4 ms·

Paradoxically, inflation has contributed to me taking a sabbatical. While I live in a LCOL area and made ~140k/year it just no longer felt worth it to work as

Paradoxically, inflation has contributed to me taking a sabbatical. While I live in a LCOL area and made ~140k/year it just no longer felt worth it to work as I saw my retirement accounts start to match and exceed my salary in yearly gains. I do plan on going back to work in a part time manner, but inflation has killed any reason for me to work hard at a job for that level of salary. Furthermore, the feeling of "what's the point" around white collar work has never been more intense.

ZeWaka 3mo ago
Are you assuming yearly wages not increasing to match/exceed inflation every year? The logical point here doesn't make much sense to me otherwise.
- kennywinker 3mo ago
  Cumulative inflation since 2019 has been 30%. More with these new numbers, I think. What jobs have the wages gone up 30% in that same time period? I’m sure a few, but not many.
  - thewebguyd 3mo ago
    I'd say almost no one gets a 30%+ increase staying in the same company. There was a short period between 2019 and ~2022 when tech was hiring like crazy and you could just hop from job to job for huge increases every 6 months to a year. The problem is that is now over, and so wages are back to being suppressed again.
  - em500 3mo ago
    Hourly wage for all private sector workers is up +32% since Dec 2019 ($37.54 vs $28.38)[1]. For non-management workers +35% ($32.31 in May 2026 vs $23.85 in Dec 2019)[2]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003 [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AHETPI https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AHETPI
- rottencupcakes 3mo ago
  Also is having twice as much money (1x from interest and 1x from income) not a benefit? Maybe you are the strawman consumer that skeptics point to in guaranteed basic income debates, who just stops working because they get a check.
  - dw_arthur 3mo ago
    The only thing I want to spend a bunch of extra money on is a nice property and making twice the money would not get me there in what I consider a reasonable amount of time. I'm also not interested in going on an extra two fancy vacations per year or a nicer car. I'm plenty content to read, cook, learn, and enjoy the arts.
  - win311fwg 3mo ago
    If the first 1x covers all your spending, what else are you going do with the other 1x? Invest it in even more investments to produce more income that you already cannot spend? That turns into what is essentially working for free. Why bother?
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      That turns into working hard so you or your descendants can eventually own the world. Jeff Bezos did it. Elon Musk did it. Bill Gates did it. If any of today's billionaires stopped when they had enough money, we wouldn't be talking about them.
      - win311fwg 3mo ago
        Except all of the above settled for 1x, quitting their jobs (where they had one) to pursue their personal dreams. It so happens that their dreams also turned into something valuable, but that's secondary. They would have never been able to seek out their dream or turn that dream into something valuable had they accepted 2x.
- cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
  In the tech industry? Absolutely they have not, and in fact have likely gone the other way. Unless you're maybe one of the few specialists in deep learning, CUDA, etc. There's been mass layoffs and downward pressure on compensation all over.
  - ZeWaka 3mo ago
    I don't work as a specialist, nor at any "special" company in the tech industry, and my yearly wage increase has met or exceeded inflation. Nor has there been any layoffs at my large company.
- dw_arthur 3mo ago
  My salary has not kept up with inflation over the last 15 years. The industry I am in, which is not related to tech, has undergone massive consolidation leading to 2-3% raises some years and no raises other years.
breakpointalpha 3mo ago
I don't understand this point of view. $140k in a LCOL is a fantastic salary. Median US household income is $83k/yr. It feels more likely your investment account gains are driving your decisions. Stock gains are also driven by inflation though! I can sort of understand the feeling though, I just recently got a 2.5% raise for "inflation", which hardly feels like it's making a dent.
- dmoy 3mo ago
  I don't think that OP meant to say their wage income was low. I think OP means that once their investment returns starts exceeding their wage income, their motivation for continuing to work drops. Which, I kinda get. If you don't really like what you're doing, it's harder to stay motivated at continuing to work when your bag of money makes more money than you do. It sounds like OP is already planning on some amount of return to work, which may be necessary because that exact point (investment returns > wage income) isn't necessarily a safe point to retire. But it might be, depending on how much you spend, and what your not-employer-funded healthcare costs are.
  - cyanydeez 3mo ago
    Y"eah, the same reason we're going to have a trillionaire soon is why even if someones making a great salary, their 401k is inflating faster than they need to earn a living in a low cost of living area. Absolutely absurd, but if you got the upswing between 2010-2020, you might be in an upper class while still living in lower class, meaning your 401k is all you need to survive on while the billionaires continue to pump the market as a defacto monetary instrument and leave the dollar for the poors. Think of it like bitcoin, but instead of owning electronic worthless hashes, you own LLCs that own stocks and take out loans on behalf ot he LLC against those stocks. Then you just trade those LLCs around as tokens of wealth. Welcome to the great new oligarchy.
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      It's just yet another wealth transfer between classes. They can happen frequently and unpredictably, and usually but not always from workers to owners. If you happen to be in the class that benefits, you take the windfall.
ilikerashers 3mo ago
I feel the same. Investments are shooting up and wages stink. UK has very high taxation now so working full time doesn’t bring in as much as a decent portfolio.
Salgat 3mo ago
You're still cutting your annual income in half though. That's pretty big no?
- jbmchuck 3mo ago
  I have the same feelings as the original poster as I get further into middle age and have a good retirement nest egg - for me there are things more valuable - free time and the things I want to do with it but can't get paid to do - than making more income than I really need.
  - jr3592 3mo ago
    How much do you have saved?
    - jbmchuck 3mo ago
      Enough that a 5% annual return is enough for me to get by. I'm certainly not done working - I want to get that to 3% or so - but it does make it a bit demotivating some days when I look outside and imagine the other things I could be doing with my time.
      - jr3592 3mo ago
        I mean, I'm totally with you... It's just never clear to me what "enough" is.
- dw_arthur 3mo ago
  I don't have a family, so it's manageable. If I had kids there is no way I could work part-time.
- asdff 3mo ago
  LCOL a good house might be 140k outright. Their costs are probably barely anything yearly against their returns.
- bluecalm 3mo ago
w10-1 3mo ago
I would never, ever leave work regardless of the pay. Regardless of your skill and reputation, time off can quickly put you below the bar for even getting a call-back, and you lose access to relevant lessons. You'll be shocked at how irrelevant you become, and how quickly the retirement accounts will give up the gains of the last 3 years (particularly when this 2026 IPO summer terminates US equity markets). The feeling of "What's the point" might have little to do with work, and more to do with (finally) losing faith in ambition. If so, don't worry: the best comes after we put aside dreams.
- scarecrowbob 3mo ago
  Oh no, you mean I might not be able to get another really annoying job so I can, what, have more money than I need to live on? I used to get paged at 1am to mess with downed webservers, now I hang out in a shack with no running water in rural CO. I'm 48 and have a chunk of cash that made more last year than I've ever been able to make in a single year doing salaried labor as a programmer. I quit 3 years ago when my kiddo graduated college and have been just living on that and my small A/V production business. It's great. I do a lot of work; I have done first aid at one music festival, paid sound at a bluegrass festival, and sat around doing random volunteer stuff at another. I can give the local music school and the local civic orchestra really good bids on doing sound for them. I am going to get an EMT cert because I have a friend who contracts to do first-aid at festivals. I'm not at all worried that my (pre-LLM) programming skills and connections are going away- I've replaced them with mandolin skills and much happier.
  - josh-sematic 3mo ago
    You are describing where I want to be when my kid graduates (years from now), mandolin and all! Low cost of living, contributing to the community, enough time for passions… Not able to get there yet but it’s what I’m working towards. I just hope LLMs don’t eat my current career path before I can achieve it.
jr3592 3mo ago
This actually makes 0 sense. Like, do you even understand what you're saying? The value of your savings is decreasing at a faster rate than ever before, so its a good time to stop saving and spend it? The stock market increasing is not the same thing as inflation. What you're saying makes sense only if you are referring to stock market valuation... strictly retiring because inflation is high makes no sense.
- fluoridation 3mo ago
  >The value of your savings is decreasing at a faster rate than ever before, so its a good time to stop saving and spend it? Inflation does incentivize spending, yes. Would you rather have 100 kilos of rice today, or wait and have 99 kilos of rice tomorrow for the same price?
  - jr3592 3mo ago
    > Inflation does incentivize spending, yes. All inflation incentivizes is finding an asset class that isn't devaluing. If that is what you mean by "spending" then we align. But does inflation incentivize spending money on depreciating assets? Only for fools.
    - fluoridation 3mo ago
      ??? "All" it incentivizes? Uh, no. The vast majority of people don't treat their salaries as an investment opportunity, they have to live off it. If you need to fix your water heater, you might get it fixed now while inflation is high than wait until winter (not a great example given the time scales involved, but it gets the point across). Even if you have nothing that you desperately need, if inflation is really high you might blow it on something frivolous because if you try saving it it won't be worth anything in one or two year's time. Inflation doesn't push people towards non-devaluating assets, it pushes people to get rid of currency by any means they have available.
      - jr3592 3mo ago
boringg 3mo ago
Equities rise and fall. Unless you fully cash out that stuff can materially drop and if you do materially cash out - it can inflate away. Sorry to be a downer but there is no certainty on the future especially with the level of chaos being sown in the western world as a function of a few key people.
thisisit 3mo ago
I understand that salaries might have been stagnant and with wages not keeping with inflation it doesn't seem to make sense to continue working. The stock market often aligns with inflation. After all if the companies growth is not beating inflation what exactly is the point really? But that also comes at the expense of not paying people their due worth and incrementing below inflation rate. But past returns do not guarantee future results. Stock markets ebbs and flows. It will take a blip, not even a crash, to impact those retirement accounts. IMO this is a risky idea especially if there are jobs available.
FrustratedMonky 3mo ago
If your retirement account is making more than 140k/year. You are probably in late stages of career, and of course have completely different incentives that also play into 'what's the point'. If my retirement account was making more than my salary, then I'd also be asking myself 'what is the point' -> Regardless of inflation.
Dig1t 3mo ago
It sounds like either way you could just use a break. If you have a house and retirement is tracking inflation, you can use the time to reset and figure out a career change.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

ZeWaka 3mo ago

Are you assuming yearly wages not increasing to match/exceed inflation every year? The logical point here doesn't make much sense to me otherwise.

kennywinker 3mo ago
Cumulative inflation since 2019 has been 30%. More with these new numbers, I think. What jobs have the wages gone up 30% in that same time period? I’m sure a few, but not many.
- thewebguyd 3mo ago
  I'd say almost no one gets a 30%+ increase staying in the same company. There was a short period between 2019 and ~2022 when tech was hiring like crazy and you could just hop from job to job for huge increases every 6 months to a year. The problem is that is now over, and so wages are back to being suppressed again.
- em500 3mo ago
  Hourly wage for all private sector workers is up +32% since Dec 2019 ($37.54 vs $28.38)[1]. For non-management workers +35% ($32.31 in May 2026 vs $23.85 in Dec 2019)[2]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003 [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AHETPI https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AHETPI
rottencupcakes 3mo ago
Also is having twice as much money (1x from interest and 1x from income) not a benefit? Maybe you are the strawman consumer that skeptics point to in guaranteed basic income debates, who just stops working because they get a check.
- dw_arthur 3mo ago
  The only thing I want to spend a bunch of extra money on is a nice property and making twice the money would not get me there in what I consider a reasonable amount of time. I'm also not interested in going on an extra two fancy vacations per year or a nicer car. I'm plenty content to read, cook, learn, and enjoy the arts.
- win311fwg 3mo ago
  If the first 1x covers all your spending, what else are you going do with the other 1x? Invest it in even more investments to produce more income that you already cannot spend? That turns into what is essentially working for free. Why bother?
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    That turns into working hard so you or your descendants can eventually own the world. Jeff Bezos did it. Elon Musk did it. Bill Gates did it. If any of today's billionaires stopped when they had enough money, we wouldn't be talking about them.
    - win311fwg 3mo ago
      Except all of the above settled for 1x, quitting their jobs (where they had one) to pursue their personal dreams. It so happens that their dreams also turned into something valuable, but that's secondary. They would have never been able to seek out their dream or turn that dream into something valuable had they accepted 2x.
cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
In the tech industry? Absolutely they have not, and in fact have likely gone the other way. Unless you're maybe one of the few specialists in deep learning, CUDA, etc. There's been mass layoffs and downward pressure on compensation all over.
- ZeWaka 3mo ago
  I don't work as a specialist, nor at any "special" company in the tech industry, and my yearly wage increase has met or exceeded inflation. Nor has there been any layoffs at my large company.
dw_arthur 3mo ago
My salary has not kept up with inflation over the last 15 years. The industry I am in, which is not related to tech, has undergone massive consolidation leading to 2-3% raises some years and no raises other years.

breakpointalpha 3mo ago

I don't understand this point of view. $140k in a LCOL is a fantastic salary. Median US household income is $83k/yr. It feels more likely your investment account gains are driving your decisions. Stock gains are also driven by inflation though! I can sort of understand the feeling though, I just recently got a 2.5% raise for "inflation", which hardly feels like it's making a dent.

dmoy 3mo ago
I don't think that OP meant to say their wage income was low. I think OP means that once their investment returns starts exceeding their wage income, their motivation for continuing to work drops. Which, I kinda get. If you don't really like what you're doing, it's harder to stay motivated at continuing to work when your bag of money makes more money than you do. It sounds like OP is already planning on some amount of return to work, which may be necessary because that exact point (investment returns > wage income) isn't necessarily a safe point to retire. But it might be, depending on how much you spend, and what your not-employer-funded healthcare costs are.
- cyanydeez 3mo ago
  Y"eah, the same reason we're going to have a trillionaire soon is why even if someones making a great salary, their 401k is inflating faster than they need to earn a living in a low cost of living area. Absolutely absurd, but if you got the upswing between 2010-2020, you might be in an upper class while still living in lower class, meaning your 401k is all you need to survive on while the billionaires continue to pump the market as a defacto monetary instrument and leave the dollar for the poors. Think of it like bitcoin, but instead of owning electronic worthless hashes, you own LLCs that own stocks and take out loans on behalf ot he LLC against those stocks. Then you just trade those LLCs around as tokens of wealth. Welcome to the great new oligarchy.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    It's just yet another wealth transfer between classes. They can happen frequently and unpredictably, and usually but not always from workers to owners. If you happen to be in the class that benefits, you take the windfall.

ilikerashers 3mo ago

I feel the same. Investments are shooting up and wages stink. UK has very high taxation now so working full time doesn’t bring in as much as a decent portfolio.

Salgat 3mo ago

You're still cutting your annual income in half though. That's pretty big no?

jbmchuck 3mo ago
I have the same feelings as the original poster as I get further into middle age and have a good retirement nest egg - for me there are things more valuable - free time and the things I want to do with it but can't get paid to do - than making more income than I really need.
- jr3592 3mo ago
  How much do you have saved?
  - jbmchuck 3mo ago
    Enough that a 5% annual return is enough for me to get by. I'm certainly not done working - I want to get that to 3% or so - but it does make it a bit demotivating some days when I look outside and imagine the other things I could be doing with my time.
    - jr3592 3mo ago
      I mean, I'm totally with you... It's just never clear to me what "enough" is.
dw_arthur 3mo ago
I don't have a family, so it's manageable. If I had kids there is no way I could work part-time.
asdff 3mo ago
LCOL a good house might be 140k outright. Their costs are probably barely anything yearly against their returns.
bluecalm 3mo ago

w10-1 3mo ago

I would never, ever leave work regardless of the pay. Regardless of your skill and reputation, time off can quickly put you below the bar for even getting a call-back, and you lose access to relevant lessons. You'll be shocked at how irrelevant you become, and how quickly the retirement accounts will give up the gains of the last 3 years (particularly when this 2026 IPO summer terminates US equity markets). The feeling of "What's the point" might have little to do with work, and more to do with (finally) losing faith in ambition. If so, don't worry: the best comes after we put aside dreams.

scarecrowbob 3mo ago
Oh no, you mean I might not be able to get another really annoying job so I can, what, have more money than I need to live on? I used to get paged at 1am to mess with downed webservers, now I hang out in a shack with no running water in rural CO. I'm 48 and have a chunk of cash that made more last year than I've ever been able to make in a single year doing salaried labor as a programmer. I quit 3 years ago when my kiddo graduated college and have been just living on that and my small A/V production business. It's great. I do a lot of work; I have done first aid at one music festival, paid sound at a bluegrass festival, and sat around doing random volunteer stuff at another. I can give the local music school and the local civic orchestra really good bids on doing sound for them. I am going to get an EMT cert because I have a friend who contracts to do first-aid at festivals. I'm not at all worried that my (pre-LLM) programming skills and connections are going away- I've replaced them with mandolin skills and much happier.
- josh-sematic 3mo ago
  You are describing where I want to be when my kid graduates (years from now), mandolin and all! Low cost of living, contributing to the community, enough time for passions… Not able to get there yet but it’s what I’m working towards. I just hope LLMs don’t eat my current career path before I can achieve it.

jr3592 3mo ago

This actually makes 0 sense. Like, do you even understand what you're saying? The value of your savings is decreasing at a faster rate than ever before, so its a good time to stop saving and spend it? The stock market increasing is not the same thing as inflation. What you're saying makes sense only if you are referring to stock market valuation... strictly retiring because inflation is high makes no sense.

fluoridation 3mo ago
>The value of your savings is decreasing at a faster rate than ever before, so its a good time to stop saving and spend it? Inflation does incentivize spending, yes. Would you rather have 100 kilos of rice today, or wait and have 99 kilos of rice tomorrow for the same price?
- jr3592 3mo ago
  > Inflation does incentivize spending, yes. All inflation incentivizes is finding an asset class that isn't devaluing. If that is what you mean by "spending" then we align. But does inflation incentivize spending money on depreciating assets? Only for fools.
  - fluoridation 3mo ago
    ??? "All" it incentivizes? Uh, no. The vast majority of people don't treat their salaries as an investment opportunity, they have to live off it. If you need to fix your water heater, you might get it fixed now while inflation is high than wait until winter (not a great example given the time scales involved, but it gets the point across). Even if you have nothing that you desperately need, if inflation is really high you might blow it on something frivolous because if you try saving it it won't be worth anything in one or two year's time. Inflation doesn't push people towards non-devaluating assets, it pushes people to get rid of currency by any means they have available.
    - jr3592 3mo ago

boringg 3mo ago

Equities rise and fall. Unless you fully cash out that stuff can materially drop and if you do materially cash out - it can inflate away. Sorry to be a downer but there is no certainty on the future especially with the level of chaos being sown in the western world as a function of a few key people.

thisisit 3mo ago

I understand that salaries might have been stagnant and with wages not keeping with inflation it doesn't seem to make sense to continue working. The stock market often aligns with inflation. After all if the companies growth is not beating inflation what exactly is the point really? But that also comes at the expense of not paying people their due worth and incrementing below inflation rate. But past returns do not guarantee future results. Stock markets ebbs and flows. It will take a blip, not even a crash, to impact those retirement accounts. IMO this is a risky idea especially if there are jobs available.

FrustratedMonky 3mo ago

If your retirement account is making more than 140k/year. You are probably in late stages of career, and of course have completely different incentives that also play into 'what's the point'. If my retirement account was making more than my salary, then I'd also be asking myself 'what is the point' -> Regardless of inflation.

Dig1t 3mo ago

It sounds like either way you could just use a break. If you have a house and retirement is tracking inflation, you can use the time to reset and figure out a career change.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]