[ChiMan]

The moral of the story: Don’t quit your job unless you have an employment contract for another one or if you have a reliable, growing side hustle that generates enough income to live on. Real life bites hard, and $80k is peanuts.

[titanomachy]

Did we read the same article? This guy is spending his time learning music, mastering a sport, spending time with close friends, and your takeaway is “he should be grinding away at a corporate like everyone else”?

There’s a lot of different ways to live. Personally I like taking periods of voluntary unemployment to explore other interests. Finding a job after has never been a problem.

A large percentage of the population has at least some safety net. Probably the average 25 year old could move back in with their parents for a year if things got really bad.

[ChiMan]

In other words, the parents protect the kid from real life. No thanks.

[titanomachy]

Or allow the kid to take risks and do more with their lives than they would otherwise, and become self-sufficient in an interesting and unexpected way.

What would you want for your own kids? 45 years of grudging corporate toil, then death?

What’s the point of become a wealthy and prosperous society if we’re so goddamn uncreative about how we live in it?

[testval123]

That is privileged take. The things we take for granted in a 'prosperous' society- food on grocery store shelves, doctors available in the ER, plumbers to fix your plumbing, etc. etc. all require people to work 'standard' hours and follow 'standard' paths. The path of the 'creative' tech worker taking two years off is incredibly privileged, and I would argue infantilizing.

[navane]

The things we require in society doesn't need people to work 40h a week until they're 70 years old. The reason most people can't take two years off is not because society can't go without the fruits of their labor.

[nmilo]

No shit. The whole point of being a parent is to give your kids as much privilege as you can. Why are you talking like it's a bad thing? My parents moved here to bring me a better life than them and I'm working to give my kids a better life than me. Are you planning on hoarding all your money and making your kids stock shelves to keep them away from "privilege"?

[em-bee]

this is a common attitude, especially in china where i have observed it, but it is much less common in europe. myself for example i am the total opposite. i don't know what my parents goals were, but i don't think it was giving us a better life. not that it matters though, because i am proud that i never needed financial support from my parents. i achieved more of my goals and dreams than my parents did of theirs because my parents, as imperfect as they were, gave me resilience.

and that is what i want to give to my kids as well. not privilege. i want them to learn that not everyone has it as good as we do, and that we need to work in order to have a better life, and that we need to help others do the same. perhaps this is itself a position of privilege to be able to do that instead of living in a comfortable place in europe where my neighbors would like to go to to have a better life.

[titanomachy]

If our society falls apart, it won’t be because I took a break from deploying kubernetes clusters for three months so I could get better at skiing and volunteer on the suicide hotline.

And yeah, this is a very privileged take. Is there some other way you’d prefer that I use my privilege?

[kirso]

This. I took breaks of 3-6 months in-between jobs to explore, learn and grow and it always led me to better opportunities, skill acquisition and moving to a better more stable life.

This essay is kind of radical but outlines a few amazing points of unstructured work time: https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/quit-your-job/

[mplewis]

This guy is spending more than he makes. Who is bankrolling him?

[titanomachy]

It sounds like he is bankrolling himself, by working and saving up money.

[baobabKoodaa]

According to the article, no he isn't