Pkiernan wrote: » Best part is paying 54% tax to pay for the long term layabouts!
Pac1Man wrote: » Out of the house at least 12 hours a day including a three and a half hour commute on a good day doing something I have no passion for and yet have no fuel left (drive) to do anything about it! The thoughts of plodding along for the next 30+ years is horrifying! We are strange creatures.
dense wrote: » We can't all be supervisors.
wakka12 wrote: » Id love if work was 4 days a week. And we started a bit earlier, like 8.30, with just a 15 min lunch. Then worked 6 solid hard hours,no social media,chatting, fooling around, finish at around 2.30. How ****ing nice would that be? Though I wonder if that situation ever occurred we would just want more and more time off..People way back when worked all hours didnt they, i honestly know nothing about this topic but just remember from history class in school people just got like religious days off as holidays and only had one day on sunday as weekend, worked pretty much their whole life with absolutely no quality of life, and our current lifestyle was just fairytale fantasy
dense wrote: » Automation is apparently coming down the tracks which would leave one wondering how exactly we are to survive without the jobs we sometimes hate. We can't all be supervisors.
wakka12 wrote: » To the people saying you just don't like your job if you feel that way . I like my job, but I hate that my life feels like my job. I work pretty normal hours, 9-5.30, but along with commute, generally being tired and hungry and making food after work and needing a good sit down and rest,shower and getting to bed early enough at 11 to be well rested, it feels as though I nearly have no free time basically, even the free hours just feel like preparation for the next day of work. And of course trying to fit in a gym session when possible despite being exhausted but then if I don't I just get fat quickly due to my sedentary office job I can't even imagine how people balance this along with having children?? I find it miserable, I am only just starting out in my career and funnily enough Ive been thinking like the OP a lot the last while, how can I possibly stick this for the rest of my ENTIRE life. But then I think, my father and every one else I know put up with it for their entire life and they seem pretty happy and I must just be a self centre ungrateful twat I just think overall society has such a poor division of work and play. I know it sounds so first world problem , I have a nice home, nice things, and a nice job that so many would kill for, but whats the point of it all if you so rarely get to enjoy any of the nice things life has to offer? Its just all a bit depressing I also make decent wage, enough for plenty of disposable income, yet Im still not happy, I don't know how Id possibly stick the job if I was just scraping by just about affording rent, only enough left over for eating beans on toast for dinner, nothing left to buy anything nice on weekend. But that's the reality for plenty, I feel nearly sickened by how ungrateful I am after writing this post! Maybe Ill mature and my mindset will change, I hope..
Pussyhands wrote: » I was thinking of this but for some reason I feel like I'd need an awful amount of money. I'm currently saving about 15k a year but i live very frugally. 60k in bank. I was thinking of buying an apartment in the city and making some money with the price increases but feels risky when I don't plan on living there all my life. Though I would like to go travelling for a year and having the apartment would allow the mortgage to be paid off at the same time. The dream is having something to bring in 20k a year passively. How much would one need to retire around 40? New cars don't matter. Haha
paw patrol wrote: » while I can never say I'm wrecked at the weekends I understand the rest of how you feel. I'm 20years in prob 25 years to go OP and tbh it doesn't get any better.
looksee wrote: » You are assuming that life is going to go on the way it is at the moment. It is very unlikely to do that, you never know what is round the corner, good or bad. Live for the moment (with reasonable consideration for ambition, retirement, things to look forward to etc) - by that I mean work at making life as enjoyable as you can, with outside interests and doing your best with the job you have, while keeping an eye out to change if you need to. Be willing to grab any opportunity, or make serious change, that comes up. Don't try and anticipate what 10 years ahead will be like. Its absolutely natural, and too easy, to see life as a great shapeless blob of boring existence in front of you, rather than being depressed by it do your best to live with and also improve your situation. Take a chance, follow opportunity. If nothing else, go out on these long evenings and enjoy the sunshine, go for a walk, head for the countryside or the beach from work.
WhiteMemento9 wrote: Why are you still doing it then? I understand the need to survive and to do that you need to work. I just don't think we have found a good balance for people. Why are more people not questioning it all though? Why are we not out on the street saying, **** this crap, things need to be different?
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witchgirl26 wrote: » I'm in internal audit. It's a good variety of work. That said I have friends who would hate what I do. I was lucky in discovering what I like early enough in my career. I'm not all about career but it's enabled me to travel with work (not always as fun as it seems) and have money to do the things I want.
randomrb wrote: » I work as a trainee solicitor and most of my day is reading through files, many people would find that intolerably dull but I enjoy it and it is never the same each day. The point of all this is not finding a job that other people think is interesting but that you enjoy doing
Pussyhands wrote: » Doing the same thing. I mean, getting up early in the morning, doing a full days work, giving away the best hours of the day. Coming back, not really being able to do anything major. Weekends spent trying to rest as you're bollixed from the week. 20 days off a year. Stuck at a desk all day, probably leading to health problems later on. The hope of not doing it keeps me going but deep down the likliehood is I'll have to keep working.
WhiteMemento9 wrote: » People need more freedom.
Tom Dunne wrote: » But do you think people also need to take personal responsibility for their own fate? There is not a day I don't wake up thinking that I am a very privileged, middle-aged man, who is exceptionally lucky to be where I am today, in a job that I genuinely love (most days!) and where I get to make a measurable difference in people's lives. But then I also think, f**k it, I've worked really hard, I really have busted by behind to get where I am today. I was dreaming of this job since I was in my 20's, and while luck played a part in it, a lot of it was down to my own drive and determination. And I am extremely lucky to have achieved it, I never lose sight of that. Maybe I am the eternal optimist, but I firmly believe there is something out there for everyone, there is something that you can spend your days doing that doesn't suck the life out of you. The trick is in finding it.
ongarboy wrote: » I think a poor assumption is also being made that what you are doing right now at work is exactly what you'll be doing for the next 40 years. This is a way off base assumption to make. Ideally, people should be able to progress in a job and therefore allow new and better and different opportunities to happen for them (promotion, expanded role and more interesting challenges and varieties) or using those skills and experiences to move to a different more desirable job elsewhere. If you are in a job that doesn't offer that and you are unhappy about it, then you need to rethink what your priorities are for the future and retrain/reskill/upskill for a role that will appeal more to you. Whinging about it yet doing nothing to change it is a self defeating prophecy. In an era where we are blessed to be approaching full employment (latest CSO figures have the official unemployment rate down to 5.3% - the lowest since the Celtic Tiger), there are tonnes of opportunities and vacancies out there to do something different and make such a big leap. Also, this notion that you should be able to retire at 50, well and good if you can afford to do so from your own funds but if you are expecting the tax payer to fund it, dream on. How can the state and tax payer afford to subsidize 40+ year pensions as people live longer if they stop working at 50? We would be left with a situation with more people retired than at work. How would that be funded from such diminishing tax returns? If OP is someone who doesn't like work period and would rather sit around watching day time TV every day then I expect, should that happen, we'll see a new thread from them titled "Does anyone else get sick of the thought of watching Judge Judy, Ireland AM and Home and Away for the next 40 years?"
shesty wrote: » To the OP - you are in prime "Quarter life crisis" territory, I'd say. Sounds mad, but I went through it myself, and have heard more and more people going through it in recent years. You've been told your whole life what happens next - the next year's class, secondary school, Junior Cert, Leaving cert, then college (for most people), final year, graduation....and then it stops. And you come out and after a couple of years of work you're asking yourself...."is this it?is this all there is?" .It's a big huge adjustment, and probably a function of how our education system and society operates, but that's another conversation. At your age I was asking myself the same questions...practically had a slight breakdown as a result. And then I got over it, got back to work and decided ...this wouldn't be it. And then the recession happened, and we all know how that went. I lost my job, for a year. Puts a bit of perspective on things alright.Spent a year thinking about what the hell else I wanted to do, and didn't really have any solutions - but I knew what I definitely did NOT want to do, which was sitting in an office cubicle all day long.Admittedly I made a choice of career that facilitated that to a certain degree, because I knew that back in college. (civil engineering)....but there were no jobs. Anyway, the point is, if you aren't happy in what you are doing, you start thinking about what happens next. I have another good 30 years work ahead of me and there's no way I'm going to be in the same job for 30 years. Possibly not even the same career. I quite like my current job and would happily stay there for maybe - 10 years. And I'm not sure what happens then. But life has thrown a lot at me in the last 5/6 years, and I've grabbed a couple of opportunities that led me into all sorts of places (not all good) workwise, and it's taught me that you actually never really know what happens next. But you have to go out and grab it, and not wait for it to come to you. You ask how people balance this and kids. Well, it's very hard (I'm doing it) but there's one thing I will say - kids make you re-evaluate everything. I mean everything. It's hard to make change, but having kids can force you into it - be it forcing you to improve your fitness so that you are around for them, and give them good example, forcing you to move job so you see more of them, forcing you to change career so you can suit you and your partner's hours to fit family life. Some of it is bad, some of it is good, but change happens. You quickly realise, if you haven't already, that money is not everything - to me, time is everything. I can't buy time back, but I can always find ways to earn more money (in theory). You need to change your focus. Stop focusing on work and focus on outside work .Can you change your hours to fit an early/evening exercise class? Can you join a team sport to drag you out once a week? Can you pre-cook meals so you don't have to cook every evening? Can you finish early on a Friday and go somewhere - surfing, hiking, football, a trip, whatever. You need to make things more interesting, so you have things to look forward to, and there's no harm thinking about what you might do in work in the longer term. But sometimes you don't see that until you've done the crap bit for the short term first.
