Isn’t it better to find out that a lot of corporate work may not have much intrinsic meaning now, rather than just before you die? At least then you get a chance to do something about it.
It seems to me these changes are much more daunting if you live in a country where no job means no health insurance, and where the pay gap between skilled and unskilled work is huge. That makes an existential question about work into a very material one.
work should not be considered to have to have intrinsic meaning for it to be worthwhile - you merely need to make sure your pay is worthwhile.
Find intrinsic meaning outside of work. The best way, imho, is to find the highest paying job you can, work super hard and earn maximally, until you built up a nest egg from which you can draw a living off indefinitely. Then, use the remaining time you have left to pursue what you find to be intrinsically rewarding.
You know, convincing the masses to 'work super hard' is a good trick.
Too bad you have to work super hard until you drop dead, never managing to build that nest egg. Surely you just did not work hard enough. Soo sorry, but its all your fault anyway.
Or maybe you did manage to do that at a tender age of 60, perhaps even 50 or 40 if you were super lucky/smart. Too bad your best and most creative years are past you and you have no family (or spent almost no time with your kids, who are now alienated grown ups). Such is life, you know.
Meanwhile, the kids of the rich live by a different set of rules...
No, work is supposed to be at least useful for somebody. Ideally for the society you live in, at least indirectly. If you are wasting your work time, you are also wasting you life time in the same breath. Would you turn every leaf in the forest around twice, if it was the highest paying job? No, because that's a bullshit job.
> Would you turn every leaf in the forest around twice
if someone is paying for this, then it must mean it is useful to the one doing the paying. If you're not the one paying, you also cannot decide whether it's useful to the payer or not.
Of course you can't decide whether it's useful to the payer. You can and should ask yourself why someone would pay for it, and then decide according to your own personal criteria whether to trade your labor to that particular employer.
It is perfectly rational to choose lower income occupations for your own reasons. Income maximization at all costs is how you become a pawn in someone else's game even (especially?) if it makes you rich.
Some people earn a million per day just from passive income. They could make you turn leaves all day long just for a quick laugh, and you would be unable to decide if this was useful. (They probably won't do that, I agree, but they won't think about wasting your time by accident, given how cheap it is.)
I think there's a balance between high paying and intrinsically rewarding. You dont always need to work a soul crushing job in order to make a lot of money. And I think you're kinda burying the lede on "earning maximally" and "build up a nest egg." I worked two SWE jobs for several years and had a successful exit and didnt increase my standard of living, saved most of it, and all that really amounted to was being able to afford a decent down payment on a "starter" house in my area some years later. Maybe its a skill issue but it i feel like the concept of "work hard and get ahead" doesn't work anymore. You have to work hard just to keep debt low and maintain a decent quality of life.
I'm really confused by this comment. I know what I am now. In the grand scheme of things nothing matters, but we don't live in the grand scheme of things, we live right now.
The point of the commenter was that if we wait to have fun til later, there may not be a later. Life is about striking a balance of having fun now and sacrificing now so that you (or your family or community etc) can have fun later.
Labour is having to eat and clip your fingernails, having to sleep and repair the roof every year. All animals have to do it, humans always will have to do at least a bit of that, producing things just for them to be consumed. But work is building a world, and of course it does have to have meaning. An animal that won't breed in captivity doesn't want to survive under all circumstances. Sometimes even "nature" just says you know what, if I can only live as someone else's furniture, why live? Burnout is probably a similar mechanism.
"the remaining time"
Doing what is intrinsically valuable to you hinges on you still having access to the person you are. Don't take that for granted. A lifetime of settling can easily drive that out of someone, but planning to settle before it even started, as the only option, surely will. How could it not?
Old men [0] living it up because they never did while they lived is the worst. You can't regain a sense of justice, curiosity and innocence once you let it go and out of sight. You cannot have either without the other two, and none of them come back once you misplaced them as something you don't need "for now", but something very cringe and sad can takes their place, and it comes with this conspiracy of not mocking one another, of pretending to be fully featured people, as they stumble and babble into the sunset.
[0] And I say "men" because this is very much a male issue. You don't hear many women talking like that, at least I can't even remember one.
The FIRE model you’re arguing for isn’t realistic for most people, and besides that, spending your youth “working super hard” on a job you find meaningless will will make you a different person compared to having spent that time doing something meaningful.
And what if the FIRE plan doesn’t work out? Work generally takes up too much lifetime to spend that time on doing something one doesn’t find meaningful. That’s not a way to live a fulfilling life.
It seems to me these changes are much more daunting if you live in a country where no job means no health insurance, and where the pay gap between skilled and unskilled work is huge. That makes an existential question about work into a very material one.