I voluntarily retired at age 55 after a startup I was a principal in for five years ran out of money (raising funds was not my responsibility). Having worked from home during most of that time, and having nobody to report to other than myself, I decided I couldn't go back to the grind. I was fortunate enough that my wife earns enough and has good enough benefits that I don't need to work. It took a lot of paying down debt and massaging our finances, but it's worked out swimmingly. We're doing far better on one income than we ever did on two. Obviously, at my age, there are no kids in the picture. Not only am I her personal assistant (she's a teacher), but I take care of the household, which takes a ton of stress off her plate.
I could see a world where cognitive decline takes place, but it's actually been the opposite for me. When I'm not fulfilling my responsibilities as my wife's assistant and taking care of the household, I have many hours during the day to pursue my own passions. I've also been much more structured with my time. I actively journal. I spend time with friends and family. I occasionally do things for fun like fly fishing. I set aside a specific time to read every day for pleasure and learning. I go to bed at a set time and wake up at 5am. I probably log anywhere from 8 to 16 hours a day doing agentic AI coding and design in Claude Code. Freed from the treadmill of employment and the grind of keeping up with the fast pace of deeply learning new technology, I feel sharper than I have in decades. It also doesn't hurt that my passion projects are generating income, which keeps me highly motivated and mentally engaged.
I'm sure those of you that read this probably think that I didn't retire. I think an argument can be made for and against this. I feel retired. I just don't fill all of my time with leisure which I think is the trap that many retired people fall into. The things that I do to keep mentally sharp are intentional choices. It just so happens that those things are things that resemble work.
The only one that I would point out as better is Render, as it allows for containers, all others are worse than Vercel, in tooling, and supported languages for serverless on the backend.
I've had a great experience with cloudflare pages. It doesn't get much easier than using their cli (wrangler) to sync up a local folder. I suppose the exception is SSR, but then again I absolutely despise SSR so I don't think it counts.
I bought the master collection CS6 in 2010 and still use it to this day to maintain legacy files. To my delight, it still does 99% of everything I need to do. I haven't given Adobe a dime since. Unlike Autodesk that has maintained its moat (vendor lock-in) around AutoCAD through patents, Adobe has not had a piece of software I couldn't replace with a free or low-cost alternative for the last 15 years. I'm not against paying companies for their software, but it is clear that the conflated subscription models/licenses have come at a cost to their reputation.
ProgeCAD seems to be a viable alternative lately. I have heard positive reviews from a perfectionist that does _a lot_ of telecom-related projects in it after years of AutoCAD.
I've been on 5x for a couple of months and the closest I've got to my weekly limits is 75%. I've hit 5-hr limits twice (expected). I'm a solo dev that uses CC anywhere from 8-12+ hr each day, 7 days a week. I've never experienced any of the issues others complain about other than the feeling that my sessions feel a little more rushed. I'd say that overall I have very dialed-in context management which includes: breaking work across sessions in atomic units, svelte claude.md/rules (sub 150 lines), periodic memory audit/cleanup, good pre-compact discipline, and a few great commands that I use to transfer knowledge effectively between sessions, without leaving a trailing pile of detritus. Some may say that this is exhaustive, but I don't find it much different than maintaining Agile discipline.
Netlfix raises its prices for the second time in years. Prime Video ads are so invasive that I honestly can't watch any video without turning it off immediately (I refuse to pay for the ad free tier), and now I'm seeing very long ads in the middle of YouTube videos.
Two months ago I just stopped watching streaming services all together. The friction of enshitification reached such a boiling point that I lost all joy in watching anything. I cancelled those services I personally paid for and stopped watching those that I don't. My life improved in clear ways. I began reading for pleasure again. Each night at 10pm I sit down in my reading chair, get comfy and read 2 chapters of: one book for enjoyment and one book for learning. It didn't hurt that the first book I read was Atomic Habits! I noticed that my sleep schedule and quality of sleep improved. I've also been more dedicated to my passion projects as well. You don't really realize how invasive these things are until you remove them from your life. I had already given up all social media except Reddit a couple of years ago. Even now I stay away from hot bed subreddits (typically news oriented ones) to preserve my mental health. From 2010-2018 I actually did a test to give up a smart phone in favor of a flip phone, but that became untenable.
So thank you to all the enshitified streaming services for helping me restore balance in my life.
I was paying for Prime, and then they introduced ads. They started comingling their video content just like their warehouses so you'd get AVOD content with your premium VOD content so it made picking something ad free very difficult. They started with "Included with Prime" labels for the ad free stuff, but then that label started showing ads. I stopped watching so many shows at the first ad break and never returned. It made me finally cancel Prime.
I wouldn't watch ad-sponsored TV either, but you either want to watch the shows or you don't; your time is extremely valuable! I wouldn't assume the price of the show is that much a factor.
Probably not the answer you want to here but I'll share my perspective. Three years ago my wife and I sat down and optimized our finances so I could soft-retire and focus on a few of my life goals while simultaneously working on ways to generate income without the stress of being in the employ of others. It was tough work which mainly involved paying down a lot of debt so we can live more lean. We did a lot of optimization and of course some compromise and lifestyle changes. Fortunately, my wife earns enough for us to still live comfortably on a single income.
Now I am her part-time personal assistant which has taken a big load off her plate and reduced her stress significantly. A lot of this work is clerical: writing emails, grants, curriculum/lessons (she's a teacher), ordering supplies, working with spreadsheets, doing misc. graphic design and other office work. I also take care of the household, finances (mostly) and pets. In my spare time I pursue my lifelong passions (writing, game design, and programming), but with each of these my focus has been channeling those passions into generating income. This is not a requirement of my soft-retirement, but rather a choice I made to create balance between us.
Overall, we are much happier and fulfilled and have managed to carve out a life where we work meaner and leaner without huge sacrifices. In reality, it feels like we are financially better off than we were before.
Whenever I read something like this I have to ask if kids are in the picture? Or maybe they've already moved away.
I'd like to do something like this but everything that has to do with kids is both too expensive and too unpredictable for lean living to be an achievable goal.
- how old are they? If the poster is ~60, likely has savings and may even have Social Security income. If they worked as (say) a police officer for 20 years, they may have pension income. A 47-year-old former military officer could reasonably have kids at home and also pension income from the military.
- Many people inherit houses (most houses are eventually inherited). Most sell them, but it can be a viable choice to just move into an inherited house to zero out housing expense. OR one could inherit a house that is >> valuable than one's own, such that selling the inherited house allows one to pay off one's own house.
- Location. The Discourse typically divides between HCOL and LCOL, but ignores that in both there are also people who spend much less than the average. In NYC the average home price is ~$850k, but there are today listings for 3BR homes in the low $200s (<$1,500/mo).
And of course these are stackable. One could have a military pension and buy a cheaper place and have a buffer from an inheritance. (None of this is uncommon.)
they said "teacher" but also mention writing grants. A high school teacher isn't writing grants, their wife could be bringing in a lot more than the typical teacher.
A tenured position in a reasonably good university can give you quite a good standard of living, and depending on your area, there are even opportunities for occasional consulting work.
Not to mention that the professional prestige itself in an academic profession gives your family a lot of status that other people usually try to attain by buying expensive stuff.
Even in the fanciest neighborhoods, nobody cares if a Princeton Professor drives a 20 years old Volvo.
I think the heart of what they're getting at is that while on paper they are bringing in less income, they have gotten off the hedonistic treadmill, and as a result, quality of life per dollar has increased dramatically. They are less stressed about finances than they were prior, even though their income is lower.
We live in a world where someone has to clean the sewers, unblock toilets, maintain electricity lines in snow storms, weld deep underwater, clean, wipe the butts of old people, and 10,000 other thankless, tiring, and dangerous jobs which no one in their right mind would ever do because they found it fun and interesting. Until we have very highly capable robots to do these jobs, we need some way to incentivise doing work which few others want to do, or are capable of doing. Right now we use money as the incentive. On top of that, there are things people do which bring a lot of value to others. They invent new things, for example, and sell them. Others buy them. We also want to incentivise that, even though it's not easy, and not everyone is capable of doing that.
I do think AI and robotics will usher in a much more abundant world in the future. It's unclear how we navigate that - economically, politically, socially.
Alternatively, you live in a society that has conditioned you to devalue manual labour and erronously assume that no one exists who actually enjoys physical interaction with the world.
As you're likely to be in the US, you could always watch the Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs back catalog.
> Alternatively, you live in a society that has conditioned you to devalue manual labour and erronously assume that no one exists who actually enjoys physical interaction with the world.
I think the burden of proof is on you to prove that the same number of people would be interested in wiping butts and fixing mains lines in snow storms if they weren't paid for it. To me this seems unbelievable and naive on its face, but I'm willing to keep an open mind if you have some evidence.
I generally think people who believe these jobs would be done without some kind of incentive have never worked them before. They suck. Sometimes jobs really do suck, but they still need doing.
It can be enjoyable in the context of failure analysis: troubleshooting, finding root causes, documenting other people's fuckups then tracing through the assignment logs on who interacted with the server last.
Leaving aside the scene from Life of Brian, I have no issue cleaning shit - I've raised children, they poop, I have livestock, they shit, kids will happily frisbee cow pats, raking out sheep shit from under shearing sheds is a job that I've done, as have many .. you end up with a couple of tonne stacked high on a double axle trailer that's great for the garden.
For what it's worth, I don't mind a bit of higher dimensional data reduction when processing raw multi channel data, or geophysical world modelling (magnetic fields, gravity, radiometrics, etc).
I'm heading to the Graeberian world of bullshit jobs which ironically tends to head towards the direction of meaning.
I'm pro "everyone cleans their own shit" but the meaning of a garbage truck driver could immense compared to a honest hedge fund manager or a VC Patagonia vest.
Cleaning time of our own shit hopefully won't be a full time job. We'll just figure out the ones creating too much shit and educate them as a society :D
>> We live in a world where someone has to clean the sewers, unblock toilets, maintain electricity lines in snow storms, weld deep underwater, clean, wipe the butts of old people, and 10,000 other thankless, tiring, and dangerous jobs which no one in their right mind would ever do because they found it fun and interesting.
>> I do think AI and robotics will usher in a much more abundant world in the future. It's unclear how we navigate that - economically, politically, socially.
Delusional optimism. If AI and robotics take over, the only effect will be another wave of layoffs and unemployed, not even the willingness to unblock toilets or wipe butts will save you from homelessness and destitution. We're already on the way to Victorian era poverty, if robots take the shit jobs too, we're back to Oliver Twist: please sir, can I have some more ... tokens?
Given how we handled the industrial revolution and more recently, the destruction of Midwest industry in Chinese offshoring, you may very well be correct. People will cheer cheaper products and services while watching unemployment rise around them.
However if it happens so fast, and so many of us are impacted, I have to believe that will impact how we vote.
How many acres are you personally willing to farm to let others eat without payment “in a just world”?
How many days per month are you willing to pick up trash, sit in a fire station, or teach elementary school?
It’s not slavery (if you) that other people won’t give you their output without payment. In fact, it’s closer to being slavery in the other direction if they have to work and you get the benefits of their output without payment…
> In fact, it’s closer to being slavery in the other direction if they have to work and you get the benefits of their output without payment…
This sounds a lot like you've been conditioned to think there can't be an alternative to the current system. Even if I don't know what a better system would be, I can absolutely imagine that there are better options than what we've got. We should all want that and push for that and ask ourselves what it might be until we find it.
I can tell you this much about what I think would be part of that better system: we wouldn't leave people to sleep on the streets and we wouldn't have for-profit healthcare.
> I feel this fucking form of slavery as well hard
I think you'd do well to learn more about how slaves were treated before making these comparisons. Have you been whipped until your flesh opened and had salt, lime juice, and peppers rubbed in the wounds because you messed up at work, where you are also forced to lived?
I could see a world where cognitive decline takes place, but it's actually been the opposite for me. When I'm not fulfilling my responsibilities as my wife's assistant and taking care of the household, I have many hours during the day to pursue my own passions. I've also been much more structured with my time. I actively journal. I spend time with friends and family. I occasionally do things for fun like fly fishing. I set aside a specific time to read every day for pleasure and learning. I go to bed at a set time and wake up at 5am. I probably log anywhere from 8 to 16 hours a day doing agentic AI coding and design in Claude Code. Freed from the treadmill of employment and the grind of keeping up with the fast pace of deeply learning new technology, I feel sharper than I have in decades. It also doesn't hurt that my passion projects are generating income, which keeps me highly motivated and mentally engaged.
I'm sure those of you that read this probably think that I didn't retire. I think an argument can be made for and against this. I feel retired. I just don't fill all of my time with leisure which I think is the trap that many retired people fall into. The things that I do to keep mentally sharp are intentional choices. It just so happens that those things are things that resemble work.