Yep.
Whats wrong with signing one of them?
Yep, this board skews older.
I’ll say it straight up, I didn’t ever work at a job job. I did some art work, murals and sign painting. Volunteering alot.
Mostly I was a lazy ass with four kids, pets and a big house and property to tend to. Between lounging around watching game shows and eating bon-bons. Did jack shit.
Funny how it took 20 hour days and no one ever gave me a paycheck.
Actually I chose to be SAHM. I’ve had health issues my whole life but I don’t get disability. I would if I needed to. But we’re ok.
My husband has been semi-retired and then fully retired for many years. He invested in his retirement well. I inherited my Daddy’s estate and houses. I figure there will be some left for the kids at my demise. If I can keep Son-of-a-wreks hands outta my pocket book. That boy has high ideas and often wants me to pay for them.
Sam has said he wished to drop this, and I don’t really want to continue the hijack, but I did note this:
So in a workplace where they value diversity, the older white male still got a job. Diversity is the worst thing ever!
Rack up my parents as another one for the “early retirement” category. They were both university lecturers, in their early 60s when the pandemic hit. Normal retirement age would be 65, but they retired a few years early after figuring that remote Zoom teaching was not something they wanted to keep doing.
Labor force participation peaked in ~2000.
There’s a whole swathe of the population that doesn’t want to work, but do - they just work as little as they can manage. I’ve worked for temp agencies in Chicago where some of the regulars were known for only working a few weeks or months to make some cash, then leaving until they ran low.
Here in KY you can still buy a few acres for $5 or $10 grand, park a used trailer/camper on it, and live for next to nothing. Such people are infamous for taking some low-paying job and quitting after a couple of weeks, to the frustration of employers. I think it also feeds into the employer mindset that the low pay is fine - it must be if people can quit after a week or two of it, living off a couple paychecks.
I knew a few like that that worked at Amazon every year during Peak (November to January), taking the rest of the year off.
Amazon here also has Flex, a deal where you’re only required to work 2 10-hour shifts a month. We had people that worked, for example, the first 2 days of January and the last two days of February. Others would show up around federal holidays, since it was double time and a half and frequently a premium shift ($3-5/hour more).
Hey, a barebones life of leisure is still a life of leisure.
I know some people who have stopped working for pay - and what it has mostly turned out to be is people who didn’t need to work decided it wasn’t worth it. People retired early because they realized they could afford it , people who had already retired decided that part-time retail or food service job didn’t really make that much of a difference to their finances and the same for SAHP with school age kids.
COVID and the extra unemployment gave some people time to think - I know someone who had worked for the same company for over 20 years. When he started, the job was in walking distance of his apartment. Eventually it moved to the burbs and he had to start paying for a train ticket and his commute turned into 1.5- 2 hrs each way. COVID comes, he gets laid-off - and he realizes he’s better off taking a low paying job a 15 minute walk from home. So he’s still working- but I bet his former employer is one of those saying people don’t want to work. Because they most likely don’t know that he is working, just that he didn’t return when they called.
That’s true on this side of the Atlantic as well.
I frequent some truck driver forums and it’s pretty obvious that hauliers who are complaining about the “shortage of drivers” are really complaining about “a shortage of drivers who will work for peanuts”.
I was a high stress construction manager who still did some hands on work although my body was getting increasingly arthritic. Come 2016 we suddenly realized my mom was well along in dementia (she hid it amazingly well). Despite being 2000 miles away, I took charge of her care. That was pretty much the end of work for me. 10 months of craziness and flights until she died, then dealing with her stuff, fixing up her house, etc. Then we moved. We had almost enough money at that point to retire and then we inherited significantly more money than expected from her. Then my health went to shit (arthritis). I could be managing a huge project up at Big Sky and working 60 hours a week, but why would I do that? So, I guess I retired at 50 effectively.
Nonsense. If you have the resources, you get to retire. That can be at 30 if you are really lucky about getting enough resources. Or it can be never, if you are really unlucky.
That’s me. I’m not far from normal retirement age. But I’m still able to work. And i said “fuck it”, and I’m retiring this month.
According to the anecdotrs here, the nimbrr one reason why people aren’t working is early retirement.
But until recently (say, pre-covid), the number one complaint about the job market was that not enough Baby Boomers were retiring!
There were vast numbers of articles all over the internet saying that most boomers had inadequate savings , and they could not retire , so the younger generation would never get their chances for promotion, etc
For my part, I’ve had times in my life that I’ve worked really hard and times I’ve phoned it in, and it all depends on how I feel about the work. I love my current job. I have been there since 2015. I don’t just feel like a cog in a wheel. I give them the best of myself because they give me a lot in return. But I also don’t have to work a full eight hours every single day. I do when it’s necessary, and I know I wouldn’t feel right about it if I weren’t contributing significantly. I just have the kind of job where productivity is not measured in hours, but results. And one of the consolation prizes my brain gave me for my difficulties with task initiation is the ability to work very efficiently.
I think some of us younger folks grew up with workaholic parents and don’t want to be that way. I know my husband and I both feel that way. My husband didn’t want to be a “weekend Dad,” as he put it. But social forces, especially if you have a kid, will conspire against you.
There was an issue where people said that not enough Boomers were retiring - but plenty of those Boomers could have retired and just didn’t. Sure, some couldn’t afford to , and some could have afforded to retire but didn’t think they could but lots just didn’t want to retire. If you see someone doing physically taxing work at 65 or 70, they probably can’t afford to stop. But I’ve known plenty of people who worked until 75 or 80 who absolutely didn’t need to. They had a pension or enough investments/savings to retire and continued working for nonfinancial reasons * - including a couple of people I knew who would not retire because once they started collecting their pensions their ex-spouse(s) would get a piece. Some of them were actually losing money by working
* All different sorts of non-financial reasons - everything from helping adult children to having no identity ( or even a life) outside of work.
Yes but I’m not asking “why are YOU not working?” I am asking for anecdotes of anyone you may know personally. I just don’t want conjectures or guesses or “I heard…” Surely this board has GenX kids and Millenial grandkids they can mention. And have.
I know a lot of people who don’t work. My Aunt hasn’t worked in at least ten years (Gen X.) I consider her disabled, though sometimes I think her mental health would be much improved by a job, even a part-time, flexible one. My younger Millennial/Zoomer cousins are in and out of jobs because my grandmother enables them. Why work when you don’t really have to? I know they have mental health conditions but not the details. In fact I really don’t know their employment status ATM, but I know one on my adult cousins is living with my grandparents. But you know, he’s not exactly useless. He helps my elderly grandfather do work around the house and he helps the neighbors.
I worked only part time for years at my current nonprofit job, even before I had a kid. I was trying to launch a writing career, but it turns out that entails finishing manuscripts and caring about marketing. I haven’t given it up completely, but my paid job comes first.
I think a lot of people really don’t know what they’re capable of because they’ve never had no choice but to find out. I see a lot of learned helplessness when I look at the people I know who don’t work. But I’m not them, I don’t personally know what it’s like to be them, so I can’t know for sure what their true limits are. It’s not really my business.
I’m Gen X (43 years old). I quit right before COVID to take care of my kids. The job wasn’t worth the stress and my wife made good enough money for our family. She didn’t want to work less so I stopped working.
I didn’t hate my job; quite liked it in fact. I made low 6-figures, but the market was so good from the time I started really earning until I quit that my 401K was basically good enough to retire (assuming I was retirement age) - we we just needed my wife’s wages to cover expenses until then.
So I would add a very strong stock market to the reasons why more people don’t have to work anymore. If you are middle-aged and were fully employed with a high savings rate and aggressively invested from 2009 or so, you very likely have a very solid nest egg. The “FIRE” community has certainly encouraged this lifestyle as well.
I’m not working because I’m retired and I like it. I don’t want to lose all that by working.
I’m trying to think of a single person in my family and friends that “isn’t working” in the sense that they are expected to work, and I’m tallying up zero out of the 40-50 people I have checked off mentally in that two hours that are not working and:
Between 22 and 60
Not a mother with multiple children under 5
Not a full time law, medical or other grad school student
Not severely disabled
Not serving a custodial sentence
Everyone else is working. Where “working” includes:
Working at a “normal” job
Running a business that produces significant income (real estate agent, recruiter, restaurant owner, etc)
Managing real estate investments that are very significant (30+ rental properties, plus land, storefronts, etc)
Taking a sabbatical from an academic position, traveling and writing
Tutoring students 20+ hours a week and doing preparation/marketing for a similar time.
A lot of the people not in “normal jobs” is probably higher in this cohort than it was 20 years ago, but that is partly due to age and wealth progression, and the advancement of technology.
I’ve never understood the point of living like an ascetic for half your life so you can retire early. (The FIRE thing.) Many have regretted it. Still it definitely pays to invest a lot and early in life. I would say we’re doing okay in that department but I don’t see an early retirement. (We are 40 and 41.)
But there’s nothing I will be able to do after retirement that I can’t do right now. I get to do a little bit of everything with my current lifestyle. So I’m not desperate to retire or anything.
Sounds like the Lump of Labor Fallacy. I never encountered it much.