Only works if you are not working a shitty job and living paycheck to paycheck. Good fucking luck in most economies greedy billionaires are keeping this from happening.
Yeah wtf jobs is she getting where she builds up a safety net in 1-2 years? I've been at this shit for a decade and have 3 digits in my bank account
Edit: I should disclose the fact that I have been making minimum wage this whole time. That said, most people I know make nearly average wages, and still have 3-4 digits in their bank accounts at all times
Living with parents probably (/gen, non-derogatory)
There's a thing called lifestyle creep. You may not necessarily be living paycheck to paycheck on the bare minimum. Going out with friends, having the latest phone, having hobbies, if you cut out all fun you may be able to save up significantly. You can also live like a bum in the least accommodating space you can stand. Being comfortable is expensive, but not everybody wants to be uncomfortable for long stretches just to fuck off to the Bahamas for a month every few years. That or credit card debt.
I think current 'lifestyle creep' for many is getting used to things like 'health insurance' and 'something other than beans and rice'. Hard to give up simple human dignity once you've had a taste of it.
That is for sure a thing, but in my case it genuinely is having little income
Been making minimum wage for way too long, and at this point I'm too old and don't have the skills to get a significantly better job. My retirement plan is
I mean almost anyone with a stem education is able to do this.
Before you say: "buh have you seen the job market?"
The point of the plan isn't to get stinking rich off of each 1-2 year stint, it's to make just enough money that you can travel around and reset to nearly 0 after not working for a few months to a year
The biggest problem I see with this is staying current and sharp with your tech skills and also explaining those gaps. It’s definitely possible though, especially if you’re able to live frugally.
Not in the US, if you have any medical conditions or if you don't want to gamble with the possibility of getting injured, or if you have a spouse or children who need your insurance.
Live with a group in a LCOL area, eat rice and beans, no other hobbies.
I've got a buddy who does a variation of this. He's got a little shack pretty close to town. He'll work in the oil field for a few months, come hang out with everyone, and live a "normal" life. Then when he's saved up enough he rolls out and lives in the woods with his dog hunting and fishing and growing veggies. We go by and check on his place every so often to make sure no one has broken in and it's not rotting to the ground.
When he no longer has the money to stay in the woods he comes back. I say that, but he's got the skills to feed himself out there. I think he gets bored after a year or two and wants to be around people for a while.
I asked him about retirement once and he's got another shack right on a lake that's been paid off since the 90s. His plan is to go there and fish and not come back.
This only works without kids.
I mean there’s a whole bunch of assumptions
First, you’d need to make enough money to work 1-2 years to be able to save up enough that it’s more substantial than a two week vacation, which for many isn’t possible.
Second, you’d need to have a type of career where it’s just fine to stop working for awhile and then come back like nothing happened. Most careers don’t let you just leave for awhile and come back when you feel like it, and applying for a new job every year or two years sounds fucking miserable.
Third, you’d need to have some place you can live during those 1-2 years you are working. Either you’re rich enough to just already own a home or condo or keep paying rent, or you have kind friends or family that let you live with them. Otherwise, again, you’re searching for housing every year or two, which sounds awful.
Fourth, you still need medical care when you aren’t working, so you need the money to pay for private insurance.
As you said. Pets, kids, an SO with a stable job that doesn’t want to do this, all non-starters.
To me this screams “I have a trust fund and I mean that I want to save up travel money while my apartment is already paid for.” And where that’s not the case, I imagine it’s someone in a very lucrative field, where working two years nets them a significant amount of money.
Though the top comment certainly shows an example of where this does work (though it requires all the assumptions I outlined above)
My buddy does this with 3 kids. Hes been a contractor all his life for start up. Regularly gets equity in the start up. Builds it up, then cashes out.
Works for him as a contractor because he can make his own hours and they home school their kids, so they travel all the time too
I thought Gen Z aren't really into drinking or drugs. I hope they do this. Make holes in your resume the norm so they can't hold anything against you. I have friends that did/do this and they got it out of their system. They're pretty happy with their lives.
From what I've seen as a gen-z/millennial aged outgoing person: older gen-z still drinks quite a lot, younger ones (17-22) drink less but use significantly more drugs.
But that's just my two cents. Drugs do seem to have normalised a significant amount. Most nightlife people are clearly using coke, mdma or designer stuff, which used to be more subtle.
Tried something like this. Recruiters told me the gap didn't look good and I should lie about needing that time off for my mental health. The 1st class honours degree I was told would allow me to walk into a job was deemed essentially worthless since I had only around 2 year's industry experience. Took me months to get another role offered - a 15k paycut and overall a major downgrade - which I had to take to pay the rent. 0/10, would not recommend.
the gap didn’t look good
Yeah, live your entire fucking life to be attractive to that guy.
The only thing worth learning from this is that if there's so little need for work to be done that "having gaps in the resume" is enough that they'd rather go without, then the work does not need to be done.
It's beyond time for UBI.
I think the problem might be how quickly you quit to do it. It takes a good year to train a new person to be productive. If they only get about a year of productivity from you after training you for a year (and a junior level amount of productivity at that), then it's not worth their time and effort to invest in you. If you did it every 5-7 years instead, it would probably go over better. That's long enough to see whole projects through to completion and then just take a break in between.
There's also the issue of how long you take off. If you take off 6 months to a year, it's less likely that new technology comes in and changes everything than if you take off 2 years. Ex: 2 years from today you can expect huge swaths of industries to adopt using AI tools in day-to-day tasks. Another ex: I'm an engineer, not a CS person. I've helped design computer systems, but sophisticated coding isn't the main part of my job. In the last 3ish years I've seen every system I've encountered switch to containerization.
Yeah.... I don't really think anyone really cares about anyone's education anymore, at least not past your first employer.
I have to spend a lot of time teaching people in their residencies at my job, and where they went school doesn't really bring anything to the table. In fact, a lot of the people who went to fancy private medical schools were either overwhelmed by having to talk to our impoverished patient population, or didn't ever develop healthy ways to mitigate interpersonal conflict.
Healthcare costs in the US is usually the blocker for me when I think about extended stays as a hermit.
One solution to this has been, be a resident of a blue state and get on medicaid, though it's looking like that might not be viable going forward...
Go somewhere with cheap healthcare when not working
You'd have to find a job that pays enough for this lifestyle. And with the kind of resume this produces, it's a pipe dream.
She thinks the jobs will be waiting for her. That’s adorable.
If you're ever on the backpacking circuit you'll meet people like that. They work just long enough to save up for their next trip.
This is a Gen X thing but whatever
Who do you think raised Gen Z?
Im already doing this, can recommend
Millennial here and I've been doing this my entire adult life. If companies had better vacation policies and a less boring work flow, I'd be less compelled to job hop every year or two.
"Sounds like we're paying these guys too much"
I’ve done this for the past several years. Not on purpose. I keep telling myself I’ll settle down.
I got a new job a year ago. It looked promising and I was ready to make a life here. But I don’t see myself in it. Leaving soon. Saved enough for modest living and adventurous cheapish traveling for at least a year.
Before that job I was mostly on the road for a year and a half, with some temporary odd jobs here and there.
It has its pros and cons. It’s exciting and adventurous. Sometimes it’s intense. I basically have no retirement savings. Super hard to find a partner.
You must have a pretty well-paying job because most jobs don't pay enough for you to really generate anything other than very mediocre savings.
If I were to try this I'd probably last about 4 months and then run out of money.
Not really, actually. I live somewhat frugally. And when I say “travel” I usually mean very low cost traveling involving lots of camping.
Boomer here - that's pretty much how I managed my software career. Do a contract job for 6 mos to a year, then do theatre until I needed to work again. Had to go back to fulltime work once I got married and had kids. I miss those days tho. Also, fuck your tiny stereotyping brain if you think a whole generation has the same likes and dislikes.
I work in a place where they had specific arrangements for that.
It was something like after 5 years of employment there you could take a year off and come back to the same position you left.
Similar at my previous job, get paid 75% of your regular salary for 5 years and they would keep your position on hold for one year of paid vacation where you would get paid whatever they didn't pay you all this time.
That's kinda cool, really
Bad idea because
My 401k is being destroyed by an orange idiot who's literally enjoyed entitlement his entire life. When I'm too old to work, I'll just die.
A woman I know did just that, except she wrote a book during her "off" years.
A woman I know worked as an escort on and off and spent most of her time traveling, but I don't think most people have the looks and the charisma to do that even if they want to. I'm not sure what other careers both pay enough and let you quit and then start again easily, but presumably there are some.
I wish. It takes me around 6 months and hundreds of applications to get a job. That strategy isn't sustainable for me.
So just longer “camp” work? Some people work for 3 months and get a month off.
I knew a landscaper who would work for the 6 months you can and then all winter would go and stay on the mountains. The company he worked for only needed to keep a couple guys for snow clearing, so it worked perfectly.
Didn’t know this phenomenon had a name. That’s what I’m doing right now however. I want to have enough money to be unemployed for a year or two.
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