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what happened here

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50015398)

LMAO tyft

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50015410)

AMC879

•

11m ago

Profile Badge for the Achievement Top 1% Commenter Top 1% Commenter

I retired at 45 with $380k and a paid off $200k house and that is pushing it pretty good. Assuming you have the 40 credits needed for SS then I think you'll be ok but if you can work at all you may want to get a little income added in. Even just mowing the neighbors lawn for $100/mo or something like that. Most people will say you're crazy but I think you are pretty close to being able to make it work.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50015438)

OP

•

1m ago

Btw, fwiw, for the record, I did attempt the approved route.

Economics degree. Bombed OCI.

Law degree. bombed OCI.

MBA. Bomb. They call it OCR in Business School btw.

LL.M. in sustainability, obtained shortly before the institutions decided sustainability meant PowerPoint decks, layoffs and replacing the lights in the lobby. 💣

Each one was presented as the missing key. Each opened onto another waiting room full of people holding the same key.

So, okay. I got the hint.

The market spoke. The universities spoke. The recruiters spoke. The firms declined to speak, which was perhaps the clearest communication of all. At some point a man must stop returning to the counter with another certificate and asking whether this one is sufficient proof that he may participate.

I am taking the ball and going home. Not metaphorically, either. The ball is $280,000. Home is a Trailer. The interest clears. The electricity remains on. There are games, though The State of AAA Gaming is grim. I asked the system four times what it wanted from me and brought back exactly what it named.

Economics. Law. Business. Sustainability.

Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb.

Now it asks why I am no longer trying.

‘Nuff said.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50017886)

This is art.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50026972)

This reads cool and all, but how much low wage work have you done? I've done quite a few low wage jobs - diner restaurant, sandwich shop, theme park, farm (as a picker), daycare, warehouse, and maybe some others I'm forgetting - and I've never had that happen with the file, the scrutiny, the whatever. Probably the only one I wouldn't do again in a pinch is daycare just because it's too much responsibility.

I never had to beat sales numbers or know products very well or any of that. I and everyone else who worked at those places below management level came in, did the work, clocked out, got our money and left. Occasionally you're asked to help out coming in when you weren't scheduled, but that's about it. No manager was really expecting anything above and beyond.

I know that this type of work can suck and everything has it's downsides, but I actually had more fun then at work goofing off with coworkers than I do now in my cushy, white collar job. And I liked being active, the momentum of waitressing or the farmwork was great. I wish I had that daily step count again. My sister is still a waitress and we compare/contrast sometimes and if it wasn't for the material pay difference, she definitely has the sweeter gig.

Of course, it's your life, but if I was in your situation, I'd definitely be getting a low wage job to double your available monthly income for a couple years. You seem one or two bad months away from this house of cards falling down, and that's a lot of stress to take on just to try and stick it to the man. I'd look for an active low wage job so I could kill two birds with one stone and get my step count in for the day at work.

loadedbook

•

21h ago

I worked for a few retailers for many years, and I actually miss it sometimes. I enjoyed the work, and when I clocked out, I left it all behind without a care in the world until my next shift. I get it’s not for everyone, but it was great for my preferences.

9

u/Straight-Put-2142 avatar

Straight-Put-2142

•

5h ago

Yeah definitely. Most of my family work service jobs (restaurants and grocery stores) and they always say they'd never want my office job. There's definitely pros and cons. It's unfortunate you can't live off that pay independently below manager level (at least my sister and Mom can't, they rely on spousal income), but it is what it is right now and OP won't change that by not taking a job.

I was with you until I read your reasoning for not doing a low wage job. It’s so unrealistically whiny that it makes you seem like a bullish.ter. Capitalizing “Bad Work” and “Bad Terms” is so pretentious that it makes me wonder if this is AI generated. But to answer your question, find a job immediately. You’re one minor expense from getting wrecked.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50018050)

I understand the logic. The problem is that low-paid work is usually not low-stress work. It is often the opposite. The less they pay you, the more closely they watch you, the less discretion you have, and the more power they seem determined to exercise merely because they can. I have held those jobs. Sur La Table was one. You can beat the sales numbers, know the products, show up, do the work and make customers happy. It buys you a three-month honeymoon. A Reprieve. Then the scrutiny begins. A manager starts noting small things. A file appears. The tone changes. By month eleven, the axe falls or is made visible enough that you understand the arrangement. There is also a broader point. Every person willing to accept Bad Work on Bad Terms increases the supply of compliant labor and weakens the bargaining position of everyone else. The employer learns that the job need not be improved. Someone will take it. Someone always takes it. So I do not see a low-end part-time job as harmless entertainment with a paycheck attached. I see it as surrendering time, autonomy and dignity for modest money while helping preserve the very labor market that made the job so ignominious. I would rather spend less.

* * *

More cowgod retardese:

I understand your point. Money can run out. Inflation does not ask permission. Insurance rises. Property deteriorates. A car can become a four-figure event before breakfast. Interest rates change, tax rules change, and a plan that appears exact on a spreadsheet can be defeated by one bad year and an ordinary roof leak.

None of that is lost on me.

What I find strange is the proposed remedy. I post on a forum devoted to financial independence, and the answer is employment. Not a revision to the bond ladder. Not a larger repair reserve. Not a discussion of duration, principal preservation or spending flexibility.

“Get a job.”

There is something almost religious in it. The system has trained people to regard employment as the natural condition of an adult and freedom from it as a temporary irregularity requiring correction. A job may be degrading, unstable, badly paid and destructive of every useful hour in the day, but it is still treated as prudent. A man living quietly on assets must meanwhile defend himself like a failed state seeking another tranche from the IMF. That is the ignominy. Employment is granted a presumption of legitimacy that no other arrangement receives. No one asks the salaried man whether his manager is solvent, whether his industry will exist in ten years, whether his health can sustain another twenty years of commuting, whether his employer is quietly documenting him for removal, or whether the life he has built requires the uninterrupted goodwill of people who would replace him by Friday. His paycheck arrives twice a month, therefore the structure is considered sound. I have seen that structure from inside. I know what it is to have every hour owned, every small freedom converted into a policy question, every competent performance treated as the new minimum, every human relationship at work shadowed by the knowledge that one person is evaluating the other for continued access to rent money. The employee is told he is part of a team, then discovered to be a line item. He is thanked for his contribution, then walked out beside a cardboard box. This is called stability because the calendar invitation was recurring. And the lower the pay, the more complete the submission often becomes. The company does not merely purchase labor. It purchases posture, tone, punctuality, facial expression and the right to summon you into a back room because someone disliked the way you folded an apron. A modest wage is offered, but the employer behaves as though it acquired a controlling interest in the person.

I do not romanticize poverty. I do not believe a trailer and a Treasury ladder constitute invulnerability. I am reviewing the risks. I am adjusting where necessary. There may be occasions when income should be reinforced. There are ways to do that. I do not need to describe them all, and they need not involve an app, a uniform, a passenger in the Prius, or mowing “lawns” beneath the inspection of a man who has mistaken homeownership for feudal title. But that is secondary. The more interesting fact is how quickly people who claim to desire freedom become frightened when someone actually behaves as though freedom has value independent of consumption. They want financial independence, but only in a form that resembles employment from a distance. A larger portfolio. A nicer house. Consulting two days a week. A tasteful little side business. The same machinery remains intact. The manager disappears, but the need to prove usefulness survives. Perhaps that is why the advice arrives with such urgency. I am not merely underfunded in their eyes. I am committing a category error. I have treated time as the asset and money as the support structure, when the approved model is the reverse. I have reduced my wants until institutions lost leverage over me, and this is experienced by some as failure because the whole economy depends upon people expanding their wants faster than their assets, then presenting themselves for management in order to close the gap. So yes, I hear the warning. I may be wrong. A sequence of ordinary misfortunes may eventually force a change. I will prepare for that possibility without pretending that employment is a neutral refuge from risk. It is another risk, one that consumes the only principal that cannot be replenished. And here is the part no one seems to consider: perhaps the man in the trailer is not the one failing to understand the system. Perhaps he understands it too well. Perhaps he has seen that the grand machine is held together not by superior returns or rational incentives but by fear, status, habit and the terror of appearing unproductive before strangers. Perhaps the small budget is not evidence that he lost, but evidence that he located the minimum price of nonparticipation and paid it. Perhaps the $280,000 is not the remains of an unsuccessful life but the ransom demanded for the release of his remaining years. The people telling him to get a job imagine they are pointing toward safety. He sees them pointing back toward the place from which he escaped. He thanks them politely, checks the coupon payment, closes the browser, and goes outside on a Tuesday afternoon while the roads are empty.

If only they knew.

‘Nuff said.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50018060)

maybe its a Alabama thing but up here in the Northeast and in liberal cities, lower status, lower paid workers have it very good with all these non-salaried benefits like subsidized housing

meanwhile middle management is constantly working 60-80 hour weeks with no job security, lifestyle creep and taxes that eat 50% of their $200k salary to afford a box in MFH

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50018100)

LJL at thinking youre some kind of Niezschean Prometheus in your ratty little trailer jerking off to Baldur's Gate

you're just a balding loser who has decided to be a non-entity. youre also really unhealthily and emotionally invested within a 108IQ pseudo intellectual worldview to validate your life's choices

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50018141)

In any healthy society you'd be socially shamed into getting a job or shunned and banished as the town hermit

Just like the Bible said, I put my fucking video games down when I left high school because I chose not to pedestalize my weaknesses.

The verse says a lot about why you still have a naive, childish view of the world ("the Betters!!! the Game is Rigged" "Work is Demeaning!!!")

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50018255)

https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/comments/xbvcmq/thats_right_dad_im_getting_an_mba_and_theres/

here he clearly wants to get a job. he just keeps failing at it

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50018337)

CallmeIshmael913

•

1d ago

I'm in a strangely similar situation. I spend about 600 a month, but it can be 1000 a month if I ball out on something extravagant like a power steering pump.

I...love this lifestyle. I have peace. I read library books, and do my hobbies (I'll sell them to pay for new materials).

I might just recommend contract work. I'll be working 60 days at a hunting camp, and earning around 10k, which is essentially my yearly budget. I'm the last millennial model year before they rolled out the Gen z's, so I missed the housing window, but I'm saving to build my own.

I'd just say maybe an emergency fund of 4ish months, and a plan for what to do in 6-7 years.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50018546)

The larger question is, when you are on your deathbed and about to meet our maker, do you want to look back and see that this was your life? That you were basically a prole NEET version of RSF, spending your days playing video games? Only you can answer that question.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50018728)

Also working just makes your obituary more ignominious half the time. Every time some prole’s family lists where the deceased Worked, they Mis-spell the Firm somehow ime which is a double whammy. If you hate your family and are writing an obit, do that. It lasts forever. Mine will probably say I worked at a movie theater instead of as a Curator.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50018757)

A man known online as Cowgod has constructed an unusually austere version of financial independence. He says the arrangement has given him something his four degrees could not: control of his time.

By Rachel Silver

TRUSSVILLE, Ala.

The Trailer was paid for. This was the important thing.

It sat on a rented lot outside Birmingham, compact and unremarkable, with enough room for a television, several aging game consoles and a man who had concluded that most of what Americans called financial security was merely employment viewed from the favorable end.

Cowgod, as he is known online, had not held a conventional job since 2021. He had no debt, no dependents and approximately $280,000 invested almost entirely in 10-year United States Treasury notes, purchased when interest rates were near their recent peaks.

The bonds generated about $14,000 a year.

His expenses, according to a budget he had posted online, totaled roughly $1,073 a month. Lot rent. Electricity. Internet. Food. Automobile costs. Health insurance obtained through the Affordable Care Act.

Games received $20 a month.

This left a projected monthly surplus of $93.67.

“People keep looking for the missing part,” he said. “There is no missing part. The trailer is paid off.”

He was sitting beneath the trailer’s small awning on a humid afternoon, drinking from a plastic cup and watching clouds gather over a neighboring lot. He spoke in the flat, declarative style of a man issuing findings rather than opinions.

Cowgod declined to provide his legal name for publication. He said this was partly because of his online notoriety and partly because names had become “an identity layer used by employers.”

He was 45 and had four degrees: a bachelor’s degree in economics, a law degree, a master of business administration and an LL.M. focused on sustainability.

“Economics degree,” he said. “Bomb. Law degree. Failed OCI. Bomb. MBA. Bomb. LL.M. Bomb.”

OCI referred to on-campus interviewing, the formal recruiting process through which law students compete for positions at large firms. Cowgod graduated around the financial crisis and failed to obtain the sort of legal employment that might have justified the cost and effort of the degree.

He worked elsewhere.

There were low-paid jobs. Retail. A period at Sur La Table. Office work. Eventually, he found what he described as a film-curation sinecure, which ended in 2021.

“Fired from Film,” he said.

He pronounced “Film” as though it were a government ministry.

The conventional reading of Cowgod’s life would be one of downward mobility. He had accumulated credentials intended to move him into the professional class, then exited the labor force while still young and moved into a trailer.

Cowgod offered a different interpretation.

“I took the ball home,” he said.

The ball was $280,000.

Home was here.

The Other Side of Financial Independence

The financial independence movement has traditionally been associated with high-earning software engineers, aggressive stock-market investing and spreadsheets projecting retirement at 40.

Cowgod’s version is smaller, stranger and less optimistic.

He does not expect the market to provide perpetual abundance. He does not own rental properties. He does not run an online business or deliver groceries for extra money while insisting he is retired.

He owns government debt and spends very little.

“I already played the stock market,” he said. “The purpose of winning was not to keep playing until I lost.”

He described his Treasury portfolio as the purchase of an annuity from the American state, although technically the bonds would mature and return his principal. His plan depended on keeping expenses low, managing health insurance subsidies and eventually deciding what to do when the notes matured.

Inflation was a risk. So were repairs, medical costs and the eventual replacement of his car.

He knew all this.

On financial independence forums, strangers had explained it to him repeatedly.

“You are going to need a new roof,” one commenter warned.

“You will run out of money,” said another.

“Get a job,” several advised.

This last suggestion seemed to offend him most.

He had entered a forum devoted to escaping employment and encountered people demanding that he return to it.

“They believe financial independence is something awarded to you after sufficient workplace virtue,” he said. “You work until a calculator says you have permission to stop.”

Cowgod’s calculator was less forgiving than theirs. It simply assigned a lower value to consumption and a much higher value to time.

Most people, he said, treated the hours of their lives as though they were not part of the transaction.

“The job gets the morning,” he said. “Then it gets the afternoon. It gets the drive. It gets the preparation for the drive. It gets Sunday night because you are thinking about Monday. But people only count the paycheck.”

He had come to believe that bad jobs were not merely lower-paid versions of good jobs. They were frequently more supervised, more humiliating and more insistent on obedience.

“The wage is small,” he said. “The obedience demanded is not.”

His contempt was particularly sharp for suggestions that he supplement his income with occasional gig work.

Uber. Delivery apps. Mowing lawns.

He tended to put quotation marks around “lawns.”

“You are not retired if your phone can dispatch you,” he said.

A Professional Disclosure

At one point, while describing the failure of his degrees to produce stable employment, Cowgod mentioned that he had consulted for Xbox.

I stopped writing.

“You consulted for Xbox?”

“At one point,” he said.

He appeared surprised that this required elaboration.

“What did you consult on?”

“Platform strategy. Rare. Dormant intellectual property. The bear was in the wrong house.”

Rare is a British game studio acquired by Microsoft in 2002. Its catalog includes Banjo-Kazooie, a series starring a bear and a bird that first became prominent on Nintendo hardware.

Cowgod said his analysis was that Rare’s characters possessed more value in the Nintendo ecosystem than inside Microsoft’s Xbox business.

“Banjo means more appearing in a Nintendo Direct than an Xbox showcase,” he said. “This is obvious.”

I asked whether Microsoft had hired him.

He looked toward the neighboring trailer.

“Consulting can take several forms.”

“Were you paid?”

“That is a narrow definition of consulting.”

He would not identify the executives involved, citing what he called professional discretion. The precise nature of the engagement remained difficult to establish.

Later, he described it as “advising Xbox from outside the formal reporting structure.”

It sounded increasingly possible that Cowgod had posted strategic recommendations online and believed Microsoft personnel had encountered them.

But he spoke about Xbox with the wounded familiarity of a former insider.

He explained that the Xbox 360 had succeeded because it understood the American working-class male. The Xbox One failed because Microsoft severed that connection. The company’s later strategy, he said, mistook affection for a business model.

“Xbox was inherently flawed,” he said. “But it had a constituency.”

His critique went on for 17 minutes.

It was the most animated he became all afternoon.

The Private Mythology

Online, Cowgod is known less for personal finance than for an elaborate body of social theory involving video game consoles.

In his telling, the Sega Genesis belonged to scummier and more physically adventurous households. The Sega Saturn attracted intellectuals, graduate students and men of refined but commercially disastrous taste. Neo Geo ownership indicated inherited wealth. Nintendo 64 owners were deprived of cerebral experiences by the machine’s hardware architecture.

He has proposed that the opioid epidemic may have reduced the number of surviving Genesis partisans online.

He has treated the existence of five Coolboarders games as evidence of Gen X purchasing power.

He once argued that Gen X had “lost its own Gen,” merging demographic history with the language of console competition.

Asked whether these theories were jokes, he resisted the distinction.

“Clique is real,” he said. “The exaggeration reveals it.”

Cowgod’s method was to identify a small and sometimes plausible association, then extend it until it became a complete social cosmology.

A game console reflected a household.

The household reflected class.

Class shaped friends, education, employment, marriage and eventual physical condition.

“One anecdote is not data,” I said.

“It can be if the anecdote is sufficiently representative,” he replied.

His posts often drew hundreds of angry responses from people correcting release dates, ownership percentages or technical specifications.

Cowgod seemed to regard the intensity of these corrections as evidence that he had touched something important.

He could post six sentences about the Sega Saturn and induce several strangers to spend an evening locating archived sales reports.

“They say I am obsessed,” he said. “They know every post I have made.”

The Price of Refusal

There was an obvious psychological interpretation of Cowgod’s retreat.

He had attempted to enter the professional class and been rejected. He had accumulated degrees that did not produce the status or income he expected. He had responded by constructing an alternate hierarchy in which institutional success was evidence of obedience and his own withdrawal was proof of clarity.

Cowgod did not entirely dispute this.

“Of course it is cope,” he said. “Everything is cope. A career is cope with direct deposit.”

The unusual thing was his willingness to announce his failures before anyone else could.

The degrees were bombs.

The jobs were bombs.

The film career was a bomb.

This robbed critics of the pleasure of discovery. He had already entered the adverse findings into the record.

The trailer was not presented as luxury. It was simply enough.

His life contained long, quiet stretches. He read, watched films, played old games, posted online and followed interest rates with the attention other people devoted to office politics.

He had no boss.

He also had little margin.

A major health problem, sustained inflation or a large repair could destabilize the arrangement. His Treasury income was secure in nominal terms but fixed. The future would eventually require another decision.

Cowgod’s answer was that conventional employment contained risks too, though these were rarely described as such.

A worker might be laid off at 55. A career could consume the healthy years and release the employee only after his energy had declined. A salary could rise alongside expenses until freedom remained permanently one promotion away.

“You can lose your life without ever missing a payment,” he said.

His friends did not all understand the choice. Some regarded him as brilliant. Others thought he was wasting his education.

Cowgod believed education had already wasted itself.

“The degrees were supposed to purchase access,” he said. “They did not. Fine. I purchased Treasuries.”

The Games Budget

Before leaving, I asked about the $20 monthly games allowance.

It seemed almost ceremonial. A man whose online identity revolved around video games had allocated less to them than many households spent on streaming services.

“The State of Gaming is grim,” he said.

He generally waited for sales.

A new game might exceed the entire monthly allowance, requiring unused money to roll forward. Older games were cheaper. Some of the best ones, in his view, had already been made.

He described a recent discount on a game he had been watching.

“A Reprieve,” he said.

The rain had begun, lightly at first, striking the metal awning above us. Cowgod moved his chair farther from the edge.

Across the lot, someone started a pickup truck and drove away.

For most Americans, financial independence remained an accumulation problem. Earn more. Invest more. Reach a number large enough that ordinary life can continue without a paycheck.

Cowgod had approached the equation from the other direction.

He had made ordinary life smaller.

The result was not abundance. It was sovereignty purchased wholesale, with considerable cosmetic damage.

He had four degrees, no job and a monthly entertainment budget of $20.

He had also arranged matters so that the next morning belonged entirely to him.

“People think I am doing nothing,” he said.

He listened to the rain for a moment.

“That is the Point.”

Before I left, Cowgod stood in the doorway of the trailer and watched me look once more at the narrow kitchen, the old television and the stack of games beside it.

He seemed to understand the photograph forming in my mind.

The overeducated man in reduced circumstances. The paid-off trailer. The austerity budget. The reporter arriving from elsewhere to observe how little another person could live on.

“You people love this,” he said.

“What?”

“The poverty porn.”

He gestured toward the lot.

“You come down here and everything becomes poignant. The working class owns one unusual chair and suddenly it’s a meditation on resilience. Somebody repairs his own lawn mower and your readers get to feel America is still authentic somewhere. Then you go home and vote for policies that make his truck, electricity, food and health insurance more expensive.”

He was smiling slightly, but not enough to make the statement a joke.

“You sicken me,” he said.

I asked whether he considered himself working class.

“No,” he said. “I don’t work.”

This appeared to please him.

The interview had repeatedly returned to the question of whether Cowgod’s life represented freedom or merely withdrawal recast as principle. He had not built a company, raised a family or accumulated the forms of achievement by which newspapers ordinarily measure a life. He had arranged his affairs so that very little was required of him and then treated the absence of requirement as the achievement itself.

From inside the trailer came the menu music of an old Nintendo game.

Cowgod looked toward it.

“I say this as someone who’s been critical of Nintendo in the past,” he said, “but they understood something. You buy the machine. You put the game in. It works. Nobody schedules a meeting to align on the game. Nobody asks what success looks like. The princess is missing. You go.”

He had spent years being evaluated by schools, employers, recruiters, managers and strangers online. Nearly every institution had found him deficient in some way. Too strange. Too unfocused. Overeducated. Underemployed. Insufficiently enthusiastic about the available opportunities.

He had responded by removing himself from most situations in which the judgment mattered.

“If only they knew how much they suck,” he said.

“Who?”

“All of them.”

The employers?

“The employers. The professional people. The people telling me I need a purpose. The people with jobs writing articles about people without jobs. Everybody who thinks participation proves value.”

The rain had stopped. Water continued dripping from the edge of the awning onto the gravel.

Cowgod said he did not know whether the arrangement would last forever. The Treasury notes would mature. Costs would rise. His body would age. Circumstances might eventually force him back toward some form of paid work.

He did not claim certainty.

He claimed jurisdiction.

“I retain the right of first refusal to a life I didn’t ask for,” he said.

It sounded at first like another Cowgod phrase, grander than the material supporting it. But the longer he stood there, in the doorway of the paid-off trailer, the less metaphorical it seemed.

The world had offered him a life assembled by other people: credentials, employment, debt, consumption, advancement, retirement, death.

He had declined the first draft.

For now, at least, nobody could make him sign.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5884899&forum_id=2,5#50031329)