Hello, world.
I’m an unemployed former Big Tech software engineer with 25 years of experience in the technology industry.
And one of the strangest things about early retirement is discovering something I never seemed to have enough of while working:
time.
Free time gives you the opportunity to notice things you were too busy to notice before.
And once I slowed down, I started thinking about a paradox that I find increasingly difficult to ignore.
The Good Life Paradox
Look at the news. Scroll through social media. Listen to people talk about their lives.
It seems like we’re living through crisis after crisis.
A cost-of-living crisis.
A loneliness crisis.
A mental-health crisis.
A birth-rate crisis.
A meaning crisis.
And underneath all of these is a broader feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong with our society.
Yet here’s the strange part.
If you look at our material standard of living, we are living in an age of extraordinary abundance.
The average American today has access to things that would have been unimaginable to even the wealthiest people a few centuries ago.
Our homes are heated in the winter and cooled in the summer.
We have clean running water and electricity.
We can eat food from virtually anywhere on Earth, year-round.
We have modern medicine.
We have instant communication with people on the other side of the planet.
And we carry, in our pockets, access to an astonishing percentage of humanity’s accumulated knowledge.
A relatively ordinary person today can watch a movie, have dinner, talk to someone across the world, summon transportation, access a library containing millions of books, and ask an AI to explain quantum mechanics, all before going to bed.
By almost any historical measure, we live incredibly comfortable lives.
And yet...
A huge number of people don’t seem particularly happy.
So how can a civilization achieve unprecedented material abundance while simultaneously experiencing widespread loneliness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, and a crisis of meaning?
Maybe the problem isn’t that we have too little.
Maybe we’re optimizing for the wrong things.
So What Actually Makes a Good Life?
This question is obviously not new.
Human beings have been asking it for thousands of years.
Philosophers, religious teachers, prophets, and ordinary people have wrestled with the same fundamental question:
What does it mean to live well?
What’s fascinating to me is how much overlap exists among traditions that developed independently of one another.
Different civilizations disagreed about countless things.
But when you strip away the cultural details, many of them keep circling around a remarkably similar set of ideas.
I would boil them down to three things.
1. Meet Your Basic Material Needs
First, you need enough material security to survive and live with dignity.
Food.
Shelter.
Clothing.
Safety.
A place to sleep.
You don’t need a mansion.
You don’t need a Lamborghini.
You don’t need the newest iPhone.
You need enough.
And historically, there was also an interesting connection between work and human dignity.
The idea wasn’t necessarily that you needed to spend every waking hour maximizing your economic output.
It was that contributing through honest work could be part of living a worthwhile life.
The goal was never supposed to be endless accumulation.
It was supposed to be having enough to live well.
2. Build Strong Relationships
The second ingredient is relationships.
Family.
Friends.
Neighbors.
Community.
People you love and people who love you.
People who depend on you.
People you can depend on.
A human being isn’t designed to exist as an isolated economic unit.
We need other people.
We need to serve other people.
We need to care for them.
We need to forgive them.
We need to be forgiven.
We need companionship.
We need belonging.
And perhaps most importantly, we need to feel that we matter to someone.
You can have an enormous bank account and still be profoundly lonely.
3. Find Meaning and Purpose
And then there’s the big one.
Meaning.
Purpose.
A reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Different cultures have different names for this.
Ikigai.
Raison d’être.
Calling.
Mission.
Faith.
Purpose.
The terminology changes, but the underlying idea is remarkably consistent.
Human beings need something that makes their existence feel meaningful.
That something can be religion.
It can be raising children.
It can be creating art.
It can be helping other people.
It can be building something.
It can be pursuing knowledge.
It can even be a hobby that gives your life structure and joy.
The specific answer is different for every person.
But the need itself seems almost universal.
And I think this is more important than we realize.
Meaning isn’t merely something that makes life better. It may be something that makes life possible.
The Darkest Lesson About Meaning
I learned this lesson from Viktor Frankl.
I read Man’s Search for Meaning during one of the darkest periods of my own life.
I originally assumed it was going to be some kind of self-help book.
The cover looked almost cheerful.
It was not a cheerful book.
Frankl was a Holocaust survivor who spent years in Nazi concentration camps.
He witnessed people being stripped of almost everything that normally gives life comfort and security.
Their possessions were taken.
Their freedom was taken.
Their dignity was attacked.
Food was scarce.
Medical care was scarce.
The environment was designed to dehumanize and destroy them.
And yet Frankl observed something extraordinary.
Even under conditions where almost everything had been taken away, there remained one thing that could not be completely confiscated:
the ability to choose one’s attitude and create meaning from one’s existence.
Frankl believed that people who retained a reason to live were better able to endure unimaginable circumstances.
That idea stayed with me.
Because if meaning can matter under those conditions, imagine how important it must be under ours.
And this brings me to my larger theory.
Hypercapitalism Doesn’t Just Sell You Things
I think the problem with modern capitalism isn’t simply that it encourages us to buy too much stuff.
That’s the easy criticism.
The deeper problem is that the system can begin shaping what we believe a good life actually is.
Think about how much of our environment is designed around optimization.
Optimize your career.
Optimize your productivity.
Optimize your body.
Optimize your finances.
Optimize your home.
Optimize your dating life.
Optimize your children.
Optimize your time.
Optimize your sleep.
Optimize everything.
And then, after optimizing your entire existence...
You’re supposed to be happy.
But what if you’ve optimized yourself toward someone else’s definition of success?
That’s the question that bothers me.
When Luxuries Become Necessities
One of the most powerful mechanisms of hypercapitalism is turning luxuries into perceived necessities.
Imagine taking someone from 1950 and dropping them into an ordinary American home today.
They would probably think we were insanely wealthy.
Air conditioning?
A luxury.
A smartphone?
Science fiction.
Streaming thousands of movies?
Impossible.
Fresh fruits and produce year around?
Ridiculous.
Instant access to virtually all human knowledge?
Magic.
But we’ve normalized all of this.
And once something becomes normalized, it can become psychologically necessary.
Then something strange happens.
A lifestyle that would have looked unbelievably luxurious to previous generations starts feeling like the minimum required to participate in society.
The baseline keeps moving.
And because the baseline keeps moving, “enough” becomes almost impossible to reach.
When Productivity Becomes Identity
But material consumption isn’t the only thing being shaped.
Our identities are shaped too.
I experienced this firsthand working in Big Tech.
My calendar was full.
My inbox was full.
My Slack messages were full.
There were always projects.
Always deadlines.
Always another problem to solve.
From the outside, I was productive.
But there were times when I had to ask myself:
What exactly am I being productive toward?
I was accomplishing things.
But were they things that actually mattered to me?
Maybe the products I worked on had value.
Maybe the projects helped someone.
But they weren’t necessarily my purpose.
And because work consumed so much of my time and mental energy, I had very little opportunity to step back and ask the most important question:
What do I actually want my life to be about?
That’s the trap.
If you’re constantly busy optimizing your career, you may never have enough time to figure out whether you actually want the career you’re optimizing.
Hypercapitalism Can Manufacture Desire
This is where I think things get really interesting.
Hypercapitalism doesn’t merely sell us products.
It can shape our values, ambitions, and aspirations.
It tells us what success looks like.
It tells us what attractiveness looks like.
It tells us what status looks like.
It tells us what happiness looks like.
It tells us what we should aspire to.
And it does this so continuously that we can eventually mistake socially manufactured desires for our own authentic desires.
We think:
“I want this.”
But why?
Where did that desire come from?
Who taught me that this was important?
What happens if I don’t have it?
Would I still want it if nobody else knew I had it?
These are uncomfortable questions.
Because sometimes the answer is:
I don’t actually know.
Maybe I don’t want the bigger house.
Maybe I want more time.
Maybe I don’t want the prestigious career.
Maybe I want meaningful work.
Maybe I don’t want more stuff.
Maybe I want deeper relationships.
Maybe I don’t want to optimize every minute of my life.
Maybe I just want to live.
The Productivity Trap
We’ve somehow arrived at a point where productivity has become almost synonymous with virtue.
If you’re busy, you’re important.
If you’re successful, you’re valuable.
If you’re wealthy, you must be doing something right.
If you’re constantly improving yourself, you’re a good person.
And if you’re doing nothing?
Well...
You’d better have a good explanation.
But here’s something I’ve discovered during early retirement:
Doing nothing can be incredibly productive for the human soul.
Taking a walk.
Reading a book.
Cooking dinner.
Playing with your kids.
Talking to your spouse.
Sitting outside.
Building something because you enjoy building it.
Learning something because you’re curious.
Doing absolutely nothing because you’re tired.
None of these activities necessarily maximize GDP.
None of them necessarily advance your career.
None of them necessarily increase your net worth.
And yet these may be some of the most valuable things a human being can do.
So How Do We Get Our Humanity Back?
I don’t think the answer is to abandon capitalism and move into the woods.
I’m not advocating that.
And I’m certainly not claiming that modern civilization is bad.
Quite the opposite.
The material abundance we’ve created is extraordinary.
The problem is what happens when material abundance becomes the purpose of existence rather than the foundation for it.
So here’s my suggestion.
Start questioning.
Question the things you think you need.
Question the things you think you’re supposed to want.
Question the assumption that your career defines your worth.
Question whether productivity is actually making you happier.
Question whether the next promotion, bigger house, nicer car, or newest gadget will meaningfully improve your life.
And most importantly:
Question who taught you what a good life is supposed to look like.
Because maybe you were never given the opportunity to answer that question for yourself.
You Still Have Free Will
This is the hopeful part.
We’re not completely powerless.
Every one of us has a mind.
Every one of us has some degree of free will.
That means we can examine the values we’ve inherited.
We can decide which ones to keep.
We can reject some of them.
We can experiment with different ways of living.
And we can deliberately construct a life around the things that actually matter to us.
Maybe your purpose is your family.
Maybe it’s your work.
Maybe it’s art.
Maybe it’s faith.
Maybe it’s service.
Maybe it’s adventure.
Maybe it’s learning.
Maybe it’s building something in your garage that nobody else will ever care about.
That’s okay.
Your purpose doesn’t have to impress anyone.
It just has to mean something to you.
The Human Life Is Still Possible
I started this essay with a paradox.
We live in an age of extraordinary material abundance.
And yet so many people feel like they’re living through an age of scarcity.
Maybe that’s because material abundance and human flourishing aren’t the same thing.
We solved many of the problems of physical survival.
But we haven’t solved the problem of figuring out what we are supposed to do with our lives once we’re no longer simply trying to survive.
And perhaps that’s the great challenge of the 21st century.
Not figuring out how to acquire more.
But figuring out what is enough.
Not figuring out how to become more productive.
But figuring out what is worth doing.
Not figuring out how to maximize our economic value.
But figuring out what makes us valuable as human beings.
And not allowing the system around us to answer those questions for us.
Because despite everything modern society throws at us, we still have the ability to stop, think, and choose.
We can choose our relationships.
We can choose what we value.
We can choose what we spend our time doing.
And, perhaps most importantly, we can choose what our lives mean.
Living a good, meaningful, and genuinely human life is still possible in the age of hypercapitalism.
But we have to be willing to step outside the machinery long enough to figure out what that life actually looks like.
That’s my two cents.
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