Bad Habits in ERE

[sree]

One of my concerns about going into ERE in the next 1-2 years: Will it lead me into unhealthy habits?
The sudden availability of a large amount of extra time during retirement could be a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, it could allow for more time for exercise, more energy for exercise, more time to prepare healthy meals, and more time for sleep. All of which I hope to do.
On the other hand it could lead to several bad habits (admittedly many of which stem from boredom). 1. Slipping into drinking alcohol excessively. There would not be a concern about being 'hung-over' for work the next day. I've had times when I drank more than I should have, but I quit doing that because I always felt so tired at work the next day. 2. Wasting money browsing retail sites on the internet. 3. Gambling with my money on buying/ selling stocks frequently. 4. Turning slothful - sitting in front of the TV for hours, etc.
I realize much of this comes down to the amount of intrinsic motivation you have. But the danger is still there. I am planning to do a trial of part-time work for about 6- 12 months before completely retiring, to see how I handle it, but that is not a guarantee either.
Has anyone else fell into bad habits in retirement, or has the opposite happened? Excuse me if there is already a topic posted on this.

[jacob]

I would say that in ERE you'll do pretty much what you do now. Parkinson's law applies. Everything will expand to fill the time that used to be taken up for work UNLESS you actively add some scheduled component or for some reason suddenly develop a new interest.
There will be no heavy exercising unless there already was heavy exercising (unless you make a plan to train for something big). There will be no heavy drinking unless there already was heavy drinking (but you might do it on weekdays instead of weekends). There will be no increase in TV watching (unless you already spent most of your time on that). And so on ...
Habits are exactly that. Hard to change---regardless of whether you retired or not.
If work caused some problems (like stress or unhealthy eating) this will go away. OTOH, work caused me to cycle 10 miles a day---I don't do that anyway because I practically never rode my bike in my spare time.

[george]

Every now and then I'll fall into a bad habit, for example I didn't walk for a week. But I realised I had spent more time in the garden that week, and went for a two hour walk to make up for it

Less Tv watching

less procrastinating

More time with family, more tuned in.

More healthy meals

more time gardening

More time making things

More time to visit charity shops

More time to make sure you're maximising financial returns

More time to learn new things, write etc

More time making sure I regularly visit doctor, dentist

The only drawback - less time working in a team, but I really enjoy me time.

[proj]

Generally my weekends, holidays, and unemployment time haven't been a whole lot more productive than my working days in terms of non-work activities. But they've been much more relaxed. While working full time I do still find the time to do most of the activities I want, but at the cost of having to be constantly productive, never really being able to relax, and barely sleeping enough between lack of time and the weekday/weekend sleeping pattern changes. So the appeal of not working isn't as much getting lots more done as getting a bit more done while having a much more free and relaxed lifestyle. Getting into a bad habit of "relaxing" too much isn't a problem, I love all my hobbies and personal projects.
Drinking is a concern for me though! I plan to spend a significant portion of my time socialising and meeting people, and so will constantly be surrounded by alcohol and the temptation to drink it. As I said in my intro/log post, I need to learn to enjoy myself and be a fun person without it, as the temptation will be very strong if I feel like I need to drink to be at my social peak and have a good time, and it would be a big blow to my finances, health, and motivation.

[Chris L]

ERE gives more options. For example, if you fall into bad habits because of free time, you could always go back to work.

[JohnnyH]

I'm a little worried about this too... I tend to get more work done the office, including and especially my personal projects. At the end of some weekends I am actually looking forward to getting to the office.
At home I also tend to eat like a crazy man, so having a foodless office helps.
I'm going to have to merge work me into at home weekend me... Weekend me has home field advantage; old habits, lots of distractions, so on.

[mikeBOS]

I remember, as an undergrad, walking into the library and seeing all the shiny books on the new additions shelf, wishing I had time to read them all but I'd be much too busy with classes. Then when summer came and I had the time, a lot of it was spent sleeping in and playing video games.
But, oh well. Time you enjoy wasting isn't wasted.

[theanimal]

Perhaps they do not qualify as habits, but here are some traps that seem to commonly beset people around here:

-Being cheap instead of frugal
-Focusing on Freedom From instead of Freedom To
-Doing things on your own that could be better accomplished with others

[oldbeyond]

In the same vein:

- Making a straw man out of normies (“all normal people are sheep with nothing but TPS reports, junk food and plastic trinkets in their lives”)
- Fueling avoidant tendencies, thus increasing anxiety when external demands no longer force you to go out into the world

Nothing to do with me, but other people, you know

In general, money/freedom will act as a force multiplier, so the question is what forces you have at your command. A windfall might enable precious gifts to the rest of humanity (book, company, nonprofit etc) or lead to death by overdose, with a spectrum in between of course.

[Henry]

Any profound or meaningful change ie moving, job change, relationship status, is never a complete break but a reorientation that will involve continuity and discontinuity. As you get older, change will tilt significantly more towards continuity because you have become more set in your ways and you have to come to understand the Incontrovertible Law of the Universality of Assholes and their Inclination Towards Increase (ILUAITI). Thinking otherwise is a bad habit.

[chenda]

As you get older, change will tilt significantly more towards continuity because you have become more set in your ways and you have to come to understand the Incontrovertible Law of the Universality of Assholes and their Inclination Towards Increase (ILUAITI). Thinking otherwise is a bad habit.

There is some evidence getting married young is correlated with long term marriage success, possibly for this reason.

[suomalainen]

-Focusing on Freedom From instead of Freedom To

I've been thinking about this for a while, and it was raised recently in the micro businesses thread such as here

This is something that has perplexed me about ERE for awhile. There are a lot of people who dream of owning a small business and ERE is the perfect toolkit for this. Yet it's almost 100% stock investors who are looking for a freedom-to...

Or in the Why are so many ERErs academics? thread such as here

At some point, I divided the movement into generations with e.g. early-retirement/YMOYL being Gen 1, ERE being Gen 2, MMM being Gen 3, and whatever we have now being Gen 4.

It is for sure the case that "freedom-to" didn't even used to be an explicit problem for Gen 2. One of the reasons people wanted to retire was because their job was too limiting or held people back from what they wanted to do. (And we're not talking travelling or watching TV.) Freedom-to was not an explicit problem because the solution was implicit in that people already had lots of drive and only waiting to get unchained from a stifling career ladder. Gen 3 and especially Gen 4 are often carried out in easy-mode on a kind of "windfall career" (being able to make 120000/year working 2-3 hours per day in a mindnumbing job is very different than working 12-15 hour days for 30-50000/year but being very self-directed) and seem to struggle more with freedom-to.

I think this also explains why Gen2 was eager to leave Plato's Cave whereas Gen4 seems rather reluctant to leave, often arguing along the lines of "keeping skills sharp" to "maintain some connection to the Cave"; rationalizing why cutting the ties or chains is undesirable.

At least for me, I would agree with the idea that

I would say that in ERE you'll do pretty much what you do now. Parkinson's law applies.
...
There will be no heavy exercising unless there already was heavy exercising (unless you make a plan to train for something big). There will be no heavy drinking unless there already was heavy drinking (but you might do it on weekdays instead of weekends). There will be no increase in TV watching (unless you already spent most of your time on that). And so on ...

It's really hard to have the energy to even think about freedom-to when you've been institutionalized, so really the limit of your imagination is freedom from. This, humbly I submit, doubly applies to parents in modern first-world countries. Raising a child is no longer "free labor" from another inevitable monkey and if one dies, so what you have thirteen more kids and life goes on. Nowadays, kids are, like, "precious" or whatever and so you invest in them for a shitty ROI instead of seeing them as an inevitable part of life and so you might as well quickly put them to work in the machinery of life.

I think this, more than anything, explains the "dumbing down" of early retirement. You reach more and more people who are in "normal" American lives, which means the lifelong expectations of a job, a house, 2.1 kids and 2 cars. Once you're in that lifestyle, man, it's a bitch to break out of it, even if you have the imagination to. You don't have the time! Or the money! Or the energy! It's like a trilemma, except it's not pick 2 of 3, it's stare longingly at all 3, none of which you will ever have.

And so you put your head down, hoping against hope that your children will be independent one day, and you can "get them off the payroll" as I've heard time and time and time and time again. In the meantime, you fantasize about freedom-from, not really willing to face the fact that the real crux of the issue is these lifelong "precious pets" you've adopted that constantly subject you to the increased risks of additional lives and relationships. While the brutal reality of biological life has been softened by modern medicine, technology, riches (1st world) and convenience - and that is a wild species-level success - anything short of "my baby will be President of the United States one day" is somehow now a failure. And so you work, or keep your connection to the working world alive, in case the dominoes fall poorly in your direction and you now have to support [a child with special needs, a medical emergency, a parent or sibling with failing health, or any other of a number of unexpected burdens that are now more and more shouldered by the surprised].

[Henry]

There is some evidence getting married young is correlated with long term marriage success, possibly for this reason.

Not sure. Let's wait to see if there's a poster on the board who can wax on this relational topic footnoting multiple arcane quasi academic studies at once supported and questioned by anecdotal experience.

[jacob]

A bad habit is a habit taken too far. It could also be described as a bias.

Normies (ha!) tend to buy something the moment they want something and consequently end up wasting both money, space, and time. One of the simpler tricks to avoid that is to keep a list of how long anything has been desired and not buy until until it's been on the list long enough, originally 30 days. A bad ERE habit is extending this deadline further and further, possibly waiting for years to be complete sure whether buying [into] something is really worth it.

A similar problem is the following. Whereas normies (ha-ha) associate every problem with a solution that must be
bought ("Lets go to the store and buy ..."), a bad ERE habit is the opposite, namely "Lets absolutely avoid buying a solution and instead DIY the whole solution." As such even simple problems can turn into large and time-consuming projects with the only positive side-effect being that "something was learned".

A really bad ERE habit is some combination of those two in which the given problem goes unsolved forever/one just learns to live with it. This is "bad sacrifice" territory.

[chenda]

Not sure. Let's wait to see if there's a poster on the board who can wax on this relational topic footnoting multiple arcane quasi academic studies at once supported and questioned by anecdotal experience.

I was hoping you might be the man for the job Henners.

[Salathor]

A really bad ERE habit is some combination of those two in which the given problem goes unsolved forever/one just learns to live with it. This is "bad sacrifice" territory.

I feel convicted.

[Henry]

I was hoping you might be the man for the job Henners.

I am not. On either front. I am curious though. For the first time in my life I live in a small town and I get the sense there is a correlation or analogy or some type of connection. I was reading the toddler thread and noticed a common theme - limit choices. I'm not saying go back to the village where you work on the family farm and marry the daughter of the neighbor's farm. But it seems most choices are distinctions without differences. On the other hand, small towns are insular and filled with a bunch of arrogant and stupid sister fuckers. But I digress.

[chenda]

I am not. On either front. I am curious though. For the first time in my life I live in a small town and I get the sense there is a correlation or analogy or some type of connection. I was reading the toddler thread and noticed a common theme - limit choices.

I suspect a lot of things are about finding the goldilocks amount between too much and too little. Which is why tinder ruined dating.

[Henry]

I have a predilection towards conflict. So here I am in smalltown USA and let's just say there have been a few dust ups with some locals. Nothing extraordinary, just some name calling, gestures, maybe an expansion of vocabulary that rests outside the bounds of the local customs that have been established and maintained over the past 400 years or so. As I've reflected on it, the only person I need to stay in good graces with is the post office guy because I don't have any other mail options. So when he yells at me that I already picked up the package I claim is missing, I can't yell back that he's a wet brained piece of shit who can't even manage a post office too small for Clark Kent to change clothes in. But everyone else is disposable. Why? Henry Fucking Ford. If this was the 19th century, I'd be spending half my fucking life in the pillories asking Hester Prynne if she wants to get together once we get out of this shit. But since it's the 21st century, I can move so there is no recourse to public shaming. This is the problem with options. Before, they suffered with the village idiot. Now they are forced to suffer with the village asshole because the pillories were removed. Why do less people believe in God in the 21st century than the 13th? It's simple. There are more intellectual options. More options may have benefits but it also increases the possibility of bad habits. It's why actors who play prisoners have to memorize their lines and get a personal trainer.

[zbigi]

Exactly. Back in the day, there were far fewer village idiots and far fewer conflicts, because people were mindful of one another, as people were, for better or worse, in this together for life. I see this in my apartment building - people who own the flats are nice neighbors for the most part, and even if there is conflict, they try to resolve it with minimum amount of escalation - they know they are dependent on the neighbors in one way or another (in the future, they might e.g. ask them to bleed their radiators, or to keep their dog quiet etc.) . Whereas the renters don't give a shit and often behave like they live in the middle of desert, and not in a box surrouned by other people. Basically, optionality destroys communities and turns people into assholes. Or, a significant enough number of people is unfortunately only nice to others where it pays them off, and turns into selfish monsters otherwise.

Having written that, I now realise it has nothing to do with the subject of the thread. Sorry for the rant...