Do I REALLY have to deal with this crap for another 10 - 15 years?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

At my current job, in a small business, I manage department [a], while my colleague manages department [b]; we both report directly to the owner, and are hierarchical equals (if you will). Both she and I are ‘refugees’ from our previous careers, in that we both held more senior positions in bigger and more prestigious organisations, but downsized in terms of position, prestige and responsibility (and salary) for mostly personal reasons (hers was cancer, mine mental health). So, we are both hugely overqualified for the positions we hold (in fact, both she and I could do each other’s jobs with ease - we both used to manage people who did both our current jobs) - we’re also very good at what we do (as you might imagine), and the owner is quite candid about how lucky he is to have us. You might say that we have both downsized our ambitions, in a pragmatic and self-preservatory vein.

For me, it has mostly worked. I am literally earning half what I was a couple of years ago, but I am more than twice as happy and well-adjusted. I have no problem leaving work at 5pm with a job half-finished, or not-finished-as-well-I-could-finish-it-if-I-tried-harder, I don’t agonise about work on the weekends, and don’t sweat it when things go badly (which I really used to do). On the whole, my work-life balance is way better than it used to be, and I am palpably happier than I was (as verified by people who knew me then and know me now).

For her, not so much. She still works on the weekends (I am cc-d in to emails that she sends late on Sunday nights - there are lots), and regularly has temper tantrums and mini-breakdowns because things aren’t perfect. She has carried her old ‘senior management’ mentality on to her new middle-management role, and is applying the same metrics and standards from the former to the latter, with predictably catastrophic results. In short, she is just as stressed as she was pre-diagnosis, and to cap it all she’s being paid less (and, I suspect, feels some sense of humiliation in terms of being powerless with regard to operational concerns which previously would have been considered beneath her).

(and lest it appear that my laissez-faire attitude is contributing to her stress - that’s not how it works in our context; she only needs me to do 20% of my job in order to be able to do 100% of hers and vice-versa)

I don’t say this with any spirit of smugness; I like my colleague a lot and we get on very well (and we work well together) - I regularly [jokingly] tell her off for taking things too seriously, but behind this banter I’m actually concerned about her. She’s got the worst possible end of the deal - all the stress of a high-end job with none of the reward - and this could in quite real terms kill her.

The moral of this convoluted story - and relevance to the OP - is that downsizing your career aspirations can work, but only if you do it right.

22

I don’t want to travel in my job and it wouldn’t make any sense anyway. Moving to a different office would mean selling the house and Tom_Scud having to find a new job in a field in which jobs are not plentiful. (And I don’t see the point, anyway.) I already work 100% remotely, which is a huge help because it means I can shut my eyes at lunch for half an hour. I seriously don’t know whether I would be able to function if I couldn’t do that. Plus my boss is a decent human being, which is definitely not a given.

If I get a change of scenery, I want it to be for fun, not for work.

23

I suppose the main question is how wedded you are to the paycheck.

It’s great to give up 6 figures to be a volunteer at a pet shelter. As long as you didn’t need the 6 figures to eat. If you need the money and switch to cat sheltering, real soon you have bankruptcy to add to your stresses. Don’t do that.

If you / hubs can rejigger your collective lifestyle in a manner akin to what the FIRE people preach, you may find that lesser expenses plus retired, or cat shelter volunteer, or some other zero stress 30 hour a week job recovers your sanity without breaking your (revised) bank.

Start there. How wedded are you to the idea that “I’m a [whatever]”? Next, hHow wedded are you to the paycheck associated with “I’m a `[whatever]”? The more those answers are “I’m not”, the bigger move you can make now.

And if “I’m not” is not your answer, stop and think hard about whether you want to change that, or double down on your current life, warts and all. If the latter, make your peace. Nothing is more corrosive to a psyche than feeling trapped now by earlier decisions that are seen as unchangeable now.

24

By “career” I mean collectively the paid work you do throughout your life.

And when I say a person is often defined by their career, that does not necessarily mean they spend their life as a corporate ladder climber. I just think you can’t do something over and over again for long periods of time without it becoming a part of who you are (or you becoming a part of what it is).

Whatever work you do, chances are you had to choose it for one reason or another. And presumably you didn’t hate doing it enough to go do something else.

25

What are “FIRE people”?

I think I would find a “zero stress 30 hour a week job” very stressful. I like making a lot of money, working with smart people, and solving interesting problems.

I don’t love every aspect of my job all the time, obviously. But I’m 100% when I want to be, I have a pretty good client, good relationships with my coworkers and corporate leadership. What stresses me out is circumstances might cause that to change I might find myself having to take a client or new job in a shittier situation. Which is not so much stress about my current job as it is stress about what a future job might look like.

26

Live cheap, save and invest like mad, quit working while young, then live an interesting still-cheapish but drudge-free life while you’re still young enough to enjoy it.

My suggestion was that although our OP is starting later, a FIRE-like approach to expense and expectation management might well “buy her out” of the need to work at all. Or at least “buy her out” of working a very high stress job.

Lots of helper positions in business (unlike your do-er position) are very high stress for very little incremental reward. Those folks exist to be shat upon and be the shock absorber between actual revenue and the ownerships’ desire for profits / dividends. Not much upside (extrinsic reward) being in that layer of the pyramid. Often little job satisfaction (intrinsic reward) either.

You and I both have large intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for our work. That is pretty darn rare, and tends to color our outlook when talking to folks not so fortunate.

It took us both a lot of diligent sustained hard work to get there and stay there. But there’s also a large element of luck; who you picked as parents, what your innate talents are, how they were or weren’t nurtured, etc. Plus the luck of the draw on jobs, business changes, etc. Which as you say you’ve had before and will have again. As have I.

Winning this game takes skillful play; no doubt about that. But it also takes being dealt a decent hand and continuing to draw decent cards along the way.

27

In my career, I suppose I have been in a similar situation a couple of times. In both cases, it was actually taking steps to prepare that ultimately helped me. Sometimes things happen beyond our control and we feel helpless, but taking actions to get you to a better place gives you some control back.

My first situation was a possible contracting out of my position (actually, the entire division of about 300 employees). I experienced anxiety attacks at 2 am thinking about this. Know what you can do at 2 am to help? Nothing, that’s what. But I then started a serious search for another job, and just doing that dropped the stress level. When I actually took a new job, I slept like a baby.

The second time was not near as bad, but there was going to be a furlough at work (but not a useful furlough that I could use as a real break, but a don’t work every other Friday for ten pay periods furlough. Thanks, Congress). I wanted to know how this would affect my pay, so I got to work with a spreadsheet to figure it out. That spreadsheet eventually morphed into the spreadsheet I used to figure out retirement (Bonus, I did it at work because in my opinion it was work related). It turned out that I started this spreadsheet 10 years before I actually retired. By the time I retired I had a high confidence level due to that spreadsheet.

I’m not suggesting that Eva Luna change jobs. But if she hasn’t started planning for retirement yet, then perhaps she should. It’s constructive to start seeing how your retirement might look, and it may be a small distraction from work to work on your plan. But the best part is to know that “Hey, I am actually doing something here”. Gives you some control. And it will give some clue as to if 10 - 15 years is really needed or not. It may turn out to be less.

28

My prior post should have read “I’m 100% REMOTE when I want to be,”

I don’t know about all that. I get paid well, have some degree of autonomy, and when times are good there are a few perks. But being what is effectively an “IT project manager for hire” is in many ways the ultimate bullshit helper job.

29

I have been saving for retirement since my first job. Right now we are on track to be in pretty good shape (similar income to what we have now, plus a paid-off house) if we retire at a traditional age. However the big retirement question mark is medical expenses, plus people in my family tend to live well into their 90s. It would be nice if the US had a national healthcare system where people aren’t on the hook for potentially unlimited medical expenditures, but of course we aren’t and we can’t plan on that happening. If we retire outside the US somewhere cheaper, we could do it earlier, but that has down sides, too. Spain is alluring and might actually be realistic.