Post: #1

Apologies if this overlaps other 'what would you do if financially independent' threads, but this is focusing towards specifically long term pursuits, where there is some sort of mastery that you can work towards.

For me work was always a means to an end, and something to be tolerated. Make as much money as quickly as possible, so that you can do things you really want to. Secondly, I was always a but of a natural minimalist, so after almost a decade doing oil and gas engineering, saving 80%+ of my pay, without even really planning towards it I realized my investments will cover my day-to-day expenses, but it only really struck home after reading the spectacular book "Your Money or your Life".

As in other threads, I did what a lot of other people said they would do. Lots of trips, a few short personal interest courses, too much partying, more travel, and eventually settled into what on paper sounded like an interesting, low stress job with a chance for travel.

6 months in I realized the job is like others. You get pushed around by certain higher ups who think they're the only thing between you and the food bank, BS politics, and boring coworkers with pedestrian problems. While there are certain fringe benefits, no one is passionate about the work, money is the only reason they stay, and if they had $1m tomorrow, they would likely quit. I push back a bit, after all what's the good of fuck you money if you don't say fuck you once in a while, at the same time, regularly telling the world to fuck off generally doesn't make things better.

This leaves me at a loss. I could quit, but then what? I was thinking going back to school, perhaps get a trade like mechanic as I've always enjoyed hands on work and seems similar but lower stress than engineering, work towards mastery in that. Unfortunately friends in the trades say it's a similar attitude to above. Few are truly passionate about it, and they want to wire that house as quickly as possible with as few questions from new guys as possible so they can go home and get back to their TV and 6 pack.

Perhaps an academic endeavor, astronomy, archaeology and paleontology have always been things I was genuinely interested in, but the current university structure leaves much to be desired, and then short of following through to PhD level and then working for a university, I'd be in a similar spot as now in a few years. I think I'm leaning towards this, as additionally, the academic world gives you access to some pretty unique resources or field projects.

In short I want an activity where you're surrounded by people so passionate about what they're doing they'd happily do it for free, and who frequently get so enamored in what they're doing they forget to eat and before they know it, it's 4am. Does such a thing exist?

Some people never want to stop working and their view of money/lifestyle is simply one of more is better-different strokes. If however you had all your needs met to a satisfactory level, what would you spend the next 40 years pursuing?

Post: #2

I'm more or less in agreement with you. Money is nothing more than a token of freedom. Being able to take less shit from a boss. Enough to be comfortable in a field with high satisfaction is paramount. Earning money for money's sake just results in getting accustomed to the new normal and realising you wasted your life chasing numbers and didnt enjoy many experiences.

Post: #3

Learn web development.

If you're looking for a group of folks that would engaged in the activity they perform at work even outside of work, you'll find those folks in web development.

Plenty of room for intellectual challenges, and as you dive into web development you'll also be exposed to unrelated fields that sometimes cross paths with web development, such as copywriting, affiliate marketing, and working with CMS. You may end up enjoying one or several of those areas more than web development itself.

Real estate is fun as well, there's many avenues to go down, and as you engage more and more you become more embedded into your community, it's cool.

Teaching, as long as it's on your terms and with good pupils, can be really rewarding as well for folks with certain personalities, but it has to be on very favorable terms to mitigate the negative aspects (difficult students, a difficult administration, etc.).

There's so many things you can do to keep your mind busy in the spare time between raising kids, making love, and entertainment, but there's also nothing wrong with living a life of leisure, don't let the modern careerism mentality guilt trip you into not living the life you want to live just because of some sense of obligation to someone else's ideals.

It's your life.

Post: #4

In a similar position here. Some great advice above but I would say be careful about going into teaching. If you work in a school you'll likely find the environment mostly female and infested with SJWs and left-wing political thought. It can be very difficult to tow the party line if you're not 100% dependent on the job. A male-orientated work environment may be a better option. Just something to consider.

Post: #5

Go self employed, best people you will ever meet are entrepreneurs or small biz owners.

Post: #6

(11-10-2017 07:03 PM)nomadbrah Wrote:  Go self employed, best people you will ever meet are entrepreneurs or small biz owners.

100% agree.

If you can dive into any of the fields I mentioned, but via your own enterprise versus as an employee, you could lead a tremendously satisfying life.

Of all the income-generating activities I've engaged in, the entrepreneurial activities gave, and still give me, the most satisfaction at the end of the day.

That said, it takes a certain kind of person to pull it off, so I can't recommend it to everyone.

Post: #7

I agree go self employed. Especially since you have FU money.
I've never been happier. No debt, good assets and while I don't think I'm in a never have to work again position like some, I could go many years without working. FU money to me is never having to work again and still have plenty as a safety net for the unexpected.
Just get good at something and be self employed and pick you jobs / clients and enjoy life. I think I'll work at least part time in the future as I found just endless holidays gets a bit tedious after a while. But I definitely would never work for a boss as long as I live, fuck that.

Post: #8

If you're completely covered on your day to day expenses, I'd say take your time and build something you really want to build. That gave me more satisfaction in life than anything. I just happened to stumble into work (my blog) that also started to make very good money.

With money on your side, you don't have any crazy deadlines to work towards. Why not travel on a more permanent level (ie staying 3-6 months in a place, not the typical expat/party life) while just slowly working towards some sort of self-sustaining online business? Sounds like you have a lot of interests, it would make sense to do some self-studying and then create something out if it, as I've mentioned here: /thread-65448.html

Final note - from an online business perspective, I can't tell you how many people have emailed me over the last year asking if I know anything about a 6 weeks on/6 weeks off kind of gig in oil, shipwork, etc. They want the opportunity to work, make good money, then have time for real travel instead of 2 weeks a year.

Why not create a website or some sort of resource for guys who want that kind of gig? If you did it for a decade you've certainly got the expertise. You might have the potential to help a lot of young guys out who want to build their own lifestyle of freedom and not be chained to one of the jobs you're now in and not enjoying. There'd be plenty of opportunities to make a bit of money from it too.

Anyways, if you're working for the sake of filling the time, you might find far more fulfillment in something like that.

And yes, you will find those people who are at the co-working spaces all night working on their online biz. The self-employed people who are creating something fit the mold you mentioned.

Post: #9

Money brings about freedom as mentioned above. What is freedom other than the acquisition and retention of POWER?

If the unit of financial currency [think of the energy transferred by an electrical current or by physical displacement] was the Watt or Joule per second instead of £, €, $; then people would realise that money is merely a representation of the value of energy that has been expended in the form of work.

All that is happening in the free market is that one party is exchanging a unit of work for a service or product that is provided by the other party's work.

Work = Force x Displacement

The time it took a man to achieve the work is his power which is what he receives money for.

Power = Work / Time

These formulae relate to physical work. Men do intellectual work too which can be compared with the energy in electrical equations.

Power = Current x Potential Difference

If Velocity = Displacement/ Time

Then

Power = Force x Velocity - now we can see that there is an element of violence involved in power which guarantees that in a free market, men will always earn more money than women. This "violence" requires testosterone to pump through a healthy body and mind.

You can see why women are attracted to power because they produce less of it physically and mentally but they produce a "potential difference" or physical displacement through child-birth.

This is the Matrix because we don't live in a free market. We are plugged into a system of Usury which uses our physical and mental work (energy displaced) over the defined period of the mortgage, loan and national debt (tax payers' work is the collateral) to transfer Power to parasitical elements which don't work. The usurer does not sow to reap but he lodges an account into the life force (force = work x displacement) of his host.

This is why the labourer is at the bottom of the pile and the banker at the top and in such a system, men who produce are less attractive to women - the value of work and masculinity is degraded.

Only if people saw that monetary currency is a Joule/ second or a Watt, they'd rip off the cables that transfers their power into the Matrix and take their freedom. Unfortunately most men will take the blue pill and try and earn "interest" off the back of a fellow worker.

Post: #10

Get bigger needs/wants, make more money, keep adjusting upwards, and aspiring beyond your means. It's great to have reached a point of base comfort, and it is an ugly thing to see older men who've not got to that point by the time it's too late. However, those masculine energies should be applied to their limits for as long as you have them.

One of the biggest things is to try to find interest in the work itself, for its own sake, and to allow that to enrich your life. If you work with engineers, as I've done, you ought to have some reflections on that character type. For as long as you work in that sphere you ought to observe them closely and build an ever greater understanding of them, allowing that to amuse and delight you, and occasionally surprise you. There are many things like this that can make almost any human endeavour interesting when looked at in the right way.

Whatever you do, it's important to recognise that there will be long periods of boredom, or at least limited stimulation, when you're just getting the work done over time. This can be punctuated by realisations, discoveries, and other seeming trivia which can in fact offer real colour and richness to your life. I hated working with engineers for the first year. I didn't understand them, their rigidity, their lack of creative drive despite their obvious intelligence and ability. Then after a year or so, I started to understand the character type better. I started to observe them, predict their behaviours and responses to stimuli, to find delight in their successes and better empathise with their frustrations - ultimately to share a little in the tragedy and comedy of their lives. After 6 years, I am still exasperated at times by engineers, but they are lovable and amusing and interesting to me too.

It's possible to have a very interesting life without a great deal of money, living as a minimalist - I've had to do that to get my businesses off the ground - but it's almost certainly better to have the interesting life of the mind whilst still fucking super models and racing Ferraris around the custom race track you had installed in your newly built mansion.

Post: #11

(11-10-2017 03:24 PM)Seadog Wrote:  Apologies if this overlaps other 'what would you do if financially independent' threads, but this is focusing towards specifically long term pursuits, where there is some sort of mastery that you can work towards.

For me work was always a means to an end, and something to be tolerated. Make as much money as quickly as possible, so that you can do things you really want to. Secondly, I was always a but of a natural minimalist, so after almost a decade doing oil and gas engineering, saving 80%+ of my pay, without even really planning towards it I realized my investments will cover my day-to-day expenses, but it only really struck home after reading the spectacular book "Your Money or your Life".

As in other threads, I did what a lot of other people said they would do. Lots of trips, a few short personal interest courses, too much partying, more travel, and eventually settled into what on paper sounded like an interesting, low stress job with a chance for travel.

6 months in I realized the job is like others. You get pushed around by certain higher ups who think they're the only thing between you and the food bank, BS politics, and boring coworkers with pedestrian problems. While there are certain fringe benefits, no one is passionate about the work, money is the only reason they stay, and if they had $1m tomorrow, they would likely quit. I push back a bit, after all what's the good of fuck you money if you don't say fuck you once in a while, at the same time, regularly telling the world to fuck off generally doesn't make things better.

This leaves me at a loss. I could quit, but then what? I was thinking going back to school, perhaps get a trade like mechanic as I've always enjoyed hands on work and seems similar but lower stress than engineering, work towards mastery in that. Unfortunately friends in the trades say it's a similar attitude to above. Few are truly passionate about it, and they want to wire that house as quickly as possible with as few questions from new guys as possible so they can go home and get back to their TV and 6 pack.

Perhaps an academic endeavor, astronomy, archaeology and paleontology have always been things I was genuinely interested in, but the current university structure leaves much to be desired, and then short of following through to PhD level and then working for a university, I'd be in a similar spot as now in a few years. I think I'm leaning towards this, as additionally, the academic world gives you access to some pretty unique resources or field projects.

In short I want an activity where you're surrounded by people so passionate about what they're doing they'd happily do it for free, and who frequently get so enamored in what they're doing they forget to eat and before they know it, it's 4am. Does such a thing exist?

Some people never want to stop working and their view of money/lifestyle is simply one of more is better-different strokes. If however you had all your needs met to a satisfactory level, what would you spend the next 40 years pursuing?

Hey Seadog, that is great news of your accomplishment. It sounds like I'm a few years behind you...worked in the Oil Sands as an engineer for 5 year, saved almost 1/2Mil, and would probably like to leave at some point, too.

So first I'd say, yes that is great that your investments cover your expenses. I'm wondering though if you've been slightly lulled into confidence on that matter by 1) Low expenses due to work covering a lot and no time to spend, 2) young age with no extra financial obligations outside your own, 3) The stock market is at the heights of a long long period of good returns, and it sounds like your timing for starting work and investing was quite fortunate.
I think you need to answer the questions honestly of whether you truly think your low expense lifestyle is what you want going into your late 30s and beyond, and are you sure your investments will sustain you or would you rely on the stock market going up continuously.

Next I'd say that I'm sure scientific/academic jobs do exists out there that people are ultra passionate about (I don't know I'm an oil guy like you), but even if they do, if you never pursued that when you were 20 what makes you think you have the passion to do it now? I also really liked astronomy, paleontology when I was a nerdy high school kid (Just went to the Alberta dinosaur museum for the nth time a couple weeks ago) but no I do not want to spend 5-10 years reading texts and doing bitch work and getting paid like shit to maybe get some PhD and become an ultra nerd with a book covered office that sometimes goes on cool work-related excursions a few weeks per year (probably more realistic than Indiana Jones).

Do you want a wife and family? I don't see why that is not a worthy goal for you put a lot of life focus on at this point. I would imagine that raising 3-4 successful kids for 30 years feels just as accomplished as having a prestigious career in some "passion" subject with 0 or 1 kids (because you didn't have time or energy for more).

As far as actionable advice...I'm not sure. You understand that the-grass-is-greener is a real symptom? And perhaps any pursuit that involves organizations of other people will have to deal with idiotic and malevolent hierarchy structures that inflict occasional suffering on you just like your current job?

I'd say that even though you've made this first hurdle of financial independence, your money pursuit should not be over at this point. Being early-mid 30s with ~$1M is great, but it's not $5M. You might find you have significantly higher expenses as you enter middle age and beyond that you are unprepared for.

If you truly can't tolerate it anymore as-is, maybe a change of employer? Or a change in the aspect of the industry you're in? Go consulting if you work for an industry major, or vice versa. Work towards a 5 year goal of developing your own consultancy in your area of expertise. Being late 30s/early 40s is a great time to start independent engineering consulting.

If you really want into the academic world perhaps stick with engineering? Get your employer to pay for a correspondence masters degree over the next couple years and develop a good relationship with professors at your university of choice. Then you'll have the next degree done while making $$$, and have your foot in the door for more advanced, meaningful work and a successful jump into academia.