How do people handle working full time for decades?

Work is always stress and challenge for me. Learning to deal with work-stress in a healthy manner: not PMO, not gaming, not drugs, not alcohol is the key to success. But it's not easy. PMO doesn't lower the stress - it get increased. In addition, anxiety and depression are getting more and more rampant. However, holding down a job allows you to earn money and become indepenent financially. It also boosts your self-esteem to some extent or crashes it if you can't deal with the pressure.

You make a choice. You either work and get paid and feel like an adult. Or you escape the stress, sleep long hours, have no prospect to start a family and everyone in the family keeps staring at you in a weird way

 

You find a career you love. Both my husband and I loved our jobs. I think a lot of people are not intentional about work life. They just end up where they end up. I tried different jobs, had my own businesses, getting ready to start another business even though I’m retired.

 

I hate living paycheck to paycheck. It's feel like I'm wasting my life away. Im 29 years old and I got my first job at 19, so I've been working paycheck to paycheck for the past 10 years...that's why I've saving up money so I can invest in real estate. So far I have 10k saved up but I feel like I need to save up more

 

the 9-5 rat race sucks.

your plan should be to make as much cash as possible to retire sooner

you should save and invest find a side hussle

find job working from home anything that you can just pretty much bide your time as smoothly as possible

my sisters bf he has multiple jobs but are fairly flexible. he works mobile security at night as well as a daytime job but doesn't have to be on site . if alarms go off he calls out to check the place he gets paid well

and it depends on the pace and culture of the job i used to be a professional chef and loved the job working with a group of freinds and i met my then girlfriend who was a waitress working in that environment was high stress fast paced but it was exciting stimulating and we had a good social network but eventually you realise your burning the candle at both ends when your working 100 hours a week . money was great but you eventually burn out

which is when i took a career change and decided to drive lorrys all over the uk nice change of pace i started in vans which was hard graft hand balling hundreds of parcels to meet deadlines . then i moved up to bulk drops in lorries instead of hundreds of drops i did maybe 10 max . i got out into the open air the countryside and occasionally id have parked up at a beach for my lunch break had a coffee a smoke a listened to the radio no one beside me to piss me off i made about £2500 on that gig

 

It sucks but you just do it. What other options do you have?

 

I’m older than almost all of you. But I’ll tell you, the best thing I did was work my ass off for about 5 years when I was young. From 19-25 I worked 2 full full time jobs and a part time job. I also went to college full time. I stayed living at home, drove a car older than I was, and bought nothing. I saved. At 23 I got married and my husband also worked 2 jobs. We had no debt and I had 30k saved to put down on a house. So our rent at the time was $575, our mortgage was $800. So we only spent $225 more but we’re getting equity. We remodeled the house ourselves then sold it for $45k more than we bought it. Then bought 40 acres and lived in a trailer for 10 years. All of this while maxing out 4 different retirement plans. We then built our house ourselves with the help of 2 friends. Fast forward , I retired at 40 my husband at 52, we own 2 homes outright, one is over $1.3 million, one is $435k plus we have secure income from just 2 of our retirement plans. We do not touch 2 of them. We pay cash for everything except property. Those 5 years sucked but we were young and could do it. I don’t ever want to have to set my alarm clock again. If you dont make a plan you will never get ahead. I had a plan and I got lucky that we never had major health issues. It is so worth it. Those 5 years made all the difference. We rent out one house while we live in the other. My kids are going to be better off than I was, that’s for sure.

 

Great question, I'm unemployed at 64-years old and would love to not go back to work but I feel like I need a few more years of earning $ so I can retire and have my $ last another 20-years without a paycheck, something that sounds impossible now.
I wish I invested the maximum amount into my 401K's from an early age. I always invested in them, but never as much as I could have. Keeping a minimum in my bank account and investing the maximum in my 401K would have really helped me be closer to retirement.
Work for me is unfulfilling, but I try to find joy outside of work for a balance. If possible take a break at work and make a phone call to a friend or find someone for lunch, anything to add joy to the monotony.

 

What's really good about this, is you were able to find a partner who had the same financial mindset. I've seen that in a few marriages and those couples always managed to have plenty of money and lived happy lives.

 

Why not start your own business? I did it two years ago and it was the best decision in my life. It's all really just mindset.

 

He actually did not have the same mindset. He was an addict and he would spend every dime in our account. I figured this out within 6 months of marriage. So, that was why I took over all the finances ( made him happy, one less stress) I had the money automatically come out of his paycheck before he even got! I also had a separate account with only my and my moms name on it. Lol. Since this was how his mom and dad did it, he was ok with me handling all the finances. It’s literally only been since he got into recovery that our finances have taken off. I’m saving more than half our retirement checks and he doesn’t spend it!! I mean, the only good thing about him being an addict was he didn’t care what I did with our money. But that first year of marriage was world war 3 over finances. It was not pretty.

 

A good slave finds meaning, my friend.

To be honest with you I hate working, but I still force myself to do it everyday.

I am fortunate in that I work in a field that has a strong union, thus I can take a lot of days off. Which I do.

 

Work stress for me has been hard. Taking over a 5th generation family business that I've been at for 9 years now, feet hit the ground running. I love working hard, and in a way have maybe the opposite feeling as some are expressing here, I actually have to find ways to slow myself down and take my foot off the gas pedal. I seriously have thought of changing careers because of the stress but I'm finding more and more it's a self inflicted injury. I was the cause of my own problems in a lot of ways. Finding balance is really helping me, I'm a long way from it still. But already what I have done has been rewarding for me and my family. Funny enough I still get my work done, stress and anxiety crippled me and took away my ability to even function. Add P addiction to that and you have quite the dumpster fire, I can't even describe what a mess it was! Dealing with all three has really calmed the seas for me and feels great.

In terms of P recovery I actually had to address stress and anxiety along with rebooting to ever get past 2 weeks.

 

i've thought about this, i was looking this forum for ways of saving money and be able to OWN my home.

even though i despise the project i'm involved in right now, i think my job is saving my life right now. it's another way of pushing my spirit, because i don't want to do it, but i find ways anyhow to push through. for me work is an accelerator of recovery. i know i am in a bad place spiritually, so i find peace in knowing i push myself, and have no energy at the end of the day for my unconscious to do the "bad thing" (you know which one) when i have been consciously fighting all day to abstain.

 

As I started to work when I was just 15 years old, I've understand how it works, the first day I discovered what the heck was happening. For example I wasn't even doing what I chosed, the employer just sent me doing something different becuase that work would improve his profits more. But I was an aprendice, technically what I had to do was learning the work, instead they sent me doing something different because there I was more profitable, the first day of work! Not even had the time to understand what my work was about and I was already used as a tool, so the employer could make better money. Jack London painted a similar intuition of mine in his work ''Martin Eden'' or some of his other essays, when he was a kid he found a work that wasn't actually bad, but the employer fired two adult worker and replaced them with him, and paid him less. Work slavery was a thing I already knew when I was a small kid. It is interesting how some people are blind slaves for all their lifes, but other like Jack London or me were able to understand how it works and see trought the veil as kids.
So yeah neither I can imagine me doing something that I don't like for decades, there is no salary that would make me change my mind, since today the future isn't bright, and mostly uncertain, is better spare ourself and try to find something that we really like to do.

This is one of the reasons why I feel good only when I'm on the road as a traveler with few moneys and my tend. No social pressure and no bad toughts about work. Perhaps I'll be able to make this my work, since is something that I enjoy and something that does not make me feeling like a slave! Now I'm making some money, but thinking of myself at 60 years old, doing the same thing over and over like the people that I work with, this is definitely not my aspiration and feel kinda terrified about it. A good thing should go on the road and search a work like the old pioneer did (there is a nice work by Dominique Lapierre, when he moved to USA with few bucks he used to find some works and move quickly to other places, not casual that his first book name is ''A dollar for thousand kilometers), sadly the burocracy of work nowadays is a great opponent for all of us.

 

I dunno. If you don't have a large family network who can back you up then you're kind of stuck with the wage slave life. Or you can go international.

 

Accepting the job as it is. You need to do something for a living. The job is rarely a hobby. And if a hobby becomes a job, it stops being a hobby as there will always be things that are unpleasant. However, every situation has a potential. You earn your money, you learn to be assertive, you learn to deal with stress, you learn to handle emotions. A job pushes you to leave your comfort zone. If you treat it as a challenge it's more bearable. Having no job is way worse. Holding down a challenging and stressful job gives you self-respect. And the problem at work need to be either solved or ACCEPTED.

 

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