‘I’m a long way away from retirement’: 23-year-old asks how to cope with a life dictated by work
A post on Reddit’s r/jobs from a 23-year-old talked babout how they grew up on a farm where work began at 8 a.m. and ended after dark, with school squeezed in between and almost no time to simply be a child. At 18, they left, started working in fast food and retail, and experienced genuine joy for the first time, noting how they were getting paid for labour, having free time, developing hobbies, sleeping in on days off.
But as adulthood has progressed, that initial relief has given way to a familiar dread. They pursued higher education, built a career path, landed the job they wanted, and still wake up every day not wanting to go.
The freedom they were denied as a child has still not arrived. Work dictates their schedule, their time, their days. The only difference between the farm and now is that they get paid.
“I still don’t really have the freedom to choose how I spend my life and days,” they wrote. “At least if I want to be able to pay my bills. So how do I cope with working? I am a long way away from retirement. So what do I do?”
What the thread said
One older commenter offered a perspective shaped by decades of work and financial struggle: “I’ve had a lot of different kinds of jobs. I’m old. I’m poor. My body is tired. If I don’t work, I don’t eat. I don’t know of any ‘good’ jobs. I do have hope for the future generations. Something’s gotta give or there will be no middle class at all anymore.”
One response was blunt: “How do you cope with working? You remind yourself you like to eat and have somewhere to live.”
The most raw response came from someone who described staying up late every night simply to feel like they exist outside of work: “Going to sleep makes it feel like work comes sooner and I want to feel like I at least exist away from that sh**hole. Of course I’m too tired to do anything with that time but just existing and not being there is something.”
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And one commenter pointed toward something more constructive: “You gotta have purpose in life. You need a reason to want to wake up every day other than doing so just to survive, because that’s all it is, surviving, not living.”
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