Submitted 3 weeks ago by versiqcontent@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Find community work to do. Volunteer at a garden is my go to recommendation. There is no purpose more fulfilling than feeding those who need to be fed in my eyes. Humans need to feel like their lives have meaning and labor, disconnected from the alienation of waged coercion, can fill that void. Give it a shot.
You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.
But seriously… it sounds like you were letting the outside world define you. Maybe use the silence to try to define yourself from the inside out?
What do you want to fill the silence?
It’s such a relief to not need to go to a job I stopped liking many years ago, to work with people, half of whom I did not get along with. My job was a job, I did it for money to put food on the table, and keep a roof over my head. I liked it very much for about 10 years, then for the next ten years… not so much. The tasks never “defined” me. I traded my most precious thing, my time, for money–and never nearly enough.
I’m happy to be done with that, and have been for over five years now. I don’t miss it at all.
I’m happier, more relaxed, and healthier than I’ve been in 30 years.
I have over a decade to go, enjoy my job and the people I work with, but also looking forward to retirement to get away from spending so much of my time on someone else’s schedule.
What’s sad is what got you into this situation to begin with. Work shouldn’t define who you are.
Sounds to me like you were a workoholic. My brother-in-law has parents like that. I go to my sisters for the holidays, and there’s these two. We’re all sitting around the couch. We’re all relaxing. We’re all talking, and enjoying family time. Then these two are just nervously pacing around the room “ah, let me take that can, are ya done with it? I’ll recycle it! Can I take that plate? I’ll put it in the dishwasher. Do you want anything while I’m up? I could grab you some cheese, maybe some crackers? I saw fruit. How about a jalepeno popper? I could make some garlic bread. It’d only take a few minutes. Here, let me dust these drapes. Have you had enough cookies?”
Finally one day I just snapped. “LENNY! SIT YOUR ASS DOWN AND ENJOY FAMILY TIME! MERRY CHRISTMAS, OK??? THAT’S WHAT WE’RE DOING!”
Nice people. Very honest hard working upstanding people. But sometimes you feel like people working around you while you’re relaxing is too much. It feels wrong.
That kind of sounds like where you are. You spent so much time GO GO GO GO that now you feel uneeded and without purpose.
My advice is, think back to your busy time. I’m sure while you were working you said “man, it would be great if I had time for this hobby…I’d love to get into this hobby, but now everything is so busy!”
Well. Now is that time. Enjoy your hobby. And for gods sakes man! Sit down and enjoy christmas by the fireplace with your family!
Everybody is different, I suppose. I’ve seen people blossoming post retirement and falling into a hole. The level of enjoyment you felt for the work you did probably is an indicator of which end of the sliding scale you end up on.
What are you, as in you personally, doing about you feel? Learning to live with it, looking for a hobby, volunteer cause, part-time job? It might be presumptuous of me but I’m reading between the lines that you maybe want to continue feeling useful.
Why silence instead of literature? Why silence instead of philosophy? Why silence instead of learning new languages? While silence instead of learning and instrument?
No one is going to force you to enjoy your life; you have to take some responsibility for creating your own meaning.
My ebike. (Just a homebuilt but I've done 16000km/10000 miles over the last 3 years,
mostly on bike tracks, roads, some off road).
I like the freedom it gives me. Time to think, enjoy the environment and always a camera with me. I've started to dabble in writing, learning a new language - Korean - because I love k-dramas, especially period ones, that made me look into Korean history as well as their glorious cuisine.
The closest I came to 'heavy silence ' was a few decades ago when I didn't see another face nor talked to anyone for several days and I came to the conclusion that to a degree we're always alone.
These days I cherish that and when I want company or want to be helpful to others, I go out and do that, then return to my sanctum.
(Inner peace - outer freedom).
It’s probably different for everyone. My dad retired a few years ago, but he has far from stopped working. He does a lot of work for the church (he’s an elder), and he does a lot if work on the farm they live on.
I shared this with a friend, who has 5-10 more years to work and i thought she would respond about retirement. Instead she said that’s how she feels as a mom to adult kids.
I have 2-6 years to go. I really like the work but admin is becoming increasingly difficult to tolerate. It makes me sad to think about someone else helping my school kids because i bailed on them. Someone said you sound workaholic but it’s really just about feeling needed and productive and helpful.
Not as bad, but I had a crisis of self changing jobs. I left a management role I had for 15 years where I had visibility / notoriety at big 10 university and moved to a much better paying work from home job in industry an army of one with little oversight.
After 3 years I haven’t really figured out how to cope with it yet. Nobody looking to me for help, nobody to mentor, basically no meetings, no water cooler… Yeah I have lost some sleep, but I picked up chess, I got back into reading, and I’ve tried to add the structure back in that I gave up even though it looks different.
What I can say is that I definitely see what you’re getting at. I strongly doubt you were a workaholic or had some kind of unhealthy relationship with capitalism or whatever other crap is going on in this thread. I’m sure we will figure it out, but it is jarring to lose the sense of purpose / accomplishment / definition of leaving a well established role. Ive still got 15 or so years before full retirement becomes an option, so if you solve it, share the knowledge ;).
Find the audio recording for The Art of Mindful Living by Thich Nhat Hanh, and listen to it a few times.
Waaaah 🙄
Duckworthy@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
This person is just funneling people to their website to generate clicks on sponsored items. Their post history is similar drivel meant to make people click the link.
Tikiporch@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It gives AI, no?