I am a 20 year old (Male) . I work a 10–5 pm job for five days a week, but outside work I’m still on my phone almost 24/7 and honestly bored of it. What can I do to learn something new, build skills, or give my free time more meaning?

Hello there. I need your thoughts and advices about doing absolute nothing, always escaping from responsibility. I'm dead serious. No job, no school, no work, no money, no friends, absolute nothing. For the sake of both being lit by your answers and helping those who also have the same problem, I'd be very appreciated if you can share your words. thank you.

Me and my boyfriend have been living pay check to pay check for quite some time. We love our little life, we have so much that we’re ***so*** grateful for. But there’s still things we want to have and do in this life.

There’s a quote that we love (unsure of who to credit for it, I saw it on Pinterest) and it says something like “how to do anything: at first, dig with your hands. When you find the spoon, dig with the spoon. When you find the shovel, dig with the shovel”. We always say that we’ve been digging with our hands. However, we’re really ready to find the spoon, then the shovel.

So, I’m asking, those who have started with your hands, and ended up with even more than a shovel, what are things we should be doing?

Me personally, I’m also looking for tips on building consistent healthy habits. I want to be my best self for when we find our shovel or more.

(Sorry for all the spoon and shovel talk)

🫶🦋🤍🌞

Twenty-five years ago, I placed what felt like one small bet on a horse.

At the time, I had no idea that bet would eventually lead to years of pain, financial problems, bad decisions, and a lot of destruction in my life.

Gambling took a lot from me. I went through things I would never wish on another person. But after everything I experienced, I also realized that maybe some of what I went through could be used to help someone else.

That is part of why I want to open this subreddit up to more than just one topic.

This can be a place to talk about your goals, your next chapter, career decisions, financial struggles, recovery, relationships, places you want to go in life, or even those moments when you simply have no idea what your next move should be.

If you are struggling with gambling, looking for a job, trying to fix your finances, working toward a goal, rebuilding your life, or just need someone to talk to, you do not have to carry everything by yourself.

Reach out. Post. Ask a question. Share what you are working toward.

No judgment. No pressure.

Sometimes one honest conversation can change the direction of somebody's day, and sometimes it can change a lot more than that.

We are all trying to get somewhere.

One decision, one conversation, and one day at a time.

21M, Sydney, Australia, 2nd-year Compsci/Commerce.

The crux of my question: how do you compare the fulfillment of (a) doing non-intrinsically motivating work full-time for 20-30 years, then intrinsically motivating work on your own schedule for the rest of your life, vs. (b) doing intrinsically motivating work full-time for 40-50 years, then self-directed intrinsic work for the rest of your life? Basically: is front-loading unpleasant-but-high-earning work to buy an earlier "free" life worth it?

Options I'm weighing:
non-intrinsically motivating work:

• Early-retirement-focused: entrepreneurship (saas app, ecommerce, etc), software engineering, financial analyst

intrinsically motivating work

• Impact-focused: policy analyst, health economist
• Enjoyment-focused: graphic designer, fulltime artist

What I'd do w/o financial incentive: painting/drawing, photography, analytical work on real societal problems, learning how society works.
What I wouldn't do w/o financial incentive: coding (draining without AI help), advanced math, complex problem-solving. If they are tied to societal impact I think it may move to the other category. Treating that because I find these difficulty, these aren't natural strengths.

Current perception of dream life:

1. Doing societal impact work ~25hr/wk
2. Spending quality time with friends and family ~ 20hr/wk
3. Sport ~4hr/wk
4. Making art ~ 6hr/wk
5. Go on holidays (1 - 2 international trips & 1 - 3 roadtrips / yr)

Two methodologies I'm trying to reconcile:

1. Find rough financial independent (able to live off investments) age estimates (I know 30-year-out projections are speculative, so treating as hard inputs is probably inaccurate): entrepreneur 40–43, SWE/financial analyst 50–51, artist 51–60, failed entrepreneur/artist then pivot to SWE 55–58, health economist/policy analyst 57–60, graphic designer 65–70. Score each career path on 1) happiness and 2)social impact made by outlining lifestyle at each age and summing scores on yearly basis. Conduct experiments like talking to professionals, side projects, volunteering, taking courses to validate scores until you’re confident to commit towards a path.
2. Skill-first/leverage approach: early on, build a skill you're strong at where it intersects your interests and is high pay potential. Lean toward highest pay/growth early in your career, then use that leverage to move between for-profit and non-profit work as you gain experience, until you land somewhere you're happy.
3. Conduct experiments like talking to professionals, side projects, volunteering, taking courses, internships, work experience. Then imagine doing the work experience for 20-40 years and pick the most desirable path.

I’d really appreciate any inputs you may have on the questions below or any advice 🙏:

1. Has anyone actually lived out either path? Did front-loading unfulfilling work pay off, or did 20 years of it cost more than expected?
2. Is 'financial independence enables high-impact work later' a real strategy, or does starting the impact-focused career earlier compound advantages (network, expertise, credibility) that are hard to buy back at 40-50?
3. For you personally, which method do you think is better, or is there another method you’ve used that you think is better? Are there any key flaws in my methods?

Happy to share more detail on my scoring approach in the comments if useful.

Что можно добавить из полезного в мою жизнь?

Could be related to career, money, fitness, relationships, studies or anything else.

Looking for some real answers from people who learned it the hard way. 👀

For a long time I treated the 10,000-hours idea as a life goal generator: pick something impressive, put in the reps, eventually become excellent at it. I did this with guitar, then a coding bootcamp language, then photography — years of scattered effort, none of it compounding into anything, because I kept picking the goal based on how good it would sound rather than whether I actually wanted to be doing it at hour 9,000.

The logical flaw was pretty simple once I saw it: hours invested only compound if the activity itself is sustainable enough that you'll actually show up for years without external pressure. I was optimizing for the destination and completely ignoring whether the process was something I'd tolerate long enough to get there. Guitar practice felt like a chore by month three every single time I restarted it, which should have told me something the first time, not the fourth.

So the actual goal now isn't "master X" for some impressive X. It's "find the thing where hour 50 doesn't feel meaningfully different in enjoyment from hour 1." That's the only honest filter I've found for picking something worth years of my life instead of another abandoned hobby with expensive equipment sitting in a closet.

Landed on this with running, of all things, and eight months in it's the first "skill goal" I've had that hasn't fizzled by the usual point. Curious if anyone else went through a similar cycle of picking goals for their prestige rather than their actual staying power before finding something that stuck.

For years my life goals looked like everyone else's: buy a house, hit a certain salary, run a marathon, visit 30 countries. Big, milestone-shaped things sitting years out on the horizon. The problem was that hitting one of these goals gave me maybe a week of satisfaction before I was right back to feeling directionless, just with a new distant target to aim at instead. So about a year ago I restructured how I think about this entirely. Instead of a list of destinations, I built a small set of weekly non-negotiables that, if I actually did them consistently, would make the big outcomes basically inevitable as a side effect — three strength training sessions instead of "get in shape by summer," one real conversation with someone I care about instead of "build stronger relationships," four hours of focused deep work on a skill instead of "become an expert," and one day fully unplugged from work instead of "achieve work-life balance." The logic is simple: a goal you can only evaluate years from now gives you no feedback loop and no way to course-correct, while a goal you can evaluate every Sunday tells you immediately whether you're actually living the life you want, not just hoping you'll arrive at it eventually. A year in, I've hit almost none of my big goals on any specific timeline, but I'm stronger, closer to the people I love, better at my craft, and genuinely less burnt out than I've been in a decade. The milestones are starting to happen anyway, they're just a byproduct now instead of the whole point. Curious if anyone else made a similar shift from outcome-goals to system-goals, and what your actual weekly non-negotiables ended up being.

Hello !
Hope you’re doing well .
I am actually looking for tips to reach the best version of my self
And i’ll be glad if you helped me🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
M a quiet person and i want to stay calm as i can but i really wanna do things before entering my twenties so i’ll be readdy to mae it full of success

and hopefully 1mil by the end of the year !

If you are past the age of 60 we'd appreciate your participation. If you know someone past the age of 60 feel free to ask them and share their answer here. 

Here's the question: knowing what you know now, what would you prioritize when you were younger? If you had nothing holding you back, freedom to focus on whatever you want. What would you do differently? Or what did you do that you'd be sure to do again? 

The reason we are asking is because we can't see our future so we'd like to have the perspective of some who are already in their futures.

Thank you for your perspective!

For the last six years I worked in a warehouse doing rotating 12-hour shifts — the kind of schedule that eats your weekends and makes it impossible to plan anything more than a day ahead. My life goal was simple on paper but hard in practice: get a job where I could actually predict my own time.

This year I finally made the switch to a fixed 8-hour schedule with a company that respects off-hours. It took two years of night classes, a handful of rejected applications, and a lot of budgeting to survive the pay cut during the transition. But now I get to have dinner with my family every night and actually use my weekends for something other than recovering.

Posting this not to brag, but because when I was in the middle of the grind, seeing other people's "after" stories kept me motivated. If anyone else is stuck in a schedule that's swallowing their life, it is possible to get out — it just takes patience and a plan.