Because you’re smart.
Sincerely,
Overworked middle manager
Those people have bought into the grind culture and will probably get burnt out
Perhaps they value different things in life. Everyone is not the same, what works for you won’t work for everyone. There are people who enjoy having responsibility. Having children, being a manager and doing charity work feels fulfilling to them.
Until they say they are over their head and start complaining they have no free time in a very negative tone to all of their childless/non managerial friends and guilt tripping on how they should do the same. “When are you having kids?”
Do childless, non-managerial people have no complaints in life? Most things aren’t perfect. It doesn’t mean they’re not also fulfilling.
On the other hand, some people just like to complain. The comment you’re making just lacks some nuance.
You should talk.
You shouldn’t
I know these types. There’s nothing stopping them from having the kids babysat or to take a day off, but they’d rather be able to hit people over the head with the victim complex even though they put themselves into their position knowingly and without hesitation.
Half the people I work with have kids and, if you complain about anything at all around them, they always have some way to minimize it and one up you. Got three hours of sleep? Well, with their kids, they only sleep 30 minutes a night on a bed of nails under a running stream of volcanic temp water. Starving because work is crazy, you haven’t eaten all day, and it’s 7pm? With their kids busy schedules, they only eat once a fortnight, on the toilet, crying into they’re meal which only consists of bread crusts their kids didn’t want. Like, sorry, I forgot I’m not allowed to suffer around you people because you made a life decision that requires extra effort on a daily basis.
Because they get a touch of Maslows disease
I am the same and find that life is enough for me as it is. I’m also on the spectrum so it’s easier to not burden myself unnecessarily.
Exactly! Compared to what neurotypical people are capable of, I truly do feel disabled in some ways. However, as long as I can continue to support myself and my partner until we both die, I’ll be good without all the extra bullshit and responsibilities.
My ADHD plays a huge part in the opposite direction. I have had hundreds of different hobbies or interests. Each hold my attention for a while and then I rotate to the next.
What I have learned to do is make hobbies or projects interrelated and each supports the next. CAD work supports my 3D printing, which supports all the rest, as an example. Tools purchased need to have multiple uses and other supplies the same. Essentially, I have constructed a huge feedback loop for my natural tendency to bounce around.
While that stuff keeps me busy, I am learning to simplify the rest of my life, so that is nice.
Wow. I think you just resolved some minor trauma for me. My mother used to berate (and sometimes beat) me for “never finishing things”, as in I’d be really interested in something and then lost interest. It drove her up the wall, but since I was a kid all I heard was “stop being interested in everything”.
I got dx’d with ADHD at 35. Slowly, and thanks to comments like yours, I’m making sense of my brain and learning to be kind to myself
I was diagnosed early, but didn’t start treatment until my 30’s. Basically, I had some really unfounded perceptions of the condition and how amphetamines worked. Whoo boy, was I wrong!
But yeah, it’s hard not to use the condition as a crutch or an excuse. It’s a legitimate condition, no doubt, but the trick is trying to learn ways to leverage it as a positive. (TBH, this only works in some cases, not all.)
The biggest challenge for me is trying to communicate how I think and operate to others. Processes that work for normal humans simply do not work for me. This poses some massive challenges in my career, for sure. By the same token, the way I think gives me unique advantages in problem solving. (I am in IT Security by trade where thinking differently is almost a requirement.)
Can you give some more examples please?
Not op, but I love making interesting furniture and light fixtures. It’s a combination of wood working, pretty lights, microcontrollers, open source projects, and stuff that normies fucking love, like epoxy desks. I always have a handful of projects at various states of completion and whenever I get bored of one I bounce to another until I finish and then just pick something from my yuge list of stuff I wanna build and keep going.
Man, I wish I had heard this decades ago. Most of my hobbies are entirely unconnected except building guitars then playing them. I have a garage full of woodworking stuff that’s only for that, a garage full of tools for working on motorcycles that don’t overlap, a bunch of tools for cooking outdoors, a room full of entirely unconnected gear for playing pool, rock climbing, a shelf full of tabletop games, gardening equipment, fishing gear, and equipment to make a beverage that is illegal for me to make at both the federal and state level.
You have a good system.
Those sound like some pretty cool hobbies tbh.
They’re all a lot of fun. The only ones I have kept up with long term are building and playing guitars, cooking outdoors, and working on motorcycles. The rest were passing fancies.
Because people find fulfillment in different things.
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An important detail from your story is how much money you started with and gained during your corporate life. Living the way you do now can absolutely be a privilege even if it is simpler. Your core message about being yourself and not what society or specific people want you to be is still good, also assuming what you want to be is ethical in nature.
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Whaaaa life is hard and you have to figure out cash flow.
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You literally did, so that wasn’t aimed at you.
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You may be a perfectionist who’s so afraid of failure that it currently (rationally or irrationally) outweighs the motivation to succeed by a significant margin. You’d like to do some bigger things in life but you self-sabotage by distracting yourself because the thought of actually doing things is way too scary / stressful.
Armchair therapist much? To me the examples given in the post specifically aren’t about success, they’re about the things people that do not directly count as success but that do require you to devote at least part of your life to it.
I have to have a job, which means I have to work. If I have to work, I’d prefer it was challenging and stimulating. That doesn’t mean it’s good, but busy and challenged and better than bored and unstimulated for me personally.
The ability to “strive” is a learned skill that needs to be honed over years. It’s not really natural to most people — it’s easy to fall into a low-energy state and want to stay there because it’s comfortable. It takes practice and energy putting yourself out there and putting an effort into making more of your life.
If you’re happy with who you are and what you’re doing, then I’m not going to neg on your life. But are you going to spend the next ~50 years just gliding along, and not creating or building any value for yourself in this world (and that doesn’t have to be monetary value — building a family, and building up your community through volunteer works build value as well)? When you’re in the twilight of your life, do you want to look back and find you did nothing of significance with your life?
Maybe that doesn’t bother you. That’s fine. Just so long as 15 years from now you’re not some bitter middle-aged person complaining about people in the upper-middle class who get to do things you don’t get to do and who have more money and nice things that you do.
But none of that would be for me. So I put in the work, learned how to strive for the life I wanted, and got a graduate degree, built a beautiful family, got that management job (and the pay that goes with it), and spend my spare time volunteering (currently) with three different organizations. It’s a busy life and take a lot of time and energy — but it allows me to have people around me who love me, with the money to do and own nice things together, and to give back to my community to make it a better place. And when my time eventually comes, I’ll have hopefully left this world a little better off for the effort.
Maybe that doesn’t bother you. That’s fine. Just so long as 15 years from now you’re not some bitter middle-aged person complaining about people in the upper-middle class who get to do things you don’t get to do and who have more money and nice things that you do.
Statistically speaking, single people with no kids usually have more disposable income.
Meh. Your value as a human isn’t tied to your accomplishments (be it having a family or getting a high paying job) or productivity.
This whole thing of “striving as a honed skill” sounds like hustling culture and capitalist brainwashing. In fact, I would say it takes more skill to actually be content with your life and not feel the constant need to strive to be someone better or do something more.
You seem to think that unless you’ve done something, you’re worthless.
It seems that according to your view, a homeless person without a family is completely worthless.
That’s a pretty unfair characterization. He called out multiple times how it’s fine for the other guy if that’s what he wants, but that it’s not his own specific wants. And his central thesis is fine: coasting is fine as long as you’re going to be ok with where you coast to. If you want to be somewhere else then coasting is not fine - but it’s up to you where you want to go.
I pretty specifically called out striving to create things like family or helping improve your community through volunteer works — which isn’t “capitalism” at all.
Each of us can always be someone better and do something more. That isn’t a bad thing.
You end by trying to put words in my mouth. I never said anything about the worth of anyone over anyone else. Striving for the betterment of oneself, one’s loved ones, and one’s community is a good thing — but the antithesis of that isn’t that doing none of those things makes you worthless. That’s something you came up with, not me.
Different people find joys in different things (some people get more out of charity than they put in)… and different people have a different capacity for stress and energy.
We’ve been tricked into thinking either that hard work pays off or this specific hard work thing will pay off. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. But all the time it leads to more work.
My expert psychoanalysis of your entire personality based on a one sentence post is either you’re happy where you are, or you’re afraid of change.
Everyone values different things. Personally, I’m not quite ready for kids (even though I’m past the age where my parents had kids and some of my friends/colleagues my age have kids, I’m about your age), but I’m ready to take on more at work. I find it rewarding and I can make more money. And although money doesn’t create happiness, it buys some dope shit. And not advancing at work just gets boring and repetitive. Ig it’s like that urban legend about sharks needing to swim…
Money doesn’t create happiness, but it definitely sets up an environment for it to thrive.
Because they’re lost or miserable or searching for purpose and keep trying to find it in external things like career advancement or kids or partners or something.
Some people are like dogs: they want to be useful & helpful.
Some people are like cats: they want to sleep 16 hours a day & meow loudly at 3am.
Some of us like to poop in the sand box as well.
If you’re in the sand box, does it count as a blumpkin? Or is it toilet specific.
I now have a new thing to add to my bucket list.
