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If you didn't have to work, how would you spend your time?

Imagine all your basic needs are covered: housing, food, healthcare, and so on. You don’t need to work for a living anymore. What would you do with your time?

I know this might sound like a bit of a dreamy question, but it’s been on my mind lately, especially as I see so many people working tirelessly day and night. Perhaps it’s time for us to slow down and reflect on what truly matters. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

PiecePractical ,

Depends on why/how my needs are being met I suppose. If this is a post-scarcity situation where everyone’s needs are met and no one has to work, I’d probably keep at my current job. I install and repair nurse call systems (the buttons you push in a hospital to tell the staff you need help) I mostly enjoy the work and someone is going to have to keep doing it. I live in a town with a huge hospital and could easily keep busy without leaving town.

If this situation where only my own basic needs are met and not everyone else’s, I wouldn’t keep going to that job. Management is kind of a pain and they can certainly afford to train someone who needs the work. I’d still fix whatever kind of shit I knew how to because honestly, I love working with a wrench but, I’d be doing it freelance at that point. I’d probably start by knocking on the doors of local machine shops, fixing machine tools and lasers was more fun than nurse call and if I wasn’t tied to one specific brand, I could probably keep busy without driving 4 hours a day (I quit that job because I was tired of travel). If that took off, I’d try to turn it into a business and train someone to pick up the slack so I could still take the occasional vacation without leaving regular customers hanging. If that wasn’t enough to keep even just me busy, I’d probably start asking around about other random shit that needed to be fixed. Lots of people deal with broken shit because they can’t afford to fix it and if I was only looking to stave off boredom, not having to make a profit, I could probably get it done affordably.

technopagan ,

In no particular order:

  • Finally do those after-class reading + tutoring sessions for kids in my daughter’s school.
  • Sign up for shifts on the “Good-Night-Bus” in my local town that looks after homeless people during night-time.
  • Play hand-pan, guitar & other random instruments at local relaxation spots to add to the overall atmosphere of "the good life"
  • regularly offer my handymen skills to my neighborhood via local web-platform and also contribute to “Repair-Cafés” as a helping hand
  • Find a local community-garden project to help out at so that the city stays 0.1% greener than without me
  • Offer my yet-currently-relevant professional skills (Frontend / WebPerf / CDNs / DevOps) to a NGO that couldn’t usually afford my wages (again: preferably something relevant to my region to feel a sense of impact)
  • Keep maintaining my OpenSource repositories and publish new ideas ASAP to prevent Software Patents
cobysev ,

This is actually my life right now. I retired from the US military at 38 years old and received a pension which I will collect monthly for the rest of my life. On top of that, they messed me up enough that I got the coveted 100% Permanent & Total disability rating from the VA. So I’m getting free medical and dental for life, plus a monthly paycheck from the VA that’s bigger than my pension. My wife also got the same VA deal (she was actually medically separated from the military), so we have double the VA benefits coming in.

All this passive income means we don’t have to work for the rest of our lives. I just turned 40, and after spending the last couple years getting settled back into civilian life, I’m starting to invest my free time into hobbies and projects.

My father just passed away a few months ago and I inherited his house (my childhood home) and its 6 acres of property. My dad didn’t take care of the house or land (he was a bit of a hoarder), so I’m working on fixing up the house and cleaning up the property. That takes up a lot of my free time during the summer.

I wanted to get involved in my community, so I’m on the parks committee and communications committee for my local township, where I help to improve our local parks and trails, and ensure information about our local area and its events is disseminated to all our residents.

I’ve been playing a lot of video games lately. I have a steam library of over 3,400 games and I’ve been picking through my library, trying to discover hidden gems that I’ve missed. My library is so huge because I’ve been a Humble Bundle subscriber for a long time now, so I get nearly a dozen games a month. I also play online co-op games with some old childhood friends of mine every week.

My wife and I picked up Duolingo again recently and we’re trying to learn a foreign language. I’m juggling both Japanese and Norwegian right now. I learned some basics of Japanese when I was stationed there 2 decades ago and I really love the language, so I’m hoping to master it. Plus, I have living descendants of my ancestors who still live in Norway and I’d like to communicate in their language one day instead of forcing them to use English to communicate with me. I also took 4 years of French in high school, and I was stationed in Germany for a couple years, so I have both of those languages cued up to learn if/when I get bored of my first two.

When I was 13, I discovered I was a prodigy at the piano. I taught myself how to play because I heard Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and really wanted to be able to play it myself. My wife is actually sore about it because her bachelor’s degree required that she take 4 years of piano lessons… and I’m still better than her at piano, without ever having a single lesson. Unfortunately, I haven’t touched a piano in nearly 2 decades, so all my skill has gone to waste. So I bought an electric piano recently and plan to re-learn how to play. In my childhood, I had to read sheet music and sort of figure things out myself, but in today’s world, there are all sorts of training and tutorial programs and videos online that I can use, so I imagine it’ll be super easy to get back into it.

My wife and I watch a ton of movies and TV shows. If we’re ever tired and just don’t want to be productive for a day, we’ll just sit on the couch and binge shows or movies all day. When we’re extra lazy, we’ll order DoorDash so we don’t have to cook. We live in the countryside, about a 15 minute drive from the nearest town, so it’s easier to order DoorDash than head into town for food some days. We always tip extra for the drivers, because we know our home is out of the way for them.

When I used to work, I always looked forward to the weekends. But now that I’m retired, I actually find myself hating the weekends and looking forward to weekdays. On the weekends, it’s always so busy in town. So many people running errands, eating out with their families, partaking in local events, crowding parks and trails, etc. But during the weekdays, everyone’s at work, so the town is quieter. Sometimes I like to go downtown and sit in a coffee shop or restaurant for a few hours and just idly browse my phone or read a book. Or go for a walk or bike in one of our parks and just enjoy the peaceful nature. Or browse some stores, knowing it’s just me and the shop owner. I’m not bumping into other customers, I can chat with store owners, etc. I’m starting to understand why old people like to chat up employees so much. It’s kind of nice when it’s not busy.

As a 100% disabled vet, I get free passes to all national, state, and county parks, and there’s a public park with a beach just a couple miles from my home, so I go there in the summer to swim and try to build my strength back up. It’s especially nice on weekdays because there’s no one there. I can swim laps and not worry about bumping into people. And since it’s just down the road from my house, I can head over there anytime, all summer long.

I have a few other hobbies and projects on the back burner. A buddy of mine wants to build furniture and I’ve always been interested in woodworking, so we’ve talked about maybe starting up a workshop in my garage. Plus, I was a pro at electrical engineering stuff in my high school years, so I’d be interested in learning more about that field. My house is in rough enough shape, my wife and I have been talking about just tearing it down and rebuilding from scratch, so we’re currently designing our dream home right now to see if that’s a feasible project. We have enough land that we’re interested in learning how to garden. Ideally, being able to live almost completely off our own produce. I’d also like to set up a giant solar panel array in our back field, so we don’t have to pay much (if anything) for electricity anymore.

Plus a bunch of other little interests that I want to indulge in over time. In the meantime, I don’t have much of a schedule. I go to sleep whenever I’m tired and I get up whenever I naturally wake. I’m a night owl, so that means I’m usually up most of the night and then sleep until almost noon most days.

I dunno what else… I guess I’m just living in the moment now, trying to focus on what makes me happy each day and not worry about trying to be productive or accomplished. I did all that when I was working, and now I can just focus on being comfortable. It’s a wonderful feeling, knowing that I have no commitments outside of my control. My wife wants to go back to work one day, but I think I’m done. I much prefer the ability to plan my own days on a whim and not get tied down with long-term commitments. Every day is an adventure that I get to choose.

HonoraryMancunian ,

Damn. Disability notwithstanding, your life sounds pretty fucking sweet (although sorry to hear about your dad’s passing)

pineapplelover ,

Your long ass wall of text is why I fucking love this community. Thank you for that incredible read and I wish you and your life the best life together.

pineapplelover ,

I think I’d still work because it makes me feel useful to society.

timeisart ,

under capitalism or an alternative?

makeasnek ,
@makeasnek@lemmy.ml avatar

I would work full time on contributing code and development efforts to !boinc , which is a software used by scientists to distribute massive computational workloads to the computers of volunteers for processing. All sorts of medical, physics, and math research gets done through it.

AgentGrimstone ,

Aside from being lazy and playing video games all day, I would like to learn new skills. I always said I wanted to try woodworking. A lot of my current skills involve being on a computer so I would like at least one that involves tools and using my hands.

jecht360 ,
@jecht360@lemmy.world avatar

Hike the entirety of the AT and the PCT.

Go bikepacking more frequently. Or go on a months long trip.

Make art - photography, digital art, linocut.

Help friends and family with projects.

That’s the short version. There are so many possibilities once you remove the need to be tied to a job/computer for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I would love to have the freedom to simply not work. I don’t want to be rich, I just want to be able to exist without having to work.

orgrinrt ,

There’s plenty of work right there. Art is work. Training is work.

It’s not that you’d want to live without work.

It’s that you’d want to do work important and meaningful to you.

No need to undermine it.

sajran ,

Software development and computer stuff in general is my passion. I enjoy doing it as a hobby even after doing it at work. If I didn’t have to work for money, I would probably work on some open source software. In fact that’s kinda my dream / goal - achieve financial independence and work on open source as I please.

cordlesslamp ,

10 hours/day on YT and Netflix

Depressed

Existential dread

Anxiety

Eat

Sleep

(In no particular order).

Etterra ,

Minus the existential dread most of the time, plus a constant lack of any hope whatsoever but same. Oh and don’t forget my eight fucking medications daily, and a few more less often or as needed. And therapy of course. And having regular suicidal/death centric thoughts.

So you have trouble falling asleep and waking up too? That part is fun too.

SendMePhotos ,

I’d love to say being productive, learning languages, helping the communities, doing good deeds, exploring the world, trying to fix the wrongs… But as of this moment, the above comment is the realistic answer.

ristoril_zip ,

If this is a transition from how I live now to never needing to work again, I’m guessing the first 6 months to a year would just be disbelief and slacking. Video games, TV/YouTube, etc.

I’d probably do more of the things I do with my limited off time: gardening, taking care of family & pets, taekwondo.

Honestly have no idea what I’d do once I became accustomed to it. Maybe travel? Participate in local politics more? Volunteer? I would definitely have a sense that I needed to do something to make my life “worth it” that I currently get from working to provide for my family.

It’s definitely a result of conditioning, not some fundamental truth of the universe. But nearly 50 years of that conditioning is hard to break overnight.

phoenixz ,

Spending time with my wife

Working on open source projects

Learning new skills, musical instruments

Practicing karate

Spending time with my wife

thorbot ,

I just sleep in and play video games and be depressed. It’s not good.

AdNecrias ,

I do that when I don’t work but will Monday, or after the holidays. But when I actually had time as in, I’m not going to have to be back to work for a long time, I’d start picking up useful stuff. Turns out the sleep in and games/ depressive state comes from expecting to have to go back to the routine again. That’s why how you react to time out when you are still pressured to have to work eventually doesn’t give you a good answer to this question.

RBWells ,

I agree with this. It takes me weeks, if not months, to really unwind.

golden_zealot ,
@golden_zealot@lemmy.ml avatar

I’d go to school and take every course I possibly could for the rest of my life or until I couldn’t.

blarth ,

I haven’t worked for almost a year. Mostly, I wake up, play video games, eat, and do some work around the house. There are pretty bad days where I feel worthless and tell myself pretty negative stories, but I’ve gotten much better at ignoring them. Now, I’ll be going back to work soon, and I’m terrified of losing my total free time.

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