I will counter with one (older person's, I guess) observation of a bunch of my friends who are now in their early to mid fourties and late thirties. The one's who focus on making a career and accomplishments, be they for social value or greater equality for all or the justice in society being more balanced, etc. etc...... anyway, they end up at my age, when naturally, the larger group starts to drift apart a bit, looking around alone with their accomplishments being their only companion. That's great if you are only driven by business success/societal accolades. Super awesome and congratulations. You've figured out what makes you happy and I commend you. That isn't most people.
Take some of that spare time and energy and go out, meet some people and have some fun. Blow off some steam. Have some sex. Meet four or five significant others. Pair them down to the point where you're both (or whatever) are happy. Build a life together. And stop rushing around. I know a bunch (most) of friends who are on their third or fourth spouse because they were in such a hurry to get things done, they never took the time to figure out who their significant other was, who their friends were or why they liked them or who, in fact, they really were.
Don't fill the hole inside of yourself with hollow accolades and useless trophies. Take some time to figure out who you are and what is really going to make you happy. Experiment with different things. Fail. Try something else... You know. Live your life. Have fun.
Now. That being said. I doubt this will be an overly popular sentiment. But when their friends start dying, they'll see them all start saying the same sorts of things, and none of them are, "I wish I'd spent more time working."
P.S.
If you want to figure some stuff out and do some good, go volunteer at an eldercare facility. That can be you in 50 years (I'm guessing at ages here, forgive me). Sitting in a home, alone for the most part, wishing people would visit.
Building a happy life with strong relationships is important to the society at large. Trust me. Society without happy people without friends is fucking terrifying.
> But when their friends start dying, they'll see them all start saying the same sorts of things, and none of them are, "I wish I'd spent more time working."
I hear this a lot. But I'm not sure if this is always true. I chose an education path that required a much greater amount of work than other paths I could have taken. I would spend weekends working on homework and projects when others were out having fun. But as I start my career, it seems to have paid off (so far). I have a better work/life balance than many of my friends due to sacrificing some free time earlier in life.
Now I wonder: if I work hard in my 20s, can I retire a decade earlier that I otherwise might have? Or (more likely) can I save up enough that I can start spending my time working on projects that are entirely self-driven? Saving and working hard early in life can also result in a lot more time to spend with family later on. In other words, there is a tradeoff between voluntarily working harder earlier in life and effectively being forced to work hard later in life. Sure, you could be struck by a meteorite today, and you would never reap the reward from all of the work that you put in, but the much more likely scenario is that if you don't put in enough work in the front end, you will end up working 9-5 at 70 years old. So I can see many possible situations arising later in life where I think "I wish I spent more time working".
You seem to have missed one very valid option, the middle road, you don't have to trade free time now for free time later, there is in my opinion a happy middle ground to be had (like most thing life, politics being the primary one).
Sure you could argue that you get more free time later if you give up free time now but then you enter into the difficulty of quantifying the quality of the free time. When you are young, active and healthy you might be able to enjoy your free time more or perhaps having more money later in life allows you to do things you enjoy more, either way I feel balance is the key.
Do you really want to spend your most productive, healthy and free/uncommitted years working too much just to have more time when your body is starting to weaken and many of your dreams start to become impossible?
Do you want to spend less time with your children for the chance to have more time for your grandchildren?
B.S. chemical engineer -> Ph.D. chemical engineer -> data scientist
The "working a lot" was mostly the last couple years of my Ph.D. where I would frequently pull all-nighters to finish everything I needed to, but I'm glad I did that now. It's not nearly the optimal path for rapid wealth accumulation, but it's a good balance between having work that I enjoy and having enough leftover time to work on startup projects and hang out with my family.
Anyone who builds accomplishments without building lasting and deep relationships with people around them has done something wrong in the process.
Early in life, I had a small amount of artistic success (music). Though I probably couldn't have gone big with it, I did enjoy some amount of regional fame. Hard work, definitely an accomplishment, and I built several friendships out of it that have lasted over two decades (as well as lots that did fade away in time).
Similar thing with a startup I cofounded several years ago--the problem we were solving had me out in the public eye for a while, and I ended up building friendships with lots more people...people I'm still friends with.
And you know, if not for the relationships I build, some of which turned into lasting friendships, I wouldn't have had the success in the first place.
Nothing goes anywhere in life without people around you, helping you out. If you don't treat those people as the most important part of whatever you're doing, you're doing it wrong.
>Anyone who builds accomplishments without building lasting and deep relationships with people around them has done something wrong in the process.
This is one of the fundamentals of leadership, and leadership starts with leading your own life. One of the other fundamentals is awareness -- self-awareness and awareness of others, which these comments seem to be touching on.
I, for one, wish I'd spent more time working, earlier in life, so I could've saved enough to make work optional now. Nothing like having a whole day free, to give you that "I wanna start a project" feeling.
>But when their friends start dying, they'll see them all start saying the same sorts of things, and none of them are, "I wish I'd spent more time working."
The issue here is we do not know the true spectrum of outcomes with and without working. I assume many people who say "I wish i worked less" on their deathbeds presume that all the trappings of their work would come with.
I would trust it more if people paired what they'd give up with what they want to gain. ie if they said "Putting my daughter through college wasnt worth it, I wish i worked less". Or (more realistically) "I wish I spent less money on luxury, so I would have had more time with people".
Also a note of caution, any time you're wasting time thats marginal time you will be begging for on your deathbed. "I wish I had one more day with my wife (or kids)" -- today could be that day, instead of wasting it, use it up fully.
im not sure the drifter-bro-waster life of idle leisure is that satisfying. Your telling me people at the top of their careers, yan le cun (deep learning etc) are not having constructive, exiting, shared, social fun? you think hans zimmer has an isolated boring life? stress in any case has more to do with context and attitude than it has to do with the profession you practice.
Being at the bottom of one's craft doesn't equal happiness either. Accomplishments in a field are not a replacement for a healthy outlook, but they have their merits.
