no, absolutely not retired and don’t intend to be any time soon.
And I’m not making a blanket statement that is relevant for everyone but I do know that there are many many people who can’t see any other way of being happy other than doing what is required in pursuit of lots of money.
It isn’t an either/or proposition. There aren’t only two options called “kicking back and fucking around” or “working stupidly long hours”
I’ve had the perks and they are just that, nice to have. They pretty much all come with a hidden price to pay and obligations that you often have little control over.
As for the car, plenty of people couldn’t care less about fancy cars. Plenty of people get into serious debt over cars that bring them little or no great pleasure when they’d be better off spending their money elsewhere.
My point is not to say that your approach is wrong or that mine is right. Just that there are plenty of people out there who may look at your desire for money and things and believe that it is what they should desire as well and feel obliged to chase it and pay whatever price it takes. That’s a tragedy because I know many who end up ruined emotionally and physically.
Maybe the perks I experienced were just different or maybe our approach to the world is just different but I can’t think of any hidden price to front row tickets to see Jersey Boys on the original broadway run. Fly to New York stay in the hotel next to the theater and eating dinner with a good friend before hand.
I agree that there is no right or wrong way here and lots of people find things they enjoy that cost minimal amounts of money. Most of the people I know who have chosen that route wish they had more freedom to do more fun things more often. Fishing is a basically free hobby that I love and spend hundreds of hours doing but flying to Alaska to fish on the Kenai peninsula during the spawn in a magical experience that can only be accomplished with money. Of course, if you spend all of your time chasing stuff that you never use and its just a pokemon game then I can see money becoming a drag on your life.
I’ve never worked one of those jobs with 80 or 100 hour workweeks, but am trying to imagine how you do it. Let’s say you get to your desk by 6am and stay until 10pm, Monday through Friday. That’s 80 hours right there. But assuming an hour each way for the commute and getting ready in the morning, that means you’re asleep from 11pm until perhaps 5am, so only six hours of sleep. And do these people work through lunch and dinner or do they just count lunchtime as work?
And then you also come in on Saturday to do something (no idea what, with the markets closed), so perhaps you add another ten or fifteen workhours there. It sounds positively exhausting.
And BTW, it’s not just finance and lawyer types who work these crazy schedules. When newspapers publish stories about the top earners among city or state employees, the ones earning the most are often police or janitors who work crazy amounts of overtime.
I’ve never done 100 hour weeks routinely so I can’t speak for those people but 80 was and is fairly normal. My normal day was waking up at 5 am so I could get ready before my 6 am morning call. I’d talk to all of my rigs on my 1 hour drive to work and get their reports and plans for the day. At 7 I be in the office where I do my normal planning, permitting, meetings, budgeting stuff and I’d normally eat cold cuts at my desk while working. At 4 I’d head head home and take my afternoon call with my rigs. So my basic day was 6-5. Then I would work from home watching a rig land a curve or get stuck or whatever other problems they were having and with 5 rigs most nights I’d spend an hour or three on the phone /computer working on an issue. On the weekends I still had my 6 am call and my 4 pm call as well as the problems calls and typically another hour call each day with my boss.
I probably didn’t average 80 hours but it was close but I also didn’t spend that 80 hours sitting behind the desk either.
I used to have one of those jobs but I only worked a few actual hundred hour weeks. I thought I was a real piker but apparently my work hours were pretty typical for people who claim to work 100 hours per week - I usually worked 50-55. I got in at 8:00 and left around 6:00. I ate lunch at my desk or had a working lunch doing classes, meetings with clients, or internal meetings. I would usually do some reading and prep for a few hours over the weekend.
My most memorable 100+ hour week was when I was working on a deal. My client was thinking of buying a company. The company set up a confidential data room. We were told we would have one day with the data room because there were other interested buyers. I left for the airport at 6:00 in the morning. The account let me bill travel time. I was at the data room by 9:00 AM. The data room was supposed to close at 6:00 PM but there was too much to read in that time. I was booked on a shuttle flight, so I knew that whenever I got to the airport, I was less than a 30 minute wait for the next flight. If I stayed late it wasn’t a big deal. The data room was huge. It seemed like the company was burying us in bullshit. (Or rather, burying the shit we were looking for among gold and irrelevance.) I called for reinforcements so we could get through more of the documents. I also asked for a late close. The company gave us until 9:00 PM. My bosses, without checking with me, negotiated for another day in the data room because we were only going to get through half the documents. I learn at about 8:30 that I’m booked in a hotel around the corner. I left the data room at 9:00-ish and I spent the next three hours writing up summaries of my findings and synthesizing everyone else’s findings. So, that was an 18 hour day. The next day was very much the same. I show up at 8:30 AM, work until 9:00 PM, and learn at around 8:30 PM that I’m staying yet another day because we got the data room again. And some of my team was leaving because they had other commitments, so on day 3, we were reviewing documents slower. I’m still in the same suit because I wasn’t even supposed to stay overnight. Plus, the clients are reading the reports and they have questions about some of the findings that require going back over the documents. Day 3 turns into 4 (when at least the fresh clothes Mrs. Charming and Rested sent me arrived) and Day 5. Each of those days was about 16 hours, made easy because my hotel was a three minute stroll from the data room. I slept okay. I fly home on Saturday and even though I have a lot to do, I do a little work on the plane but I also nap (remember, travel is billable. Some would argue the ethics of billing while asleep. Let them.) I head to the office and work on more reports and briefing my boss. I put in a regular 10 hour day. On Sunday, I’m flying again to meet with my client so we can brief them Monday morning, but that means preparing presentations before I go and keeping up with some other client matters. That’s another regular 10 hour day on Sunday, plus two hours travel time. I used the car service on the weekends so I could bill while I was commuting between home and the office. Total billable hours that week were a little over 100 and I barely lost any sleep. Plenty of stress, but it was one week out of my life and, honestly, it wasn’t that bad. In fact, it was a bit exhilarating. We found stuff in that data room that radically changed our client’s negotiating stance. Hell, just the fact that we could get the data room for a couple of extra days told us that they didn’t have as many suitors as they claimed.
I was only on that deal for a couple of weeks. Some people on the data team I started with stayed on the deal for a few more weeks, and they probably had a few consecutive 90 or 100 hour weeks but then they went back to normal. When the deal is done, everyone on the team takes a nice vacation and gets a tan. Maybe they bill ten hours that week working from the hotel. I think that was the first time I went to Italy.
I could tell you a similar story about the time I spent in Las Vegas preparing clients for a lawsuit but you get the gist.
You explained your workday in the next post. That’s how you are paying for those perks as I suspect you wouldn’t be offered them if you didn’t do those hours.
We probably do approach these things differently. I was flown to New York on business, wined and dined and taken to see Spamalot on Broadway. On the face of it it was all free but of course I was only there because I had to deliver workshops and training sessions which took me dozens of hours to prepare for. Also. I was obliged to do what was laid on for me at a time of other’s choosing, at show I didn’t care about, after a meal I would never have chosen with a group of people I didn’t know. All I really wanted to do was wander though Central Park, stop by the museums and grab some Italian food. It does sound ungracious but sometimes those high dollar value perks lose their allure.
There’s the rub. You can get one kind of freedom with big money but that may not be fulfilling if you don’t also have the freedom to spend time with your loved ones. Finding the sweet spot along that line is tricky to do and sometimes only obvious with hindsight
It’s probably just a vocabulary difference but I don’t see having to work for the money as a hidden cost.
I understand your aversion to seemly fun stuff because it’s not what you would choose to do. Hell, I would say more than 3/4 of the time I’ve spent in strip clubs has been for work and that is about the least fun perk you can have. I put these business meetings in the box of things you have to do to earn money even if your sitting at a play on Broadway your still working if you wouldn’t chose to be there with those people if it weren’t for the money.
Once you earn the money though that’s when things get nice. I’m building a distillery in Hawaii right now when I go out for commissioning I’ll work five 16 hour days and while I’ll be in a nice place doing it I won’t get any of the benefits. Of course, I’ll also be bringing my wife and we’ll stay on for an extra week and the second week will be paid for by the first one and it will be lots of fun.
60 hours is not difficult to hit or to manage - I did email on the train in, worked 6:15-6:00 including working through most lunches, and did some email every Sunday morning…and it was easy to still spend lots of time with my family. *
80 office hours, though, is tough, and 100 seems nuts. I honestly can’t imagine doing that for more than a short burst, and it doesn’t surprise me that people mentally exaggerate.
That’s what I was trying to understand; how do people work 80-100 weeks for months on end? In part, it seems they exaggerate. Or those 80 weeks involve long lunches and dinners, which somewhat allow you to recover.
I imagine some CPAs put in some pretty big hours during tax season.
I remember quite early in my career, I first heard the sayings:
Work to live, don’t live to work
and
No one, on their deathbed, regretted not having spent more hours in the office.
Pretty trite, but sure made sense to me.
I’m proud that 2 of my kids - aged 29 and 31 - have recently questioned their path regarding pursuit of promotions that would involve more $, but also far more time. They both are astute enough to know that they (with their partners) make plenty to support a mighty fine standard of living, while supporting their considerable hobbies and interests. The one couple is likely moving from SoCal, realizing they could live like royalty anywhere else, and afford to fly back to Cal - or anywhere else - whenever they want.
My 3d kid and her spouse simply decided to never join the rat race in the first place, and instead chose to enjoy a modest sustainable lifestyle.
Dinsdale - proud parent of underachievers! 
I have never worked 80-100 hour weeks with any regularity, but I have worked 60 hour weeks for extended periods of time. For me, it was less about the money (though as a result of all that, I make a lot more than most teachers, but not much relative to what you guys are talking about) and more about really loving what I did. When in my groove (which I am not right now, for a variety of reasons), teaching is exhilarating: you feel like you matter, what you do matters. During those very busy times, I was all-in as a classroom teacher, a coach/sponsor, a college consultant, and a member of the school’s leadership team. So there was tons of intellectual challenge, positive feedback, validation, and a sense of really making a difference, of changing lives. There was no limit to the work I could do: a school is a pit of bottomless need, of bottomless opportunity. And it was FUN.
Right now, remote school and an absentee boss make doing those things a lot harder, so I am more just maintaining the status quo than innovating, than challenging myself.
But anyway, I can see that it would feel the same in a lot of jobs. It’s really possible to just like what you are doing and find it more interesting than whatever else you might be doing. I used to say I had a job teaching and my biggest hobby was also teaching.
Medical training hours do get exaggerated, as mentioned above. My residency was back in the bad old days, before limits. Even then I never worked more than 112 hours in a week (that included a 56 hour in a row shift), and most weeks were under 100 hours (but usually over 70). My program was considered somewhat cushy as a result. For all those hours I grossed $17K and change that first year, back in 1984. I chose my practice options after residency with an eye towards sanity and seldom worked over 60 hours a week. Now, over 3.5 decades later, I do 40-50, but at my own pace, and not for productivity, thanks to the niche I’ve carved out for myself.
How much time off after a 56 hour shift?
About 16 hours away from Mr. Hospital. I’d done 48 hours in the OB unit, delivering babies and sleeping whenever I could, then 8 hours in clinic after that, went home, slept, returned for another 24 on the OB unit. Two of us residents covered the unit for a month, so we alternated days, but each took a 48 hour shift on a weekend so the other could have 48 hours off twice in that month.
We also got two weeks vacation a year! But provided coverage on weekends and holidays. Some of us would be off for those, some working.
It was a different reality back then. At least we were allowed to not only get married, but to live at home with our spouses. Not like in the early days of US residency training at major teaching hospitals like Johns Hopkins in the late 18-early 1900’s. Initially you lived in the hospital and couldn’t marry, but later they eased the marriage rule but your wife couldn’t live in the same city. Every Sunday your family could visit you for a formal sunday night dinner in the hospital.
In addition to what was said above, it’s also less efficient to have two people, much of the time. There’s friction every time you trade off a project. Heck, if you are doing something complex enough, there’s friction every time you walk away from it for a few hours, and need to mentally get back into it.
I’ve heard of people “job sharing”, but they need to be very close with each other, and between them they work more than 100% of the time they replace.
Wow indeed!
I’m currently working 24 hours a week (nominal, actually hours vary from week to week) and I gotta say, I’m loving it.
There’s also a cultural factor at play. An American’s job is, more often than not, a primary part of their identity. If your answer to “who are you?” is your occupation, of course your time is going to be focused mostly on that. I’ve been to weddings in Ireland and Sicily where I spent hours talking to Europeans about everything under the sun without even learning what they did for a living. That takes about two minutes after meeting someone for the first time in the US.
I took a sociology class in college and remember the professor pointing out that obituaries always list the person’s profession, either in the title or in the first sentence.
He’s not retired, but I am retired. I’m sure I could have switched jobs more often and made more. But having a reasonable life gave me more savings than we’re going to spend if we live to 100, and I stayed married and I got to see my kids grow up. When I was working 60 hours a week I never saw them.
And there is absolutely nothing I want that I can’t afford - except more time in the week.
But my wife and I grew up with Depression-era parents, and I think that makes a difference.
I misinterpreted his post that he was retired. My quote still applied. Just not to Novelty_Bobble I suppose.
I used to care about “making money”. But that didn’t really work out for me. At least not in the sense of having a long-term career at anyplace, making partner, etc. At this point, I’d just like to find a job that’s sustainable for the next 10-20 years that doesn’t totally suck or cause me to lose my shit. I’m not even sure what that actually looks like. I’m not opposed to changing industries or professions, but really the only thing I know how to do is “IT project management”. And I don’t really want to do that for another consulting firm like Cognizant or Accenture or whoever. Nor do I want to be a contractor.