Why were so many smart members of FIRE so clueless about their careers?

[stepford]

To be blunt, I've always been lazy. I knew I'd prefer not working even before I started working. Grad school was a means to avoid going to work. However, just because I was lazy didn't mean I was an idiot. I did the math and knew I needed to work for a while to not work for a longer while. Since I never found any profession I loved (though I did, fortunately, find one I was good at) work was always just a means to this end.

Finally after 25 years of playing that game it's time to start being the bum I was always meant to be.

 

[LoneAspen]

To be blunt, I've always been lazy. I knew I'd prefer not working even before I started working. Grad school was a means to avoid going to work. However, just because I was lazy didn't mean I was an idiot. I did the math and knew I needed to work for a while to not work for a longer while. Since I never found any profession I loved (though I did, fortunately, find one I was good at) work was always just a means to this end.

Finally after 25 years of playing that game it's time to start being the bum I was always meant to be.

I very much sympathize with this point of view. Although the first job I had out of college was exciting to me, I think it was only exciting because I was moving away from a small Southern town and living at home (I lived at home during college), to a metro area and my own apartment.

It didn't take me long to figure out that having to work, sit in a cube, do what somebody else tells me, and make THEM money...sucks.

Thinking back, in the almost 25 years it's been since I left college in 1990, the only job I had I truly enjoyed was as a real estate agent for 2.5 years, when I was running my own show. Every other job I've had has just been another unchallenging and unrewarding rat race.

I could wax poetic about how all those experiences "built character", made me a better person, blah blah blah, but if I could push a button and have been born into a wealthy family and never had to work a day in my life, I probably would.

 

[Amethyst]

Me three! I already was a character.

Amethyst

I could wax poetic about how all those experiences "built character", made me a better person, blah blah blah, but if I could push a button and have been born into a wealthy family and never had to work a day in my life, I probably would.

 

[Meadbh]

I very much sympathize with this point of view. Although the first job I had out of college was exciting to me, I think it was only exciting because I was moving away from a small Southern town and living at home (I lived at home during college), to a metro area and my own apartment.

It didn't take me long to figure out that having to work, sit in a cube, do what somebody else tells me, and make THEM money...sucks.

Thinking back, in the almost 25 years it's been since I left college in 1990, the only job I had I truly enjoyed was as a real estate agent for 2.5 years, when I was running my own show. Every other job I've had has just been another unchallenging and unrewarding rat race.

I could wax poetic about how all those experiences "built character", made me a better person, blah blah blah, but if I could push a button and have been born into a wealthy family and never had to work a day in my life, I probably would.

I didn't see it that way. To me, a career meant independence. I made the decision to go into a high paying field mainly because it was likely to lead to FI eventually. I was particularly concerned about loss of independence on marriage and being tied to the fortunes of some guy who might not turn out to be Prince Charming. I had both good and bad experiences that I had not anticipated. I did what I had to do. The interesting thing is that my career alone would not have made me FIRE. I got there with the help of an inheritance from my LBYM lower middle class parents.

 

[kaudrey]

I like my job. It is rewarding and I feel it is important. Everything is going as I planned! My parents retired at age 57, when I was in my mid-20s. My parents taught me to LBYM, and when they retired, my goal was to retire at the same age they did. Now, 20 years later, I am on track to do just that.

We actually could do it sooner, except for the issues around federal health benefits. I have to stay until 57 to get those, and that is a huge perk not worth missing.

 

[Finance Dave]

It's a funny thing about working - you love it for a long time, at least I did, and then one day you discover you really don't love it quite so much anymore.

How nice, if and when that occurs, to have achieved FI so that one can move in an entirely different direction . . . like ER.

I'm still as engaged in life as when I worked, I'm just engaged doing different things. And without those agonizing, annual self-evaluations, hallelujah!

AMEN!

I worked the corporate finance gig for 24 years at a F500 firm...and finally gave up the long hours, conference calls with China at 2 AM, diversity programs, spending an hour filling out a requisition to get a pad of paper, bi-ennial layoffs (aka rightsizing), and watching execs cut department budgets while they continue spending 4 days a week on the corporate jet that costs $10M.

I became a home inspector and now get to set my own schedule, start at 9 AM instead of 7 AM, avoid working with agents I don't like, tell customers who complain about our pricing (after they've agreed to it on the phone) that "I'll gladly leave the property now and you are welcome to call another inspector" and can take vacations any darn time I want (when I was in finance, there were two weeks each month when we were reporting the results that we were forbidden to take vacations and in quarter-end months when we reported to the SEC there were THREE weeks in those months we could not take vacation.

Yes, I took a pay cut of about 60%...but it was WORTH IT! For now I'm working 5 days a week....but starting in 2014 that goes to 4 days a week (self-imposed), and then in 2015 I plan to only do inspections 3 days a week. We'll see what happens after that...but I'll probably just "fade away" after a few more years LOL.

 

[Keim]

Better change that name from Finance Dave to Inspector Dave.

 

[Finance Dave]

Better change that name from Finance Dave to Inspector Dave.

Can I get a moderator to do that for me? Help LOL

 

[Spudd]

I got my job at Megacorp as an IT person. I loved it. It was tons of fun, even the 4am wakeups from the pager I enjoyed troubleshooting.

Then we outsourced our IT and I was unlucky enough to be in a sub-department that wasn't outsourced. My job was still fairly technical at that time but I was starting to get poor reviews because I was not business-oriented enough. I transferred to another part of the company that was supposed to be more technical, but once there I found that it was pure management work. My job now is just to manage our contractors. There are no technical jobs left anymore.

There's just too much politics and BS. What I like is problem solving and being hands-on, and there's none left.

 

[ziggy29]

To the recent comments, I'd add this:

Between 1987 (the day I took my first career-oriented Megacorp programming job) and 2013 (the day I was downsized out of said career), the working world and corporate expectations changed.... a LOT, and only rarely for the better. This was especially true after the start of the 21st century, when the BS bucket started filling far faster than I could empty it out.

Over the years there was more and more bureaucratic nonsense and status reports, more recurring "compliance training", more and more layoffs, more and more benefits reductions, budget cuts and pay freezes (even when Megacorp was posting record earnings), more and more work to be done even as you had fewer and fewer people doing it (turning 40-45 hour weeks into 55-60 hour weeks -- salaried, of course, no extra pay)... more of a corporate attitude that employees were disposable resources to be mined, consumed and discarded -- not to mention the senior management's "motivation-by-fear" that comes with it. And, of course, more of a corporate mindset that you should be thankful to them for having a job at all, even after they have you doing twice the work at 20% lower inflation-adjusted pay. (Translation: More and more people would beg for your job for even less pay than you are getting now. Shut up and get back to work, or the door's that way.)

In short.... in my experience, life as a foot soldier in Corporate America is simply becoming more and more dehumanizing and demoralizing. And less and less of it is actually doing the things you studied to do in the first place. So what seemed like a good idea in 1987 (and it was for a while) had me questioning why I was still doing that stuff, say, 20+ years later when it was starting to impact my health.

 

[akck]

I decided to go ahead and throw my story in here too.

Starting out, everything went well and I'd bet retiring was not even a thought in anyone's mind, except maybe for a select few. I started out in the forest products industry, working out in the woods. After several years working, I saw the writing on the wall and the industry was going into a decline. MBA degrees seemed to be needed to advance further, so I decided to go back to school.

One other thing, which became a pattern in this and future jobs, was when new outside management came in (vs. in-house promotions). Seems for one reason or another, a conflict with management resulted in me moving on. Okay, I leave when office politics is pushing me closer to the path of a moving bus.

After the MBA degree, I moved to a position that provided rapid advancement. In came a new level of management and pattern repeated. This though was a lucky move as I got a job with pension benefits. I thought this would be my final job, but alas, my boss retired and in came the Wicked Witch of the West, who took all the credit and passed on the blame. So I'm now on my final job and of course my boss retired before me, but this time it's an incompetent manager. Fortunately, I'm close enough to retirement that it doesn't matter.

So it's not that we pick jobs that we hate. Sometimes the hate is thrust upon us.

 

[meierlde]

Better check your laws before you decide to take any action on that. I'm quite certain that it is illegal to distill alcohol w/o the proper Federal license.

It is legal in all states to brew beer or make wine, up to 200 gallons per household, 100 gal if only one adult (some states might have tighter restrictions?). Distillation is a whole 'nother matter.

-ERD50

Actually that provision dates back to the Volstead act and Prohibition. During that issue you could buy dried grapes add water and yeast and make wine.

 

[Co2012]

Very few people want to work forever. As for myself, I was looking to retirement after the first day. Work was a distraction keeping me away from what I really wanted to do. Although I gave 120% while I was at work, I could not wait to leave and any overtime was completely out. I was not fortunate enough to find a job I really loved. Now if I had been a professional bowler that would have been a different thing.

I do think that people can be clueless as to when to retire. For example a person who has 40 - 50 years service who has all the money he needs, no insurance issues. And in in some cases has passed their usefulness and others have to take up the slack. (I worked with several people like this). There are so many college kids coming out who are working for minimum wage or can't find a job at all who would love to get their foot in the door. In the building I worked the youngest person was like 42 and that was young compared to everybody else. And throughout the whole system the people with over 30 years service far outweighed anybody else (but to be fair, I do have to say that a person could retire at any age as long as you had 30 years. We had some going out at 48 with full pension). Then when a lot of these people retired, they would come back in some way again taking jobs from someone who really needs it.

Sometimes it really can't be helped as in the case of one co-worker with over 35 years service who could not quit due to needing her health insurance for a sick husband. Not many people knew this and when there were layoffs she would get dirty looks and snide remarks because a newly hired worker with a family got laid off. She really felt bad. While another co-worker with close to 50 years' service who fell in the category of having all the money he could use (or so I heard), could care less. His feeling was oh well. What am I suppose to do all day? Finally last year he did retire and I saw him at the store. He looked great and said that he wished he had done it sooner. He had even remarried.

 

[ER Eddie]

I think the general answer to the OP's question is that we can't predict the future or control events. We do our best to make the choices we think will give us a happy life, but we often do so without much real world knowledge, and more than that, so much of life (most, really) is beyond ur control, unpredictable. We often end up in places we did not set out for. Granted, some of us get lucky and have a smooth ride. Many others do not. I wouldn't attribute it to "cluelessness" but rather to our inability to predict the future and control others/events.

 

[Danmar]

I think just about anything I could say has already been said. I loved my jobs for all but the last 5 years of working. Never really thought of retirement until then. People just get tired ,or bored, or lack the motivation once FI achieved. I think it is mostly us (not them) that change. I think your chances of career success are greatly enhanced if you are happy in your work. Too bad that more of us aren't happy longer. As well you would not expect a lot of great career stories on a RE site would you?

 

[Meadbh]

Why were so many smart members of FIRE so clueless in their careers?

Something went south. A lot of you folks obviously studied hard, made all kinds of sacrifices, maybe even went to graduate school so you could work in your chosen profession. And, now, many of you are counting the days, months, years, or decades looking for the time you can quit the job you hate. Now, I understand that many of you just want to retire early to get on with your lives, but what about the others of you? What happened? What didn’t you account for?
(Ah, duck, is this any way to make friends)?
And, maybe more importantly, how did I make this post green?

Because times change.
And I know how to make text green.

 

[redduck]

Because times change.
And I know how to make text green.

It's not nice to tease the elderly.

 

[Amethyst]

Oh, I dunno. Why should some people get a free pass just 'cause they're old?

A.

It's not nice to tease the elderly.

 

[redduck]

Oh, I dunno. Why should some people get a free pass just 'cause they're old?

A.

Some old people shouldn't. I should. Now you know.

r.