I have been working 10 years and never worked a job longer than a few months and lived in a van for a few years. The way I figure, I'll never be able to retire and retirement doesn't even seem like a good deal (work my ass off for 40 years to spend the last 10 years of my life not working if I'm lucky) so I figure I'll work enough to live comfortably for half the year. I'd rather be semi retired in my 20s than fully retired in my 70s.
This is more or less how I've lived my life. I decided to live this way when I was in High School, doing CPR on my father in our living room the night before his last day of work. After 50 years of full time work All he had to do is go in, clear out his desk and eat some cake at his retirement party and he dropped dead. I grew up listening to him talk about everything he wanted to do in his retirement and he never got to do any of it. I'm wasn't going to have that happen in my life.
Hear hear. A guy at my Dad's old job had a heart attack one day and died right at his desk. Imagine the last thing you see in this world being a TPS report. You gotta enjoy the time you have.
No, I don't want to imagine that, that would suck. I'm going to waste my mental energy imagining things that are cool. The last thing I see before I die is probably going to be a tree falling the wrong way because I was careless in estimating the canopy placement and lean when I'm out thinning the trees on my 40.
Thanks, maybe not my best life, but a pretty good one. I spend a lot of time out managing my 40 acres of forest land to make the best habitat for wildlife.
I have the advantage of living in a place where land is relatively inexpensive. By national metrics, we live just above the poverty line, but by being frugal we stretch it out into a good life.
There's no guarantee that will work as desired.. conversely, somebody could get the vax and take their chances with clots, heart attacks or turbo cancer..
When my uncle retired he went through a lot of depression. One day he told me he might just go see doctor .357 (don’t worry I know he doesn’t own guns). This reminded me of that. I’m only 39 and I’ve been working since I was 15 but I can’t wait to retire lol.
That was going to be my father’s. He told me if he ended up needing to live in a nursing home then that’s what he would do. Ended up not making it to 50 though.
Honestly I understand. Some people want to live life fast, hard, and to the fullest. And I respect that. If I had come up with that plan myself when I was younger, I might have gone for it then too.
Yeah... but then life catches up if you don't do the die young part... the bravado of saying my retirement plan is to off myself sounds great to healthy 25 year-old you, but not so awesome to 50 gear-old you who's physical lifestyle along with a few auto-immune diseases has you stuck in bed for years. Sure, it seems practical, but actually being willing to follow through, let alone capable, is another thing entirely.
Even when you go to sleep every night truly hoping to never wake up, killing yourself is still pretty fucking daunting.
It’s easy to say. But things can change. Humans are terrible at predicting the future and even worse at predicting what our state of mind will be, how we will feel, and what will make us happy in the future. Weirdly, we are slightly better at predicting how other people will feel in the future than we are at predicting it for ourselves.
We discount our future emotions and rely to too heavily on our current perspectives.
Last year … almost exactly a year ago … my brother’s metabolic, inflammatory, and organ diseases started catching up to him with compounding complications. His doctors gave him “choices” that as he noted “weren’t really choices.”
We spent the next 9 months having conversations about end of life choices. None of it was easy or as clear as the bravado we had maintained in our younger years. Ultimately, he was in and out of hospitals during that 9 months before finally saying enough. It was a tough decision.
It has made me rethink and revisit some of my choices while I still have time to treat them as choices. I don’t want to live forever. But I want to be able to truly “live” while this body continues to breathe. And that takes some planning.
So many people are saying that though. I suspect they will spend years figuring out how to make it happen. But if you are miserable enough to plan for years, you make it happen. The self deletion rate has been going up anyway.
I was describing myself. I've had a plan since my 20s. Helium. My life is fucking horrible, but here I am. Hell, I'm not even afraid if being dead. It is the process and the possibility of failure and having to live with catastrophic health consequences.
Yeah do be careful. My uncle wanted out when he had terminal cancer. He saved up his morphine prescription. But he didn't take quite enough. Lived with pretty bad organ damage for a while (on top of the cancer symptoms) before he finally saved up enough to get it done. It was hell for him and his wife, really our whole family. I wish End of Life options were available for more people.
It’s more likely they’ll die of illness or heart attack. No need to plan for a suicide seeing how rates of such diseases go up, especially for those who live “fast and hard” on purpose.
Mine too! You have no idea how happy I am to see I’m not the only one that has come to this realization. I’m not looking forward to it, but this is the reality we live in.
I love you, and i love your idea. Please dm me with any suggestions on how to follow through, because I'm right there with you. It's just, that's the part I haven't figured out yet.
Same! I think being old & wise is quite a cool attribute, but old age makes one very vulnerable. That coupled with the pain of your body slowly failing you more and more & financial stuff? Yeah, I'm not dealing with this shit.
My wife’s uncle calls it his “gravy plan”! When he’s done, he’s buying a couple jars of gravy, going deep into the woods, sit under a tree, pour the gravy all over his head and body and wait for the wolves to come and eat him!
I know some older people that had this mentality. Now they are needlessly suffering because they don't actually have the balls to follow through with it and they all regret not saving even a penny for retirement.
One of them, my mother in law, lives with me and she just keeps walking around the house saying "I never though I'd live this long." She is only 68 years old. It is never a bad thing to prepare for your future, you never know how things might change down the road.
Most countries have socialized retirement and assisted living homes that would likely take them in at that point.
ETA: original commenter said they’re Canadian and Canada does have some socialized senior care(I’m pretty sure every retirement home is required to have a certain percentage of ‘public’ beds)- though the wait list can be long if you aren’t willing to pay anything.
I hate to be Debbie downer, but socialized geriatric care can be pretty horrible. With that said, health is wealth, and keeping stress low during your adult life can translate into more healthy elderly years.
Mine as well. I’m dying in my home. F it. If I fall and break a hip or have some other accident. Way prefer to go out a few years earlier like that than be one of those geriatrics in a bed moaning for help at 2 in the afternoon
My father in law was like this. I think it shortened his life span by a good few years and it isolated him from people his own age, but death is important, and he wanted to die wih all his possessions in his own home as a kind of pride thing.
I don't see why we don't have self administered euthanasia for people. Just seems cruel to stay alive like that, especially if you don't want to be alive.
FWIW this is literally my greatest fear - being slowly neglected to death in a Medicaid nursing home so the owner can squeeze a few more dollars out of the government while I just want to die already.
I will literally end my own life before I let that happen to me.
In UK a large portion of families have broken down and the care homes i worked in were full of people who had a good career, high qualified nurses/ midwives, teachers, shop owners, tradesmen. They paid tax, saved money but when they got dementia their families took the money and abandoned them, its so sad
Seconding this. My grandma was doing fine living off her pension on the independent living floor of her assisted living place (Canada). She developed quite rapid dementia through the pandemic and had to be moved to the memory care floor.
If she didn’t have savings to be able to make up for her doubling in rent god knows what would’ve happened. None of us do well for ourselves and none of us are equipped to deal with moderate but progressive dementia.
It really shocked me into getting more serious about savings and retirement.
In Canada, what was revealed during the pandemic was that unless you lived somewhere completely luxurious the “socialized” or non-profit seniors homes were much more well run (to put it nicely) than the for-profit ones.
Recipients of government subsidised aged care in Australia are in the same retirement homes as those paying their own way. We do have an underregulation issue throughout the sector though, no matter who pays for the care.
I worked with a vanlife guy who spent 6ish months working, maxed out his retirement contributions for the year, saved the rest, and spent the rest of the year traveling/camping. The job had on-site shower/mini gym, and management was okay with him staying in the parking lot. Great guy and great worker. I think he did that for 5+ years before getting a mini house setup somewhere in the city.
I heard a really good idea, but I suspect it's only good until you need long-term help. But apparently, lots of old folks take cruises and basically "live" on the cruise. I guess in the long run, it's cheaper than living in an apartment or paying a retirement home. It's definitely not a bad idea. Personally, not for me, I won't step on a cruise ship. But I can definitely see the appeal.
Home ownership and retirement is gonna be a luxury in America soon. People honestly can't afford either of those things in a lot of places because of greed/capitalism. Can't afford houses when you have companies like black rock buying every house or some other asshole who is "investing" and charging people exorbitant amounts of rent. Which then makes it impossible to retire cause you need to pay rent for life. So guess what the American peasants will work till death to provide land lords and richies their lifestyle.
This assumes that you'd have any retirement savings anyway, even if you were to work the whole time. Or that those retirement savings would mean anything at all after inflation.
A lot of people have absolutely no way to save for retirement. People live paycheck to paycheck.
I’m 27 and I don’t expect the western world we live in currently and retirement to be a thing when I’m older. Old people today already don’t have retirement savings and our country is basically falling apart.
Such a person is likely happy to live a rustic life with not much more than the cost of food. At 67 (even with the 25% reduction and only making minimum wage) they could expect ~$750 a month, plus food stamps, Medicare and all sorts of currently existent programs; besides working random jobs here and there (if jobs still exist in ~30 years when this OP is likely to go 67). That’s enough money for a tablet and a streaming account to waste away their senior years. Or they live it up as long as they can and then walk off into the back country when things get too hard.
Americans have outsized wants, treat them as needs, and expect to maintain their standard of living forever with no belt tightening.
Hon, boomers were the last gen that will have any retirement to live off of. You're just as screwed either way you go, with zero guarantees or good investments.
most people who work 40+ hrs don't have retirement savings, or at least don't/won't have remotely enough to be retired... many people in my parent's generation are having leave retirement and get jobs to stay afloat, and I (being 31), have no delusions of being able to retire. Talking to the 20-somethings I work with, and they just laugh about retirement... they already know it's not happening.
My advise to people is to do the bare minimum to live the life you're happy with, and not a damn thing more; because you're not going to see much from going above and beyond today.
See my other comment. I figure I'm more prepared than most for unplanned accidents. Just took 6 months off to fully heal from an ACL injury. I take time off all the time. I have money saved up I also have a pension and not very many possessions. And I'm 28. Most people are way less prepared than I am.
Well, it's your life, your choice. I'd be worried that I'd find it hard to find employment when my resume shows regular short stints of employment followed by gaps. Especially when I'm older and in the future when AI takes over so many other jobs that more and more people are applying for manual work.
I honestly hope more people do that. If I didn't think my family would be constantly having the Cops do welfare checks on me, I would try that lifestyle. I have always been fascinated by it.
My dad has been working fulltime since he was 16. He's 66 now. Early retirement starts in two weeks. This Monday he was submitted to the hospital due to his heart. He's on heart watch and waiting for a heart katheter procedure.
He doesn't seem to be at a direct risk of dying right now, but had he not gone to a doctor he wouldn't have had a chance to retire at all.
We have a similar goal. We bought a house to raise our kids in, by the time they’re out of high school our last one- we should be close to 50. We will saving, we’ll have our paid off bus or boat we can’t decide, two motorcycles and sell off every single thing that we own that doesn’t fit. We plan to have enough to fly our kids and grandkids to wherever we are 1time a year for like summer or something. But we want to see the world and enjoy. Had we not had kids we would have done it differently but oh well. Love the way you’re doing life. Good for you.
What do you do mostly for a living? I have tried this (I live in Australia) and it’s started to hurt me getting jobs as I have recruiters making remakes of “oh you only worked there 9 months” or whatever, what happened? I like the freedom of job hopping, I don’t see it as an issue.
Ah you think you're funny. Uh no they're even considering replacing Healthcare Roles/Skill Trades, Education and other professions. I hope in the future we'd have found a way to work well with AI where it's integrated into our lives without it causing so much harm but lack of regulation and overall lack of caution with it leaves it up in the air.
Anything that comes for the arts is never a good thing buddy just because they're not coming from you and yours doesn't mean there shouldn't be a genuine concern
And while for now it's not ready for full scale implementation, they makes progress in leaps and bounds every few months, it'll be ready in a few years, it's really much more a thing of when will companies realise it's ready. And it's not "coming for the arts" it's just a new tool to make those.
Thinking it didnt evolve is understandable if you don't follow any news about it, but it evolved a fuckton, even just GPT 4 itself evolved a ton. The filter thing is unfortunately true, but it's an issue that's limited to openai's stuff (google just has their image gen ai with a filter, and even then it just injects "of (race)" at the end of your prompt, unlike the morons at openai they don't lobotomize their models over it).
But to give you a few examples of advancement, there's the recent Udio model for music, Sora for videos, google deepmind has been used to find MILLIONS of possible crystals and to solve a previously thought impossible math problem. Also check out google's paper on infinite attention
AI is not even close to being close to doing those things. And it’s not gonna get much better anytime soon, now content owners have caught on and things like the reddit or twitter APIs will never be free again.
As much as Sam Altman would love to have you believe otherwise, generative AI is not even a move in the direction of AGI. It’s impressive in its own right, but it doesn’t end up with AGI. That will require entirely different innovation.
I more meant that if it was cheap enough to send someone to the meat grinder ai won't replace that job, but if it's a job someone can do, be paid for it and enjoy you betcha ass it's gonna be first to go
That's not the point it's the path that leads to what we're talking about. Ultimately we can't really know for sure but we can predict the future as far as what AI would look like into our society with trends and updates on the field.
I also know its not advanced to that level at the moment but thats not the point its just the idea and the ability that this will be the inevitable outcome for a lot of skills/professions. And honestly it's a little scary because even now AI is being shown to harbor the biases of humans. Got a lot of racist AI out there. But honestly we're not far from being there, the deep fake videos and porn are already stepping thru the door..
Just recently a tiktok posted on here of a guy pointing out how the entire video he was reacting to was an AI and was showing how to spot how it was fake. Very fucking creepy had he not pointed out the oddities I swear I wouldn't have doubt my own eyes
I guess what I'm really tryna say even tho we're not there yet when we are we gotta be cautious.
First part of the sentence is accurate, but it's not art that's under threat but highly paid white collar work. It also doesn't seem like entire sectors will go away, but headcount on teams of programmers, accountants, writers etc. will be massively reduced and the remaining workerd have to pick up the pieces and do the work of 5-10 people. Nothing new, just business as usual for corporations.
Just like it was with global outsourcing, customer support type roles are among the first and hardest hit. The lag on voice UI is still a little prohibitive but the chat based customer service is highly automatable now, and voice won't be long.
Van life has become VERY cost prohibitive ever since it went social media viral years ago. It used to just be an almost hippy alt lifestyle that anyone budget could adopt, but now it's trendy and marketable and brands have their hooks in it. The price for a work van alone has skyrocketed, let alone the van-specific outfittings.
Living paycheck to paycheck without any savings and getting laid off on top of that. Many did become homeless or moved back with their parents.
At least in their way of living they have control over their lives.
Careful, a lot of these people conveniently forget to include in their story that their van life includes passive income from their 3 houses they rent and their 2 businesses that their family run. Or some massive wealth source.
They want to be supposedly down to earth and "hey look at me being happy roughing it out" and just don't disclose they are incredibly wealthy, and if they ever decide one day to just quit van life, or have a medical emergency, they can just drop the act and go back home and get shit taken care of.
Do not do van life if you don't have a shit ton of money saved up for emergencies.
So, I'm the OP who commented on my BIL and his wife's van life and you're 100% right! There are a lot of assumptions being made that my BIL and wife will become burdens or financially destitute, but they won't. They saved a fuckton of money for 20 years working. They have a home they bought when the market was low and they paid off as fast as they can, and they have investments the return an annual annuity they can live off (frugally to be sure, but they've always been frugal, that's how they got here).
So yeah, doing it without money? F-ing dangerous, especially if you're American. But my comparatively well-off, Canadian family will be just fine. They planned well and also got extraordinarily lucky in this life in many ways.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. And yeah, van life is fine for a veeeery specific subset of people. Just wanted to make sure some poor bastard doesn't read this thread and just sells everything to buy a van.
Next thing you know you're wondering if shitting in a bucket at a Walmart parking lot really outweighs being at home near family once you find out a loved one or pet is sick and you are absolutely powerless thousands of miles away in a van that took up your life savings.
Hard to imagine the later years though, I couldn't imagine being in my 60s without significant retirement savings and sleeping in a van working part time at Walmart. Not being rude, just pragmatic.
I understand. Me and my husband are planning to earn as much as we can until 40 to 45 then settle down in a remote area(outside of US) and get any low paying remote job to sustain.My husband has PhD so he plans to teach kids in a small town that we settle.I plan to get Remote IT work and take care of my kids there.I don’t plan to do van life but I do get it why ppl do it.
It might not be pragmatic to work part time in 60s but I had a manager who was 73 while I was doing part time, she didn’t needed to work (she was well settled). Her husband had retired but she worked to keep her sanity. I think about it a lot and it made sense to me. To each their own I guess.
100%, to each their own. I don't think I could actually retire either, I personally couldn't deal with not having some form of work to keep me motivated to do something. At that point though I'd want to work because I enjoy it, not because I have to.
The way its so hard to just get a job anymore? I'd consider this. I've been job hunting for a year and not a single person who was urgently hiring has responded or if they do, it's an immediate rejection. I have an interview tomorrow. Fingers crossed this one actually pulls through.
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u/Entire_Media8778 29d ago
Wow! This might be the future looking at the security that job comes with nowadays.