Is there a way to live without working?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Man, so often I feel like the OP. But, I don’t mind working - I just want a job I like a little more. (Something more creative, run by people that are competent.)

I often say that I want a Sugar Daddy. Some nice guy that will dote on me and support me. But I don’t really want to be “supported” (as in I sleep in and drift about, doing nothing). I want to have time to do my pottery (and then sell it in galleries), a little web design on the side (nothing too high-end, it’s just a hobby) and paint portraits of people. I could make money at all of these things eventually, but right now it’s too risky to chuck a stable job and make a stab at all these things.

Sigh. Carry on. I can totally sympathise with the OP at times, I must say.

42

Shagnasty: Thank you for posting that response to Twiddle. If you hadn’t, I would have. My recent ex-wife is a college professor, and she worked damn hard to get where she is (just got tenure last year). Even though your rebuttal was excellent, there are a couple of points I still have to make.

  1. College professors do not get “summers off”. Even if they’re not teaching summer classes (which a lot of them are), they’re writing lectures for new classes, refining lectures for existing classes, going to conferences, writing journal articles, doing research (which often involves travel to archives around the world), writing books, and a host of other things (the ex is also the book review editor for a major journal, so she has duties in that direction as well). One of the most persistent myths about professors (and primary/secondary teachers as well) is that they get summers off. It ain’t so, folks.

  2. 4 or 5 classes a semester is a hellishly huge number. Most people teach 2 to 3. Every class that you teach requires 4 months of lectures to be written, exams to be created, syllabi to be constructed, not to mention all the grading (most people don’t get graders at a lot of places). If you’re teaching 4 or 5 classes a semester, you’re going to be so busy you won’t have a single spare minute for anything even resembling a social life.

So to sum up, Arcite, disregard Twiddle’s advice; college professor is no kind of career for a person who doesn’t really like to work, and work hard. To be fair, it used to be different…about 40 years ago. Nowadays, however, there are so many Ph.D.'s out there that competition is fierce, and only the hardest-working survive.

43

This is just to say that I can totally sympathise with the OP. I think that I’d be really happy being a housewife, ya know, except for the “wife” part. It’d be really great if I could just hang around the house in the morning, garden in the afternoon, and paint and write all night. If I could just live my life for myself, by myself, I would be the happiest damn person in the world.

Anyway, have you considered being a caretaker? It’s something I’m thinking about.

44

Re: the disability route. Take it from me, it’s no bed of roses. Your income is small and fixed, and you have to endure wisecracks from people about how you “found a way to live off the government.” If I could work, I would.

45

One of my friends has made an incredibly successful, workless living as a drug dealer who recieves disability and is supported by his hard-working scientist fiancee. He has approximately 398 mental illnesses - really, I know he is manic depressive/bipolar, agoraphobic, claustrophobic, and a few more things. He takes a shitload of pills everyday for his problems and sees his therapist four times a week. He made a great living while he was a student because he sold drugs and held a real job. But things got to be too much (so many people, mood swings, etc) that he quit his job, dropped out of school, and met his future fiancee, with whom he moved in after only about three months. He kept selling pot, but because of his problems he smoked a lot more of it than he should and didn’t make much of a profit.

So she’s supporting him for a while, he’s making enough selling pot, and then his therapist pushes his paperwork through disability. Now he recieves like $1500 a month to sit at home, deal drugs, and live off his woman. He cut back his drug-use a lot so he’s making an incredible profit (although he really does smoke too much of it still). She works for Hopkins and makes a serious amount of money doing research (like $60 grand a year).

They spent a week in Amsterdam as a pre-honeymoon; he bought her a brand new Jetta; he is paying for her graduate school in Boston and they made a downpayment on a condo there; they are having a small wedding but honeymooning in Italy for a month before school starts and they move.

I would be jealous except for his mental problems. If I could spend my days with a spouse who worships and supports me, a job that requires occassionally dealing with good friends - maybe once a day - but also allows me the freedom to sit in a drug-induced stupor all day long, and a life that requires minimal contact with the outside world, I would without a doubt. However, he’s about as unhappy as a person can be, so I wouldn’t want to have the burden of his psychosis.

46

The trick is in finding a job where you won’t be constantly be asking yourself “would I be happier doing something else?” Problem - usually your dream job isn’t feasible (bikini inspector) or you just can’t find a way in (I’d like to find out how to be a professional foley artist - but nobody’s hiring or training!).

However, your basic question (as already pointed out by Lumpy) is asking how you can live forever off the sweat of other’s brows. You aren’t going to find too many people willing to help you there.

My best bet would be to work on making a time machine, then gather a lot of pre-dated currency and give it to myself in the past. But if I did that, I wouldn’t work on making a time machine, and so on… But in that infinite loop, at least half of the BraheSilvers created in the parallel universe offshoots will be quite happy. The others will have given their life savings over to a young punkass version of themselves. I hope I don’t eventually fall into the latter category. :wink:

47

My cousins Mother does it all the time, Its called welfare. She has been on welfare as long as I have known her, i thought it was supposed to cut off?

48

Fellow music school/liberal arts (I have a degree in both!) grad who earns a good living in spite of himself here.

All I can think of is find a girlfriend from a wealthy family. I knew a guy who did that, they got married, neither of them have to work if they don’t want to.

My problem with not working at all is I have a tendency to feel somewhat inadequate if I’m spending money I didn’t work for. I’ve been on unemployment and have lived off my girlfriend (now wife) while on a 6 month break/job search and while the hours were good and I was able to do what I wanted (within a strict budget), in the end I feel better as a working stiff.

At this point I’ve achieved a decent balance between putting in a respectable 40hrs/week at a well-paying job that doesn’t suck the life out of me and having enough money, time, and energy to do what I please. Considering the amount of effort I put into it (I kind of stumbled onto it and learned as I went along), I consider myself very lucky.

49

12 years have passed.

What happened Arcite?

50

Some ideas:

[ol]
[li]Find an insecure, but non-violent SO/spouse - Basically live with them while they go to work and you stay at home. Unless you are a complete slob or the sexual interactions are poor, many will keep you around simply for fear of dying alone[/li][li]If you are a male, live with a doting female relative - Unlike a male relative, a female relative will probably not practice “tough love” and if you don’t overly abuse the relationship, you should be able to live without working for many years. Unfortunately, I have found that female relatives are not to do this as effectively as male relatives, so if you are female you may be out of luck. Also male relatives will not ususally tolerate non-working family members, so if you don’t have a female relative to sponge off of , this probably won’t won’t work, either.[/li][li]Technically, don’t be “homeless”, but simply don’t work - If you can get a hold of a few thousand dollars, buy a lot in a rural area ( there are some areas of the US where land can be purchased for as little as $500 per acre) and locate a small outbuilding and have it relocated to the site. Live in the outbuilding and travel around the arrea looking for cash handouts and free food. You will be slightly above teh traditional homeless person (you’ll be viewed as a hermit or a recluse) and you should be able to bum enough money to pay the taxes on the property each year and enough to buy some extra food or water. Use public facilities for sanitation and get government assistance for health care.[/li][li]Travel to a boom town - This is a town which for reasons of resources or industry is currently growing vastly beyond its former size. Become a professional “hanger-on”, travel from party to party and bar to bar. If you have a winning personality and you are relatively honest, you’ll find numerous people who will support you with food, drink,drugs and a place to stay. This can last for months or even years if you don’t wear out your welcome. Sex with your “sponsors” is optional.[/li][/ol]

51

Yeah but all of that require some kind of action, some basic planning, something. All I want is to be completely free of that. To have to worry about absolutely nothing.

Just like when you were a kid.

52

I know this is a zombie thread, but I figured I’d add to Shagnasty’s reply back in 2002.

Anyone who thinks the life of a college or university professor is not that taxing should talk to some people in the field first. I think it may have been that way back in the early post-WWII era, when the world of higher education was expanding fast, first to take all those GI bill students, and then the Baby Boomers, at a time when the previous generations through 1945 hadn’t produced many PhDs, so it was a good job market if you had one.

But now it’s quite the other way around. There’s an incredible glut of people with doctorates in pretty much every field (including math, where I’ve got mine) and universities have figured out that they can improve their bottom line by farming out a lot of the teaching load to adjunct professors - part-timers who get paid a couple thousand dollars per course, with no benefits. This reduces the number of tenured and tenure-track professors they need, which increases the number of hoops they can get their full-time faculty to jump through just to stay employed. And of course being an adjunct totally sucks unless you’ve got another career or a spouse that’s really supporting you, because teaching enough courses to make a passable living off of at the piece-work rates they pay adjuncts is too exhausting to even think about.

In Bull Durham, Crash Davis (Costner) asks Annie Savoy (Sarandon) what she does for a living, and she replies that she’s a part-time professor at a community college. My wife and I always laugh at that one: even in 1988, that was the equivalent of “I can magically live on almost no money at all.”

And of course, that’s after you get your doctorate. Of all the (metaphorical) mountains I’ve climbed in my life, getting my Ph.D. was the hardest. There’s not enough money in the world to get me to do that a second time.

53

I think everyone has at least days when they hate work. I have entire weeks sometimes when I have to force myself to try to act cheerful, or at least not morose at the prospect of more work. The dole is available, yes, but it’s hardly anything. I’d feel bad taking it anyway. Surely there are people who need it more than I do. I can work. I just don’t like to, not day in and day out with people I don’t like very much in drab buildings that suck the motivation out of me. Yeah, and my chair is broken.

Nobody mentioned thrift. You can work a lot less if you’re thrifty, and if you’re thrifty for a long time, you can retire earlier. But you still need money.

Ideally, we’d all have jobs we liked, but the fact of the matter is that jobs are tedious, silly things. People talk about what they do and how busy they are and much of it sounds like a sham. And so much time is wasted in the offices I’ve worked-- people don’t know what they want, they repeat themselves, they socialize, they goof off. I’ve had jobs where the core duties-- the actual work-- could be done in a couple hours a day, yet if you leave early everybody freaked out. So I’d sit there trying to think of ways to make the work take longer or how to add value doing work nobody asked me to do or just space out drinking coffee. Managers don’t like it if you tell them you keep running out of work, in my experience. I guess it’s in short supply.

Surely that’s not an unusual experience. There are entire multinational corporations full of shiny happy wolves dying to just work work work and provide people with, I dunno, Coca Cola. Nobody needs Coca Cola. If it went away tomorrow, the only downside for me is… is there a downside? Fewer fat people? Jerks who love their stupid jobs making sugar water and selling it to children losing some money? Luckily I haven’t ever had to work for a company I considered complete detriment to humanity, at least not so far.

Anyway, I was surprised that few people had much sympathy for the OP, other than a couple saying he could be a whore or something. The guy probably really was intelligent, in his way. Sometimes I think life is a little easier if you’re sort of dumb. If you’re clever you keep wondering why you can’t figure out a little thing like not having to work all the damn time. And don’t get me started on all the work you have to do to just find a job that isn’t chump change demon amusement.

54

Not supporting yourself can have strange effects on your self-esteem, no matter what the circumstances and rationalizations. Be careful what you wish for.

55

You mean like those guys who stand at freeway exits holding signs?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v97/PanthaGirl/panhandlers-full.jpg

56

I realize that this is a 12-year-old thread, but I still think it’s an interesting discussion, and no one has brought up the most realistic way for most people to live without working: combining a relatively short period of holding a reasonably-well-paying professional job with frugality.

Look at the Early Retirement Extreme or Mr. Money Mustache early retirement approach, which is essentially a combination of frugality and lowering your standard of living to the point where you can be financially independent in a relatively short time without having many millions saved up.

This means doing things like buying things used on craigslist, living in a smaller hosue, riding a bike instead of driving a car, wearing sweaters in the winter instead of turning up the heat, and making most of your food at home. The OP mentions a desired lifestyle of sleeping in, reading, hiking, and gardening. None of those things are expensive hobbies! Gardening, if you grow food, should be a net-income generator.

The OP mentioned having a $5 million nest egg and giving it to a financial planner, but that’s really a lot more money than is required to have a comfortable life. Historically, 3% of assets per year has been a pretty safe withdrawal rate. $5 million would give you $150k per year of income at that rate (and if you do it right, you’re paying capital gains tax on most of that, meaning that you pay less tax on someone who makes a $150k/year salary). That’s a huge amount of money. Average US household income is around $45k/year. Most people can live a very comfortable and happy life on less than that. You just won’t be golfing at the club, jetting off to Monaco, or eating out all the time. Personally, I’d much rather have a few extra decades without the requirement to work, but the important thing is that you make the decision with your eyes open.

57

There’s always changing your idea of what comfortable means. I have a couple of different friends who work a limited amount of hours and do without some creature comforts in order to have more free time. One sails as an oiler on research vessels about 3 to 4 months of the year, and the rest of the time she does handyman/girl friday work here and there for various people. She’s not lazy, as she spends a lot of her free time doing various charity work and going to art and music things.

I’ve kind of arrived at the conclusion that I’ll never be able to retire, but perhaps I can change what I feel I need in order not to work full time.

58

Your mistake was getting an Ivy league Ph.D. and looking for a research position. Get a Ph.D at a good, but not great state school and you’re probably not looking at that many hours (actually, that’s something that varies strongly with the individual professor; you need to look at what each PI expects, not the school). While academic jobs aren’t exactly abundant right now, they are much less competitive if you’re not going for a research position at a top university (as you seem to be implying with your “publish publish publish” comment). Go for a teaching position at a 4-year college - yes, they’re competitive, but if you get one the work will probably be more like Hedda Rosa is describing.

59

In all fairness, the company where I met you (and the SDMB) was pretty dumb by corporate standards. There are plenty of smart people at places like Google or McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or the myriad of startups that form every year.

But then you’re back to the 90 hour work week problem.

60

Holy crap, I’ve been on this board since before Beiber had hit puberty and this is probably my new favorite thread ever. FWIW, the OP has logged in as recently as yesterday.

As for the ways to live without working it basically comes down to earn more and spend less. Or find a way to get someone else to pay your bills w/o you having to work for it (get married, be disabled, go to jail, inherit money, etc). The ways of doing that are varied and have been discussed. Well, at least the earning more stuff has, people didn’t really discuss how to spend less as much. Sites that have been listed like mr money moustache or early retirement extreme claim if you earn a decent income and save 75% of your post tax income, you can be financially independent in 7 years.

However one drawback of those sites (esp early retirement extreme) is that they seem to not factor in health costs. The US has the most expensive health system on earth, and yeah for a single guy in your 30s like the early retirement extreme guy a high deductible plan is ok. For someone in their 50s with chronic conditions it is not. But with the ACA, it will be a lot easier than before.

You could always become a criminal. If you succeed you get a lot of money. If you fail you go to jail and someone else pays your bills. But prison is probably worse than working for a living, least one would assume. What with the shitty food and the violent gangs and whatnot.

Here is a plan I devised, as a possible way to do it.

Buy a duplex in the midwest. Then equip it with solar panels and buy an electric car. Only send the energy from the solar panels to your half of the duplex. Rent out the other half of the duplex to someone and rent out a bedroom in your half to a tenant. Total upfront cost is about 100-150k.

Assuming you do that you will have few rent/household expenses, no energy expenses to no gas/electric/fuel bills. Plus the income from the rentals (Ideally $700+ a month from a roommate & the duplex) will help you out. Your total living expenses will be under $1000 a month assuming you are healthy and have no kids since your only expenses are food, medical, luxury items, non-energy utilities, etc. This assumes you have the 150k or so necessary to start up this program.

After that you just need to find the $500-1000 a month in living expenses. That can come from working 1-2 days a week or investments.