Dr. Hax on Nostr: I thought that when I left my job with no intent to get another one, I'd be shedding ...

I thought that when I left my job with no intent to get another one, I'd be shedding my responsibilities, have lots of free time, and be able to decide how I spend it. It hasn't panned out quite as well as I had imagined.

When you have indoor plants, a garden, compost that needs flipped, there are some responsibilities or you no longer have these things.

Okay, but that's only a couple hours per day, right? So that means I have like 10 hours a day to do whatever I want. 70 hours a week, right? Lovely.

But I like to eat every day, multiple times even. I can't afford takeout for every meal, so I cook. But that also means checking for food about to go bad, picking out recipies to use said ingredients, figuring out what we already have versus ehat we need and going shopping for that food too. That adds up to about 20 hours a week. Yes, I've counted.

So now I've still got 50 hours/week of leisure, less time for other chores like laundry, cleaning and the like, but that's not much time at all, so we'll sweep that time under the rug.

I do, however, also feel compelled to run my own servers. Email, GitLab, Nextcloud, Mastodon, Jitsi, Matrix, DNS... the list goes on and on. And the maintenance there is actually pretty low. Once things are set up, everything is pretty well automated. Still, it's not zero. When software or hardware nears end-of-life, I need to take steps. Air gapped backups require manual work. And I have other people who depend on the infrastructure I built, so I do feel obligated to ensure we have good uptime. In addition to that, I've also been trying to refactor my automation so I can publish it and make it easier for others to self-host things. I could do this pretty much full time for years, but I severely limit the time I spend here.

Then there's the Signet project. I feel obligated to work on that every week for between 4-16 hours. I have users to support. I want to fix some minor bugs, build more hardware, etc.

There are a couple other projects that I do under other nyms that take about 6 hours a week.

The Artisans Coop takes about 10 hours/week.

I'm helping put together a system to measure rainfall in real time so floods can be accurately predicted. That takes at least 4 hours per week.

I volunteer for Books2Prisoners for a couple hours a week. I also want to help out the local makerspace for at least a couple hours a week. More when they have a cleanup day or interesting event.

There are house projects like moving and then fixing the rain barrel stand, re-routing the gutters, reattaching the gutters, spray foaming holes in the house, getting rid of the ants, installing a huge floating shelf, mudding/texturing/painting, making molding for the windows and all these odds and ends that sound like they're no big deal. In isolation they're not, but when the gutter falls off the roof and there's going to be water in the basement, and that will quickly lead to mold, they absolutely demand my time. If not now, a whole lot more time later.

In the end, I guess this is just me rambling on about how even though I have more freedom to decide how I spend my time than I ever have in my entire life, I still feel pressured into doing things in a timeframe I don't control. I do not feel like I am free to just go work on the things I want to do. I feel obligated to do these things above.

Sure, I could walk away from several of these projects and leave people hanging, but that's really hard for me to do. I'm going to scale back nonetheless, because I want more control over my time. Hopefully I will get things to good stopping points and making sure someone else can pick up where I left off before I burn out and just walk away.

I suppose if I have a point here, it's that if you have a full time job, and constantly feel like you don't have any free time, don't expect that to change if you weren't spending 40 hours a week at work. Change has to come from within, and that's something I'm slowly learning and doing my best to internalize. So really, this is a message of hope. In a world where there is so much you don't control, there's also a lot you can control if you are mindful about it

If anyone actually reads this far, feel free to give me a follow and let me know what you think. Am I just a fool for volunteering to help all these people? Should I just stop and let them fend for themselves?