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“Free”
Both my parents retired. Are they living it up? Are they checking things off their bucket lists? Nope. They’re having emergency surgeries, planned surgeries, going to the doctor all the time, taking a regiment of pills or they die, and hanging around the house because they’re old and their mobillity isn’t great.
A just reward after a lifetime of work.
It’s a scam, friends. You’re going to work until you’re dead or until it doesn’t really matter anymore whether you’re dead or not.
I used to get downvoted to shit for saying things like this, but enjoy and use your youth.
No matter how you treat your body, you do not know what will happen to it. You may be athletic, rarely ill, an extremely healthy eater. You can still end up with a genetic condition you didn’t know about, with a cancer you never fully recover from, losing all of your limbs, losing your bowels or bladder. Dying. All kinds of things.
All of this can happen at any time in your life. Any time. You are not safe from bodily ailment just because you are young and apparently healthy.
Even if nothing happens until you are old and decrepit like a healthy person ought to be, you will still have lost the best years of your life.
Hey, I’m ~40 and this is that I do, too! Plus work.
0-10 years.
You can die during the first 60 at any time, never making it.
Or never retire due to circumstances outside your control in your working years
40+ years is a long time for shit to go wrong
Die before retirement? Well that’s one way to escape wage slavery 😄
I’ve watched multiple co-workers not make it to retirement.
Really makes you want to keep doing it.
All the people I know that died did so once they were retired. No thanks, I’m never quitting the work force. You know how many people I know that died from drinking and driving? Zero.
i think about this when looking at the deduction % on my paystub i chose for retirement savings i may never use
At least it will give your children or siblings something to fight over when you die.
only 1 child, so he has it easy, unless i remarry, then it may get spicy
How selfish of you to deny your fortune to be able to contribute to the wealth of the chosen few!
This framework fails to consider all the time between those main activities, which we spend shitposting.
Indeed, most days consist of 8 hours working, 8 hours sleeping and 8 hours shitposting.
The only thing missing from this is the quest for a cruelty free pee, that seems to take up most of our lives these days.
What?!
It’s not my job to educate you
I generally know what cruelty-free means, but searches for “cruelty free pee” just yield regular stuff about cruelty-free products, as well as some anti-odour thing for pet pee… ;n;
Cruelty free pee is pee that didn’t burn when it came out. It’s so cruel that God does this to me.
Can relate.
Did you know that it’s possible to bleed to death (or, in some of our cases, almost bleed to death) as a result of chronic hemorrhoids? Because I do now! Also, blood transfusions kind of suck.
Yikes… Good luck with that.
Are you named for Gongitsune?
Nope! I don’t think my parents named me after anyone or anything. They just picked a common but not too common name with a respectable meaning.
/unshitpost
I have no idea either
/reshitpost
Try harder, colonialist
40 years? Try 50+
I started working at 14-15, and I’ll be happy if I can retire at 65
I’m expecting 13-73.
I was free from 0-6.
I am going to study from 6-27, roughly, though also working in the meantime. Let’s call that 20 years.
I intend to work from 23-50, at most. Hopefully less. That’s 27 years.
There’s some overlap.
Let’s say I die at 80 (I’m almost 25). A slightly early death, on average.
That’s 36 free years. 27 years of work. 20 years of study.
36 free years VS 44 work/study years
Methinks possible. Methinks not so bad?
I’m curious on how you plan to retire at 50. Doing that where I live means you basically get no pension so you’d have to have saved up enough to live the rest of your life during those 27 years, so a bit over half your income would need to go into a savings account.
Look up “FIRE” for “financial independence, retire early.”
tl;dr - save a larger chunk of your salary and
invest itbecome part of the owner class, living off theinterest, dividends, and capital gainssurplus value generated by the working class.
I’m curious how you were free at the time in your life when you have the least amount of freedom to make any decision whatsoever (0-6).
And I think part of the point is that you are not free in your retirement years because your body is old.
I’m curious how you were free at the time in your life when you have the least amount of freedom to make any decision whatsoever (0-6).
Well, I guess that’s debatable, sure. I was thinking in the sense that I wasn’t studying or working, so the last option was that I was free. I guess you could say that that is a different kind of thing altogether? I was constrained both by my parents attempting to raise me and by my stupidity, weakness, frailty, and overall lack of understanding of everything on account of being a tiny child. Still, I think I had huge freedom, in that I was being guided by my seniors, though there was really nothing I had to do, and everything I needed was provided to me free of charge. I don’t know, sounds reasonable to me to call that freedom.
And I think part of the point is that you are not free in your retirement years because your body is old.
Personally, I think this is absurd! There’s definitely something to that, I agree – disease, for example, definitely hinders one’s ability to enjoy life – but there are many older folks that are perfectly healthy and capable of living fulfilling lives in retirement. My grandmother (mid-70s), for example, and my own father (mid-50s) are shining examples! They’re both very active physically, which is something that I myself have been doing for about 2 years now, in preparation for my life post-retirement.
Also, I think that sort of mentality is destructive. Do you dread old age? I certainly don’t! Not only do I intend to stay healthy, but even if I don’t, I intend to keep doing things I enjoy. Are you marathon runners or something?! I enjoy reading, eating good food, riding the train, art, and nature… I don’t suspect my old age to rob that from me. Not until I’m way old, anyway, and by then, I shall die after having enjoyed many great things for many years, I hope, with a smile on my wrinkly and sun-damaged face.
Sure, but you should not expect to be healthy in your old age. Hope for it, plan for it, sure. But also realize that you don’t have a whole lot of control over it in the end. Use what you’ve got while you’ve got it.
And no, I don’t dread old age. My genetic problems reared their heads long ago.
Sure, but you should not expect to be healthy in your old age. Hope for it, plan for it, sure. But also realise that you don’t have a whole lot of control over it in the end. Use what you’ve got while you’ve got it.
To an extent, I agree with this. Of course, any number of things could (and will) happen, outside of my control, and some of those things might cause me sickness and hurt my health. True, and I accept that, as we all should. But I shouldn’t expect to be healthy? Why not?!
Not as healthy and capable as I am now, certainly, but healthy? Yes. I think I should expect it. Living a healthy life, making the right choices for my long-term health… I’m stacking the deck in my favour. If something happens to me, alright, but why would I expect to be unhealthy when I’ve seen first-hand and second-hand and third-hand that it is perfectly possible to be old and healthy? I think you sound like a fatalist.
And no, I don’t dread old age. My genetic problems reared their heads long ago.
That’s really unfortunate :C I do hope you still find joy in life :D
I’m really not. Quite the converse, really: I think that people take the present for granted, and their futures as well.
But thank you. Life is often tedious but has plenty of joyful moments.
36 years as a walking corpse that society no longer wants, outside your grandkids. So you have to perpetuate the cycle to feel anything. Oh, and some beautiful landscape and nice things you can buy, again, while you rot away, and no one cares what you have at all, no one to share with.
The philosopher Emil Cioran had an interesting take on this. If I read him right we can stop looking for the meaning of life. It won’t make us happy to look, but it also won’t make us happy to stop. Nothing will make us happy.
Credit: Sidney Harris
I don’t get it.
Anf then you move to western or northern europe. Wait you guys got childhoods? Wait you guys get actual 6-8 hours of work a day instead of having 4 hours of unpaid overtime after it? Wait you guys get to retire at an age and health condition where you just travel poor african and asian countries for another 15 years being racist in some very strange colonialist manner?(this last one being a critique)
Free? That’s when your kids send your grandkids for you to take care of. Ungrateful bastards…
Parents are the ones who should be grateful for their children. Parents are the ones who wanted the children.
The Beatles had the meaning of life in a song back in the day- Life Goes On
That’s it, it just goes on
If you’re lucky you have a kid
40 Hopefully!
The meaning of life? Learning to enjoy it. Realizing that even though it’s a grind sometimes, every instance is something like a miracle, because given all the things from a microbiological scale to an astronomical scale that had to align in just the right sequence for this moment to occur, the probability that you’d even exist to be reading this message is so incredibly close to nil and yet it is happening.
A significant minority don’t see that as inherently positive, much less providing meaning. Random chance and now you had to deal with all of this.
I have also felt that way when I was depressed, and found that, for myself, my current perspective is much more conducive to an enjoyable life - - it was brain wash myself or be miserable, and this worked well. I understand though, that my journey is my own and I don’t fault anyone for their perspective either. So I guess, if I’m a bit more honest, this is just the meaning of life for me.
Another way I see it is that meaning itself is the meaning of life. We are meaning machines, it’s what we bring to the universe. Without us the universe truly is meaningless and for that reason I feel life is immeasurably valuable.
And to be perfectly blunt, what you describe is beyond a victim mentality, it’s an entire victim identity, and I’d recommend finding a less self destructive path.
You’re doing a lot of projecting there. Or assuming. I’m not miserable and I don’t need a destructive life.
Don’t mistake this as me saying this work-til-you-die shit is okay, cause it’s not. But freedom is as much a mindset as it is a material circumstance. There are people who have everything but freedom and there are people who have nothing but freedom.
You think you are going to retire for 5-10 years? Cute.
