won’t you get bored?

Dec03
by TFS on December 3, 2019 at 9:00 am
Posted In: Random Thoughts, Rants

Not with this set up!!!

 

It’s one of the most predictable rejections to the idea of FIRE out there isn’t it?

We’ve all heard it before in many articles that go short on the FIRE lifestyle.

The funny thing is, recently I’ve disseminated the idea (nay, fact!) that I’m handing my notice in this coming January to friends and family, and have not mentioned the words early retirement or FI at all. The former because that would be a downright lie, I plan to continue working on things that I want to do, and the latter because it’s likely I’d get an expression of confounded incomprehension (not to mention that would also be a lie because I am not and will not be technically FI either).

And yet the number one comment I seem to be hearing is that people think I will get bored.

Eh!?

I just don’t get this. AT ALL.

But… I guess they don’t know what goes on in my head[red]Where’s the Neuralink brain connector when you need one?!?[/ref]. So it’s a fair question, let’s dig into it a bit shall we?

 

anti-social behaviour

I will admit, there is the not insignificant worry of how to fill the void of social interaction that my job easily provides right now. I really do love the ease of which to find someone to:

  • Go for a run at lunchtime
  • Go and play squash
  • And my recently acquired hobby of climbing
  • Go for a beer after work!

However these problems are clearly not without fairly easy solutions. I could:

  • Join a running club (although to be perfectly honest I really do enjoy running alone)
  • Join a squash club (there are courts around 1 mile away from my house!)
  • Go to the local climbing wall and try to make friends (again 1 mile away from my house, and the walls are a lot higher than the one near work so may actually expand my climbing experience as well!)
  • Be a bit more proactive in keeping in touch with local friends for beers around where I live.

 

team work makes the dream work (puke emoji)

There also the social side of actually doing work which could fairly be described in a perfect world as something like:

Doing great work with great people all working together towards a shared vision you are all passionate about

I’m not saying there aren’t great people at my work, but the company is large enough now that interaction with the good ones is now few and far between, and I’ve long since stopped giving a sh*t about the companies “mission” or whatever you want to call it; which is basically to make as much money as possible 1

However, this is not to say I couldn’t get a job somewhere else with those lofty attributes in bold up there. I just think the chances of this are very, very slim.

Ultimately, I want to try the solo-preneur thing for a bit. There are bound to be connections I can make to others doing similar things (in fact I’ve already made a fair number of them through this blog and other online channels.)

While the chances of face to face collaboration seem somewhere between “fat” and “none”, you never know where things might lead.

Being perfectly honest, I’ve never really had an issue with getting down to serious sessions of solo work on the laptop/PC for extended periods of time, so I don’t see why that should start becoming a thing to worry about now.

 

imagination stagnation

The list of things any given person can want/attempt to do, even just limiting it to getting work done on a laptop, is now pretty endless.

And there is no reason why I would necessarily limit myself to that anyway; Part time gardener over summer sounds like a pretty fun gig, for example.

I haven’t mentioned many ideas of things that I’m interested in pursuing to people, so while they can be forgiven for not knowing exactly what I might do with my time, does this not show a serious lack of imagination of most people? I could think of 100’s of things I’d rather be doing than full time work without missing a beat, and no none of them involve watching TV!

Maybe that is part of the issue? Has TV turned us all into non thinking zombies with no idea of how to otherwise fill our relatively time abundant 2 lives? Or has it always been thus, with other things like books and whatnot providing distraction for the masses, with only a handful breaking free into independent thought?

Maybe I’ll build a time machine to go back and find out 🙂

 

soo… what then?

Here is a list of a few things just off the top of my head that sound interesting. I would imagine most people would have a list like this stored in their heads, but again given the “bored” comments, maybe this is not the case 🙁

  • Decompress – First and foremost, after 16 solid years in the work force I may need a month or two just to decompress and get into the swing of things?! (I actually think this is unlikely and I want to hit the ground running with other projects, but, it has been reported many times in FI circles that decompression is a *thing*)
  • Make a music album much like our friend The Mad FIentist (or at the least just get back into making music full stop!)
  • Part time gardening (summer only!)
  • Part time handy man – I quite like the sound of this and the varying nature of the work.
  • Learn to play guitar properly.
  • Learn to play the drums… hell yea!
  • Do an ultra learning style course (basically do an online course but try to accelerate pace of learning):
    • Online Masters in Computer Science from a premier US college, like The Saving Ninja
    • A Materials science course – I am interested in doing something that could help “save the planet” – I believe finding new materials (instead of plastic etc…) are a key part of doing this.
    • Robotics / AI / Machine Learning
    • Nano-technology
    • Learn 7* languages (*or whatever)
    • A proper economics/business course
    • Get consumed in numerous Wikipedia/YouTube/TedTalk spirals of death 🙂
  • Finish off all the small/medium DIY jobs that still need doing around the house (believe me this could take me a year in itself!)
  • Bigger DIY projects – Downstairs bathroom, Decorate spare room, look again into installing a ground source/air source heat pump(!?!?)
  • Fitness/Sports – Play/do a lot of and (attempt) to get really good at:
    • Squash
    • Running
    • Golf
    • Tennis (my friend is a tennis club member down the road from me, it’s really cheap so not against giving some new a go!)
    • Climbing
  • Investing
    • Gain a much deeper understanding of investing. Become the next “The Investor” 🙂
    • Build a great portfolio of early stage companies (I’ve decided that this is where the best gains are going to come from)
    • Becoming involved in Angel investing at a deeper level, providing support etc to companies invested in.
  • Actually making some money… we need to eat after all!
    • Continue creating simple yet useful online/web-bots that I could sell to potential customers to automate their day to day process (I think there is a lot of scope in this area, from my initial experiments and feedback!)
    • Freelancing
    • Improving the blog (maybe start with writing a post more than every 6 months 🙂 ) – and monetisation thereof
    • Starting up other websites with a more monetisation focus from the offset
    • Buying//Improving/Selling websites (Flipping)
    • I know people love this one so I’ll include it – Amazon Merch 😉

 

One final thought, as I’m now fast approaching no work D-Day I had a quick check on my daily plan I wrote back in April this year, and am glad to see that this still looks pretty good, for at least the first year of my post work life, at least.

 

What about your plans post FIRE? Will you keep yourself busy? 😉

Notes:

  1. I have no issue with this, and it’s the same as any other reasonably sized business, but why do we all have to pretend we are “customer oriented” and other such nonsense? Let’s just be honest about our goals! ↩
  2. Compared to people even 100 years ago who worked all hours under the sun ↩