Typical Work Week in Early (semi)Retirement - DS582

I talk about a typical week and how semi-retirement is treating me.

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00:00 Introduction and Outdoor Recording Challenges 00:52 When to Quit Blogging and Projects 01:50 Doug’s Current Work and Lifestyle 03:52 Daily Routine and Productivity 07:09 Interview Preferences and Podcasting 14:34 Fitness, Health, and Cooking 18:59 Hobbies and Personal Interests 22:51 Financial Independence and Early Retirement 31:55 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. I’m Doug Cunnington, and today I’m trying to record outside. There’s, uh, dogs barking.

There’s crickets making noise. The sun could give me a hard time. The audio might not even be recording, but we’re gonna do our best I was about to make notes and then I thought, uh, fuck it. We’ll just go for it, you know? So we’re gonna go for it today.

The topic will be something that, uh, Lauren Hunter put a seed into my head, and we were talking a couple weeks ago about when to. Quit blogging or stop projects and that sort of thing, which is a hard thing to figure out. There’s sunk costs. There’s the fact that sometimes if you wanna work on something, it takes a long time before you get traction.

There’s plenty of examples out there, but there’s other times where maybe you should quit and you are actually wasting your time and you should move on to something else. Really hard to tell. It’s extremely hard to tell. So one thing in the conversation, Lauren mentioned a, actually it was before we started recording, and she maybe was like, ah, you know, how much time do you spend working?

And like, what do you do? And I’m like, I’m in a really weird spot. I don’t work that much right now.

And the thing is with the Doug Show and the Niche Site project and all that kind of, uh, sort of content. Hm. You know, we were talking about side hustles. We’re talking about like how to earn money online and that sort of thing.

And I’m not really testing that stuff out anymore. There’s some dog around here, uh, that. The people must have locked the dog outside and it just wants to be with his family or something like that. So I apologize for that. Georgie’s hanging out right behind me. She’s just chilling. She may come up closer in a few minutes.

The people that are just listening, you won’t obviously see this, but Georgie’s in the, in the frame here and, uh, she likes to play, but she just. She’s taking a little rest right now. She has, she’s like, uh, laying down, but she has a Frisbee, like laying across her, uh, arms or legs, I guess their legs, but it’s her front leg, so I consider them arms.

All right, so Lauren was like, Hey, how much time do you spend working? And I was like, I don’t spend that much time working. Um, I’ve whittled things down and my other podcast is Mile Hi-Fi, and it’s about early retirement. My wife retired about 18 months ago, and I have been working for myself for. About a decade.

I didn’t even celebrate my, like, layoff day. I kind of forgot about it. I, it’s so far from, it’s removed from my, like, daily thinking. I don’t even think about the corporate job anymore. I don’t do that much work, and it’s really refined down to the work that I want to do most of the time.

Now, you can’t get away from admin all the time, but I have stopped replying to so many emails. If I don’t wanna write an email newsletter that week, I don’t do it. If I want to, then I’ll go for it. I’ll write a few that week.

So I’ll describe. Kind of what I’m working on, kind of how like a week looks for me.

And I’ll also talk about, um, the fact that some people were probably nervous, like, well, if I, if I wasn’t working on something, then what do I do with my time? And I’ve chatted with at least dozens of retired people that are young, say in their thirties or forties or early fifties. Very few people are bored, so I’ll give you a little info on that.

But more importantly, I mean a lot of people wanna get to a spot where like work is optional, and that is where I have arrived. So the work that I’m doing is optional. I don’t have to do it, and it’s. You know, it’s good to work on things and to be productive and creative, and I get that part of it, but it’s far less than whatever I expected.

And again, I talk to people and I’m like, ah, yeah, my wife retired. And they’re like, I just don’t know what, uh, that’s crazy. I would be so bored. Like, I like to be productive. And I think I would’ve thought that back in the day. But I don’t think it anymore. And I don’t, I don’t do that much work, and I can tell you it’s fucking awesome.

I love it. It’s not for everybody, but it works for me. So the bigger piece that I’ll cover today is just like what I did while I was working on my side hustles when I had a full, full-time gig, and it enabled us to have a work optional. Um, lifestyle. Some people would want to travel. Some people wanna work on their pet projects and, um, maybe like start the business that they actually wanna work on that doesn’t have to earn as much money.

That said, I’m just gonna tell you stories. This is not financial or legal advice in any capacity. I’m just gonna tell you what I did and I’m not prescribing this to anyone. And it’s not financial advice to be explicit. It’s not financial advice in any way. And a lot of it’s simple. I’m not gonna even mention anything super specific.

But anyway, typical week, I’m probably working a, I don’t know, three or four days. And on those days I’m probably working 45 minutes to say four hours or so. And the biggest chunks are when I’m actually like doing an interview and I’ll pause here ’cause there’s a plane flying overhead.

It’s often nice outside, but if it’s not windy, there’s like other, other noise, but it’s peaceful out here, at least with the headphones on and I can’t hear the dog yiping back there. the days where I work longer, it’s usually like an hour or an hour and a half of like an interview. So that’s like the biggest chunk, and that actually goes by very quickly because it uh, it’s fun.

And that’s the thing, I enjoy doing the interviews. It’s a conversation I get to learn about someone. Half the time I’m talking to a friend of mine, and we’re able to go into like a, a deeper conversation that you wouldn’t normally have. Let’s say I’m hiking with a group of people or it’s at a happy hour and there’s a lot of people around, maybe I don’t ask.

As many questions and we don’t have the same kind of conversation. It’s different of course, when it’s for a podcast, but essentially I’m chatting with people that I wanna chat with and there was a time, and I’ve uh, complained about this in the past, where I would actually like interview people that had books coming out or I was interviewing people where it looked like it could be an interesting opportunity for me to make the connection.

I’ve since learned that. I don’t enjoy that and it’s not good for me to make the connection, and it’s better for me to not do those interviews. And a lot of times these will come in. And it, it doesn’t have to be someone promoting a book. They could be just trying to get out there on podcast. So they have a promotion company working for ’em and they send an email and they’re like, um, Joe Blow is a CEO.

He pulled himself up by. Bootstraps and he’s been able to become a multimillionaire and he’s a CEO and it would be great for your audience to chat with him ’cause he has all these great fucking stories and he has a big email newsletter and social following and all this stuff. And he’s gonna promote it to his audience of.

193,000 people, and I did a few of those and then realized, oh, these motherfuckers don’t bring any of their audience. They just want to get either links or in front of my audience, and I don’t care about their story. And they’re a dime a fucking dozen. I, I don’t give a shit. I don’t wanna talk to ’em. I now mark those as spam and I probably have a bunch of, um.

Domains and emails where I just don’t get emails from ’em anymore. ’cause they kept sending me all this shit. I’m like, remove me from your list. And if it’s someone really good, they’re probably going to come in through like a channel that I’ll accept, which is typically like a warm introduction or if I meet someone in person.

So I recently did an interview. Uh, for my other podcast, but I met him at a live event. I talked to him, hung out with him for, uh, a couple hours or whatever, and they were passing through town and I was like, great, come to the studio. We’ll do an interview. You guys have a cool story, so we’ll talk about it.

And that worked out great. But typically if I get an email, cold email, I’m not, uh, I’m not even replying back these days. I used to say, ah, it’s not a good fit, whatever. But now. I tell, I, I just mark it as spam and move on with my I do interviews. There’s a little overhead, and if you’ve been following this podcast for a while, you know that I have somewhat struggled with what I was gonna cover in the last, say, six months or so, because I’m not trying to start new side hustles. I’m not. Doing this stuff that people might be interested in, in the same way.

I’m still interviewing some people here and there, but I’m mostly just, I’m just talking about stuff. Right? Turns out people want to hear about that. It, it sounds like it’s, uh, more interesting because, uh, number one, I’m not trying to sell anything, so that’s. That’s different. ’cause before I was at least trying to place everything in, uh, like the context of building websites and stuff like that.

But I’m not selling anything now. So it pretty much frees me, uh, from anything. And again, I don’t have to talk to anyone. I don’t want to or have content that’s, um, different than exactly what I want to create. So you hear the crickets here. You hear the. Plane and the dog barking in the background here and it’s a little bit more interesting.

It took more work, but I think once I get a couple of these under my belt, it won’t be too, too bad. Alright, so skipping forward, it’s just a few hours the rest of my day like. Today it’s, um, it, it doesn’t even matter what day, but today is, uh, happens to be a Saturday. I, uh, did normal, uh, like house cleaning stuff, so I like cleaned the bathrooms up a little bit, did a quick sweep, and a lot of times we just, we still do this on, on the weekends.

We don’t have as many plans. Uh. Maybe on weekends, but the, our days run together, so we don’t even pay attention to weekends other than we don’t want to go to a place that’s crowded because it is a weekend. So we may hike more during the week because there’s less, less people out there hiking. So. That’s one thing where, you know, I go to the grocery store early in the morning on Monday through Wednesday, typically, because if you go to a Costco or Sam’s on the weekend, it’s packed.

That’s when everybody else goes. So typically I’m trying to avoid crowds, but generally. A day consists of, you know, me walking Georgie for an hour or two. Uh, yeah, about an hour, give or take. And then I’ll do any sort of productive thing that I need to do in the morning. Usually before 2:00 PM is like my productive time of day and.

Occasionally I’ll do an interview later if time zones don’t allow for it. But again, because I’ve distilled down, I’m like, I don’t wanna wake up early to meet somebody’s time zone and I’m not gonna work later than I want to. So I have a window and I’m somewhat uncompromising for that unless there’s some exceptional reason for me to do, um, something outside of the window that I want to do things.

I usually go to the gym. Uh, I would say four to seven times a week depending on what’s going on. And I’ll work out for one to two and a half hours, depending on what’s going on and what I want to do. And it just varies and I kind of, I kind of, uh, just kind of figure out what I’m gonna work on that. Day, or sorry, the workout that day, depending on like what I did the previous days, how sore I am, how good my sleep was, a number of different factors.

So I’m kind of like listening to my, my body and my mind on like how much, how much stuff I want to do. I think now we have a baby crying out here, so it’s sort of a cookie cutter, uh, suburban neighborhood.

So while we have these privacy fences up, there’s probably, there’s like eight houses with an earshot. So if you bring a crying baby out, you know, it kind of carries, I don’t know if you could hear it, but I can’t. A little bit. It’s like me trying to record at an airport or something like that. Okay.

I don’t work that much and it turns out it’s great because there’s always stuff coming up or one thing you could kind of spend, not an infinite amount of time on, but like fitness and health is something that you can spend a lot of time on.

And occasionally here. Recently, in the last, I would say six weeks, I would do. Two workouts a day, which is not typical. ’cause I, I really don’t wanna wear myself out. I don’t want to injure myself and that is a great way to overtrain. But I would go to the gym in the morning for only about half an hour.

And the thing is, I could walk to the gym. So if I walk over there, I get a handful of steps. I could do a couple or, uh, say two to five sets of some exercise. Let’s say I’m focusing on. My shoulders or something. So I could work on that specific thing and then I can come back to the gym later in the day, uh, maybe when it’s not as crowded and I could do a little bit of a different kind of workout, uh, maybe more cardio or maybe I do, uh, more compound lifts or whatever.

I’m just making up an example, but I’ve been working out a couple times a day, just a couple or few times a week. I’m not getting a huge number of steps, but like over the course of six weeks, it does make a difference. If you look at like the total step count per day kind of thing or like, uh, just how many workouts I’m getting, how many sets I’m getting on the shoulders, or something like that.

Again, just an example. No one look at my shoulders and judge if they’re larger or smaller than they were the last time you saw me. Okay.

The other part is I spent a huge amount of time cooking and on food. So yesterday was a kind of a. An odd day, but I end, end up doing this maybe once every two weeks.

I’ll buy a huge amount of meat and then I’ll grill most of it all in one day. I use a charcoal grill typically, which you might be able to see in the background of this video. It’s just your standard like Keter Kettle, it’s your standard Weber Kettle. I think it’s a 22 and. When you fire up the charcoal, it stays hot for a while.

So I thought, oh, if I have the grill hot already, I may as well go ahead and grill a bunch of other food. So I probably grilled, I don’t know, eight to 10 pounds of meat yesterday. I’ll freeze a, a good portion of it. We label and date it and we eat through it over the next week or so, and then we have frozen stuff that we can thaw whenever we’re like, oh, you know what, I’ll just uh, thaw that, those, those chicken breast out or whatever.

They’re already cooked and um, you know, we have a vacuum sealer, so it’s a great way to, to save the food there. Alright, so. I spend a ton of time on food. It’s what I’m into. I like to shop for it. I like to cook it. I like to prepare it Super fun. I probably spent six hours doing that yesterday. It’s like a flow state.

I didn’t even real, I’m like, oh, shit. Like whole afternoon’s gone. I’ve been cooking. This is awesome. The grill’s going pretty fun. I’ll have a beer and it’s great. I’ll listen to a podcast or put some music on or whatever. Georgie hangs out, Elizabeth. My wife will come out and play with Georgie and we’ll just kind of be out here grilling.

So that is fun and I spend a lot of time on that. And then I put, you know, food in with the health aspect because I. I mean, I’m not saying everybody needs to spend time on food. I spend a abnormal amount of time on food, but I enjoy it and it’s a hobby. And I’ve always cooked since I was a little kid. Big in my family.

And some families, you know, they spend their time doing something else and that’s totally fine. But for me. Super fun and it, you know, cooking is, uh, it’s a good way to spend my time and it ends up being healthier than if we eat out. Typically. It’s also cheaper too, even though I’m getting like premium meat and like great steaks and like prime filets or whatever.

It’s, uh, much cheaper than eating out, which is surprising, but that’s just the way it works out. And I have no issue spending money on food.

The other thing that I have been spending more time on in the last couple years is music and guitar and I, I don’t practice enough. Again, it’s sort of like fitness and health.

There’s kind of an unlimited amount of time that you could put into like music and practicing, and if I put in eight hours a day. You know, assuming I didn’t have like hand fatigue or anything like that, I put in eight hours a day, I would probably make a lot more progress. And it’s super fun. I have been playing with a couple friends.

I have a friend that lives, um, sort of south of. Denver, so he’s about an hour away, but he plays drums and we’ve been going to this spot where he could play drums really loud and then I could bring my loud tube amp and turn it up all the way. And it’s a lot of fun. Again, totally in a flow state. Lose track of time.

It’s a blast. And we will, we’ll mostly just improvise and jam. We work together pretty well on that. Some people are a little more formalized and they wanna learn songs and stuff, and we will, we’ll both say, ah, yeah, you know what? We’ll, we will check out this song. And then even if it’s a song that I propose and practice a little bit, I usually don’t quite have it under my fingers.

There’s very few songs that I do. But anyway, he’ll improvise, play, uh, some great drums, nice groove going on, and I’ll try to jump in and we’ll go back and forth and that sort of thing. It’s really fun. I don’t think we have any ambition to like start a band or perform in any way. However strong chance like, we’ll, we will work on something to have like intro music for this show and for my other podcast as well.

So that’s how I spend my time, which was a bit rambly. So I appreciate you going along for the ride. Again, I did create notes today. The other thing I’m gonna cover is something that. I alluded to, if you’re a long time viewer and listener, number one, I appreciate that, that you do check out the content I’m putting out.

However, the point here is you may have read in between the lines or if you’ve met me in person and you’ve asked me a few questions, um. Maybe at FinCon or other places like that, I probably told you. Oh yeah.

Like I am not reinvesting everything back into my niche side. So we wind say to 2017 to 2020 or so, kind of the heyday of like niche sites and affiliate marketing in the way that we were building content websites.

In those days and very effective, you could add a bunch of content. It was before AI writers and before chats, GPT. And if you were using an AI writer, you could tell the content was just pretty bad. And even a lay person could read the intro and think that this didn’t quite sound right. But if you rewind and you know what, I’ll broaden it, say 2015 to 2020.

’cause those years I, I think I worked pretty hard. I put on a lot of hours trying to figure out how to work for myself and basically. I was reinvesting some money back into the sites, sometimes a significant amount. So back in those days, I was probably only reinvesting 10 to 15% back into the sites, and some people probably would have said I was crazy. And I, I don’t think I like publicized it widely. And again, I didn’t keep track exactly, but if I look back. Probably something like that. Alright. And with the rest of the money, I, you know, paid for some living expenses, but largely like we just saved that money.

And this is, uh, the part that is not financial advice. This is just what I did and I’m not, I’m not advising anyone on anything. We basically invested in low cost index funds and. Vanguard is the company that we primarily used. They are one of many that have these low cost index funds, and we generally went for the total stock market index fund.

So there’s like s and p 500, there’s the total stock market, and they’re pretty darn close. The total stock market has like, I don’t know, 3,500 or 4,000 companies. S and p 500 has 500 of course, but they pretty much track, um, pretty closely and. Uh, that is pretty much what we did. So we just invested that money and I did, my wife did as well.

And then, uh, there were good returns for several years and at some point, compound interest kicks in and. You are earning money, uh, via the interest. So people, you could look up the 4% rule, which gets you pretty close. But the shorthand of that is if you look at your annual expenses each year and then you multiply that by 25, that is the inverse.

That’s a reciprocal of 4% is multiplying by 25, and that tells you like what nest egg you need. Now, that said, these days, um, some of the. Original folks that did those studies and the way the market has been in many other details. Some people will say, oh, maybe it’s 5%, or Maybe five and a half percent is what you could say.

If we withdraw each year and never run out of money, that’s debatable. Some people say it’s 3% or three and a half, so you have to figure out what works for you, what you’re most comfortable with, and. You have some leeway, but essentially if you aim for 4%, that’s a lot of money. You know, uh, the other, I’ll give you an example just to make the math easy.

If your annual expenses are $40,000 a year, then you would need to save $1 million, or you could double that, right? It’s, it’s linear. So if your expenses are 80 K, then you need to save. $2 million. So not anything to sneeze at, but if you’re in your mid forties like I am, and you’ve been saving since you were in your twenties, compound interest does kick in and everybody’s in a different situation.

Like we don’t have kids, like some people have a family or you have to support, um, your parents or sibling or whatever, you know, aunt, uncle, fill in the blank, right? Like everyone’s in a different situation, but at some point. You end up with compound interest working for you. And I have, um, a couple friends where they, they actually like working.

They actually like the, the corporate structure, which I, you know, I don’t, I don’t understand why, but there’s some reason they enjoy the corporate structure.

Doug (2): Basically like I have some friends and let’s say they have, they have $4 million and the guy was like, ah, I thought about working again. And he’s been retired for about four years. He was like, ah, I thought about working, but like we’ve saved up so much money that.

Whatever job he gets, it’ll be, he’ll be earning less than the interest that he is making on their nest egg. So again, if they’ve saved $4 million, if you take that, uh, you know, 40,000 number, multiply it by four, you know. 40,000, 1 million. So 160 K. So he is like, ah, you know, if I got a job I would make less than 160 K.

And we’re making that by not doing anything. So he’s like, ah, I’m having a great time, you know, spending time with family. He spends time on cooking. And I just made up the amount that I’m not even mentioning the person, but he’s like, even if I got a job, I would not make as much as we’re making by not doing anything.

So overall. That is like the idea of the, the fire movement. The financial independence retire early and. I’ve basically ended up talking to people who are roughly my age that, you know, they discovered it, um, in their mid thirties and they were doing most things okay, nothing perfect. Maybe they weren’t saving enough, maybe they had some credit card debt.

Maybe they have, uh, car payments and a couple other things like that. But within. A couple years, they get everything on track, no more credit card debt. They’re watching their expenses a little more closely so they’re not, you know, mindlessly buying things that they don’t need and they get rid of the car payment.

And within another few years, because they were doing most things right, not everything, they’re able to retire in their early forties. So many people I’ve talked to are in that situation where as long as they didn’t completely, um, disregard like any financial responsibility, usually they’re able to get things in place pretty quickly.

There’s some other folks where like, maybe they, they. They didn’t pay attention, um, to any of this retire early stuff, but they were doing very well. Maybe they don’t have car payments. Maybe they, they, um, they’re pretty frugal. Anyway. They’ve been socking away 15, 20% in their 4 0 1 ks for, uh, 20, 25 years.

And I’m thinking of a, a specific couple, some friends of mine, and basically they. Were getting tired of work and one of them was gonna get laid off and then they, they checked their numbers, they did some research, and then they realized, oh, we can quit working. So one of ’em quit within, uh, months, I think, and the other one kept working for about a year.

Um, she just wasn’t sure yet about. Stopping work and she needed to wind things down a little bit and it allowed them to sort of like gradually get into it.

One big advantage I had is I was able to slowly do less work as I was self-employed, essentially. I say I quite quit on myself. ’cause I was just like, you know what?

I don’t like doing this stuff. And I, I mean, it’s the job that I created. I worked for myself, right? So I slowly like backed away from certain things to the point where. The work that I was, or the work I am doing now is distilled down to the creative stuff that I wanna work on. And I imagine at some point I will get a little bit more bored and think, oh, I want to actually do a little bit more work.

One of those things, which has been on the back burner, is a book on laziness and anti productivity. So it actually fits in really well with some of the stuff that I talked about. Where I just wanted to work on the stuff that I wanna work on or nothing. And there’s some strategies and ideas that I’ve slowly, um, come around to.

’cause I would’ve been pretty resistant probably in my say. Early twenties to mid thirties, fairly resistant. But then, uh, the corporate structure kind of wore me down a little bit. That said, I think I have some innate like, um, self-motivation and I don’t get a lot of validation from like external sources so much, you know, whether that’s performance reviews or like getting promoted.

Although if they fucking paid me more, then prob, I would’ve been like a lot more interested.

It’s, it’s funny, it’s like the noisiest day. I think someone is, uh, throwing rocks around now. I, I, uh, it’s a real ambiance out here, but, um, basically like that book, it’s something that I worked on for a little while. I was working on with my old podcast partner, Carl Jensen, and we worked on it for a while and I think, uh.

Carl was very busy, so he got part of the way done. But I think it’s something that I may take and spend more time on it. And there’s actually a lot of interest I get, uh, unfortunately now there’s people asking me about once a month. They’re like, oh, how’s the book coming along? And I’m like, ah, I haven’t touched it in a while.

So nothing’s happening.

So in an average week, I’m probably working about 10 hours per week.

I also realized that there’s probably one week per month that I don’t do any work, and I either am traveling a little bit or. I just decided I’m gonna play guitar mostly this week.

I’m gonna work out and then I just look at my email and make sure that I don’t need to, actually, I don’t even look at my email every day now, which is, uh, pretty freeing. ’cause you think, ah, I really have to, turns out you don’t, you don’t have to look at it every day and it’s totally fine. So the other part is, while a lot of, uh, people in the niche site industry, I think a lot of people did.

Reinvest a great deal of the money that they were earning back into the sites. I did not. I only reinvested. Uh, 10 or 15% and then invest. I de-risk. ’cause I viewed the niche sites and that side of the business to be extremely volatile. And I learned that right away with some of my first sites where they would, they would get a lot of traffic, they would earn money and then they would, uh, tank and earn nothing.

So I was like, this is way too volatile to like reinvest everything. I can’t go that route. So I de-risk and put it into another investment. And then over time, compound interest kicked in. And then it’s great. I really enjoy not working. I can’t imagine like working a full-time job. It would’ve to be something very specific and I can’t, can’t even imagine it.

So the other part is, you know. You could spend your time on your hobbies and things that you enjoy. And most of the people that I talk to that have several hobbies, they end up having a really great time not working. I’ll mention there was a handful of people, I’ll make up an example too, but there’s a handful of people who are like, I’m gonna retire early, and then they try it.

And then they do the thing that they thought that they were gonna enjoy, and it doesn’t quite work out how they think. And then they go back to work. And I feel so bad for ’em, and I think they’re making a huge mistake. 99.9% of the time. The example that I’ll give is someone’s like, oh, I want to retire and then I’m gonna travel.

’cause that’s the thing, everybody’s like, oh, I wanna travel. Most people would wanna travel more, but some people, they don’t wanna be away from home too much. And I real like, we don’t wanna be away from home too much. Everyone’s different. And some people wanna be on the road, whatever, constantly, uh, every day of the year, they just want to move into a van, fucking travel around.

And that works for some people. But the big issue is like, if you think. You’re gonna love Van Life. And then you quit your job, you saved up a huge pile of money, and then you hop into a van, you start driving around, you realize, oh, this sucks. I don’t like being in a van. I want to have a more permanent place.

But you think that it’s, um, the van and you’re like, oh, you know what? This didn’t work out. It looks like I better go back to work and then just automatically go back to work. There’s a decent number of people that do that, and part of it is like their identity and ego is tied up with their old work, and part of it is just like they’re not willing to test and and admit, I thought I was gonna enjoy traveling, but it turns out I don’t enjoy traveling and I should probably try something else.

And they don’t test anything out, they just. They get their old company, they call ’em back and they’re like, Hey, uh, so and so quit. Do you wanna work here again? And they fucking go back to work and then they’re right back into the grind. And maybe that frees them ’cause it’s an option now, like they’re choosing to do it.

They don’t have to do it. But at the same time, I believe the opportunity costs are too great to go back to do something that you. I apparently didn’t like before. ’cause there’s so much stuff you could do. You have infinite choices. So it’s when people think that they’re gonna enjoy something, they try it and then it doesn’t work.

That’s when they freak out and they get a job again. And I think it’s a huge waste of time.

Depends on the company. Like if you’re a social worker and you’re like, I wanna continue helping people, that’s great. Corporate structure, I mean, I’ve been meeting a lot of lawyers recently, corporate, uh, high level lawyers, high stress.

They typically hate it and they, they quit and they’re like, I don’t wanna look back. I’m having a great time. I had like a consulting and engineering job. You know, a lot of consultants and engineers, they don’t like it. Once they get out, they’re like, this is great. I have a ton of hobbies and I, they work on that stuff.

Georgie. You’re a good dog. ?

All right. I guess I’ll try to play us outta here.

Okay, Georgie, you’re a good dog.

All right, Georgie.