career is always something I engineer.
