My job tends to push me well beyond 8 hour days & 5 day weeks. I feel like my job requires a ton of emotional labour, and I find that super draining. Normally when I’m working, I’m falling behind in sleep and self-care. If I have free time, often times I need to just chill out and rest. I tend to put something pointless on YouTube or Netflix just to relax.
When I have some time off, my body stops screaming to slow down. I catch up with sleep and exercise. I can read as much as I want to. I touch base with old friends who I haven’t talked to in a while. I can do much more IRL activism. Basically, I become the person I wish that I was normally.
God I wish I had some passive income coming in so this could be my life. Everyday would be a vacation. I’d probably go to the office and waste my employees time with meetings so I’d feel like I was doing something. I’d go to a Global South country, pretend I’m volunteering, and meet other trust fund kids who think they’re making a difference. If I had enough capital, I’d found some NGO that makes freedom maps, and the DPRK would get a very sinister colour. I could go to cocktail parties and brag about how my NGO is making a difference. That it’s all funded by the exploited labour of my workers is easily forgotten after 3 martinis.
Looking back at the past, I can’t see any path that I would become a capitalist, as there was no chance of me getting capital, except becoming an especially evil sort of grifter. Maybe I’d be a very different sort of person if my parents left me a 5 million nest egg.
You don’t need passive income to be able to do what you want. Mostly you just need to get past the barrier of housing cost.
Where I am, I could pay down a mortgage on a good house in 4-5 years of working fulltime. With another two similarly-committed comrades to share the house with, we could easily pull it off in 2 years. After that, baseline cost of living would be 6000 a year for 3 people.
After working fulltime for 2 years I quit my job and the 18 months since I’ve averaged less than 10 hours a week of zero-hour type gigs or odd jobs. I’ve been on like 12 overnight-away-from-home trips in that time, totaling over 3 months. I could probably retire on 300k, including the cost of a house. I’m going to have to start working again soon but I’ve been in total vacation mode for a year and a half.