u/thejacobcook

I’m kinda venting here, kinda asking for advice on how to deal.

I am constantly daydreaming about not working or
working just enough to pay my bills and eat and I’m only 28, feeling burnt out, paralyzed to do anything about it. By all considerations, we (my wife and I) are doing excellent. I’m a programmer and my wife is a marketer, so the job market is a little uncertain for us, we don’t assume this money will last forever.

We are on track to gross about $200k this year. 10% 401k + match with about $175k already invested across all retirement accounts. Depending on how the paychecks line up, we net about $10-12k a month.

We target spending at about $7k a month. We just bought a house and the (15 @ 5.25%) mortgage ($3500) alone makes up half of this. we’ve been pretty decent about following the budget since buying last Oct in a neighborhood we adore and will stay for a long time. we’re rebuilding e fund as fast as possible and just trying not to freak about AI and our jobs.

I’m just… so disillusioned with work. it feels meaningless and not worth it. I have a decade or so of history with overextending myself and burning out. I just changed jobs and trying to get out of one of these burn out periods. it didn’t work. again. idk what to do anymore.

I’m daydreaming about cashing it all in paying the taxes and penalties and trying to live off 100k in some far flung place for 1-2 years, but if I leave the job market i’m not sure i could easily renter it, certainly not at the same wage. I know this is wrong but I’m just so tired of

I know that $100k is not enough to retire on, at least not for my QoL, and we’ll probably need a minimum FIRE no of 1 mil in today’s dollars. Idk, just not sure I can do this for 15 years until the house is paid off. Yes we could cut spending (3500 for everything else is still kind of a lot, especially for this sub) but at the end of a hard week or day I feel I am unable to resist the temptation for some fast food (CAVA) or a cold beer at the bar down the street. We love traveling and splurge on that, but sometimes a trip is the only thing that keeps me going bc i’m looking forward to it.

Anyone else a little further down the path have any advice pushing thru burnout / “boring middle”?

sorry if this Q gets asked a bunch in this sub

E: thank you everyone! i know that our spend and FIRE goals are a bit of a stretch for this sub, but my wife n I are really trying to get to the mindset to be good with 1 mil nest egg and a paid off house. we will get there!

E2: To expand more on what I meant by boring middle!
I mean like anyone have advice for dealing with the intersection of burnout and the boring middle where everything is automated and you’re just building a sick ass life within your means while saving for an early retirement. I didn’t mean to say I thought my life was boring, but rather that I’m burned out by my work and feel a bit stuck because I am in the boring middle.

I saw another user was asking on r/SameGrassButGreener about taking a job reassignment near Tulsa, OK. I was inspired to write a little blurb about this cool place I have called home now for more than 6 years. I tried posting it there, but it got taken down, maybe my language? I tried to censor a bit more on this draft. I thought maybe the community here would like this, I hope you do!

My wife is from Skiatook and I met her here while I was interning as a programmer over the summer of 2019 at 22 years old. Tulsa was is the perfect “big city” to me, my small hometown Iowa city’s population has struggled to maintain 8k for decades, despite being the county seat. So yeah, Tulsa wasn’t Chicago, but it’s got everything I really need. After that summer, I got the job offer after graduating and moved in Feb 2020. I started March 2nd and was in the office just about 2 weeks before working remotely indefinitely. I managed to keep my job! (luck was certainly on my side).

I have since built a life here, I love my family, friends, even trying to love, or at least like, my silly and annoying neighbors.

I have really grown to love this place over the years, and especially my neighborhood, Brookside. I feel like I have everything I need in walking distance and I personally love walking, even on those hot summer days. I have the river trails half a mile from my house, along with lots of food, shopping, and grocery stores all in about a mile. The people here are nice enough too, mostly live and let live types. The city and surrounding area is rich with natural, cultural, historical places and stuff to do.

As someone who has had to fly for work, and a few times for vacation too, the airport is SO nice. Maybe it’s a bit more inconvenient than hub airports with more direct flights, but I can usually just roll up like 1hr - 30 min before boarding and I’m never sweating it. I connect in DFW or ORD and never need more than a 1 hr layover.

The biking culture here is so fun! Great trails, lots of races to go to, beer to be drank, good times to be had. I’ll see y’all on the hill passing out beers all day. June 7th IYKY.

The river trails are great for more than just biking too: walks, runs, rollerblading, skateboarding, one-wheeling, cartwheeling, bird watching, people watching, people-on-wakeboards surfing-the-Arkansas-river watching, kite guy!!!!, etc etc. The Gathering Place is honestly so cool. And so much fun around other neighborhoods too. Party it up Downtown or on Cherry street. Farmers markets, cute local shops, pretty great food options IMHO. Baseball games, concerts, hockey, indoor football, just so much stuff that is fun to do around here.

The region is cool too, go to OKC, check out the OKC 🐓 ring, ride the tram in circles, cry that Loaded Bowl is closed, and see the Thunder play, and lose (Damn you Wemby!!). All this only a 90 minute drive, 60 if you’re cool like that. If you like camping, the entire Ozarks are 1-3 hours drive away, or Broken Bow, or dozens of state campgrounds. If you love to appreciate a good prairie habitat, the Tall-grass Prairie Reserve is 2 hrs north and has Bison and beautiful views! Keep a look out for prairie chickens! They disappeared and we can’t find them!

I’ve left a lot out that I love about this place, but that’s some highlights, pls add anything you love about Tulsa or the area!

I love my little corner of Green Country, and there’s lots of negatives I could list, of which I do have plenty, no place is perfect. I know it ain’t for everyone, but it’s all pretty green to me.

I’m pretty green, graduated in 2020. Just started a new job as an engineer last month at a larger company with proper change control, peer review, mentorship, clear career development opportunities. I’m so excited I made the jump because I’ve primarily worked in small shops where I just learned by the seat of my pants, praying with every keystroke I don’t take down prod (got really good at restoring from backups!) Don’t get me wrong, I have had some great mentors, but constant baptism by fire gets old fast.

I’ve been admittedly hesitant about AI because I wasn’t sure how impactful it might be, but I did present ChatGPT to my team right around when they rolled it out a few years ago. company didn’t want to pay for it. At the time, I just saw the single vertical opportunity to document the legacy systems i was struggling to understand and maintain for them, starting to think there’s a lot more to it than that. I get it, still early and some companies move slower than others.

My new company is 100% full steam ahead with AI and how to reach every role in the company with it. They have a ton of stuff available to us for learning and are giving out tokens like crazy from what i’ve heard. We even have a leaderboard for people who save the most “hours” through automation. It’s not something I can be hesitant about anymore. But my dev team is pretty set in their ways, not “all-in” like some are in the company. So I honestly have a lot of training and catch up to do and an opportunity on my team to signal to the company that I’m on board.

I guess I have kinda had my head in the sand about it and I suspect a lot of people are like that right now. This sudden shift in my personal world and experience has been a little jarring for me, some folks are saying Engineering roles won’t exist at all, some say it will change but grow because of the ability to amplify an engineers output. I have terrible anxiety and grew up pretty broke, so really worried about being let go and the market for my skills evaporating. I’m really worried about the 5-10 year horizon for me. that’ll be my 30s and possibly some of my highest earning opportunity years are probably there. If I miss the boat by not staying up to date with AI or AI is truly able to replace me and my labor, I am really worried I’ll end up back to broke. I cannot stress enough how nice it is to not be at the bottom of the hierarchy pyramid of needs.

I have been saving money too, but just had a lot happen the last year so e fund is pretty wiped out but my households savings rate is roughly 20% right now and should bounce back by the end of the year. Most of my peers aren’t able to or choose not to save anything at all so I feel OK about the 20% but also i’m kicking myself for not saving more.

How are you folks navigating this within your orgs? What are you doing to hedge? I had a plumber over today and thought his job is safe probably for that 5-10 year horizon, not that it’s particularly enjoyable work. But even if so, if people like me become unemployable en masse who’s going to pay the plumber to come out? Idk I guess I’m just late 20s and worried about the decade ahead. There has always been a lot of uncertainty, I know. I’m sure there’s lots of folks on this page who were working on these very same systems during the 1970s oil crisis, or the 80s debt crisis, or the .com bubble, or the 08 financial crisis, or covid so I’d love to hear how to mentally navigate those. I’m just tired man. I got thru covid right as i started working and it sucked, do I just have to keep doing that forever and hope to get lucky?