Comment by gopalv

> When you have enough money to not work, it becomes very lonely fast

I haven't made enough to not work but once my US immigration was sorted out (H1B isn't very leisure compatible), I took a year off to rediscover what all passed me by when I was working.

This was a lot of alone time, but not true loneliness.

For example, I would set up lunch with a friend, they would bail due to work emergencies or something but I would go eat there anyway.

Quickly learned to go to a place where multiple people were scheduled anyway, like heading to Berkley for a tech talk on Byzantine block chains or vector search algorithms, hoping something would interest me.

> OP seems to be going through a belonging crisis. Trying to figure out what group he wants to belong to

The first three months were a strange struggle with my Ego, because a large part of my "Get up and do things" was the belief that what I had to do was very important to others and the whole world stops if I stop moving. To get through the waves in life without feeling self pity about it, I honestly felt my work was what made the sun rise and the rain fall.

Suddenly, my self importance was shot to pieces immediately.

I wasn't important anymore, what I did wasn't important to others but only to me. All the years of sacrificing my own wants (not needs) suddenly felt dissonant.

Plus a lot of activities aren't cumulative in the way work is - cooking dinner today does nothing for dinner tomorrow, there's no way to add up that to something.

Work is particularly rewarding because it checks those two boxes for me - it adds up to something, slowly every day, plus what I do is important to others in way where they want you to succeed (unlike say training for the SF marathon, where it's all "I could never" from people who could, but don't want to).

Eventually, I went back to work, but now I drink that workahol in moderation.