[jwells89]

Exactly, it's the opportunity cost.

When I was a young adult and especially a teenager, I spent a lot of time making things out of pure desire to because I didn't have to think too much about my financial situation (present and future). That unfortunately gave way with age, and now ~15 years later whenever I engage with these activities there's a voice in the back of my head nagging, asking how doing those things instead of something that could potentially bring a financial return might negatively impact ability to achieve short term goals, tide over periods of economic uncertainty, have enough money for retirement, etc.

It's probably not the right way to think since personal projects that might seem unprofitable on their face can bring benefits in unexpected ways, but it's a problem nonetheless.

[qb1]

I am in this boat with you. How do we get out?

[jwells89]

Great question. The feeling clearly isn't based in logic; somehow watching a TV show or playing a game (neither of which is financially productive) instead of working on "just for fun" side projects doesn't elicit the same mental response unless I really couch potato out and do those things for hours on end. That makes it a bit more difficult to work with.

[Vegenoid]

Probably because of the feeling that you only have so much energy for each bucket. Watching TV isn’t taking energy from the dev bucket, but working on a fun but personal project does take energy from the dev bucket.

Of course, this isn’t how it actually seems to work - there is some truth to it for most people, but if you “overdraw” from one bucket and “neglect” another bucket, they will change sizes.

[komali2]

In order to experience the upper tiers of relaxation and life enjoyment capitalism offers (pure free time with no external pressures to sell your labor), you have to be successful by capitalistic metrics. You aren't going to be a billionaire so power under capitalism isn't available to you, so instead you'll need to sell your labor until you have enough money to exploit and sell someone else's labor at little cost to you. If the word "exploit" makes you feel icky, think of it more positively, like the way one might exploit a gold mine: by mining it.

At 4 million in the bank (and various assets) you should be good to "escape," if by escape you mean "not need to sell your labor to live" anymore. 4 million gives you more than enough residuals to live off until death. Less if some of that is in property so you don't have to pay rent. Less if you retire to southeast Asia and engage in geographic arbitrage. You spent years paying for carrier groups and precision missiles, why not reap the rewards?

So far as I can judge, this is the only way the system permits escape.

If you're interested in permitless escape, one of my favorite introductions to the subject is "Walkaway" by Cory Doctorow, a wonderful amalgamation of hacker culture, anarchism, sustainability, anti capitalism, and communism. Even if you think some of those are dirty words, if you're at all interested in EV tech, 3d printing, batteries, solar, zero trust ID, or transhumanism, you'll probably enjoy that book. He basically just answers every "but what if..." you could think of for a group of hackers living in an abandoned rust belt town.

Personally I'm right now very interested in food forests and tech projects researching local supply chain production of equipment, such as https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ the global village construction set and https://simplifier.neocities.org whoever this person is that's been documenting their efforts building things like solar panels and circuit boards in their garage from raw materials for nearly the last decade.