hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2802.txt

Episode: 2802
Title: HPR2802: Mid-life (?) assessment
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2802/hpr2802.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 17:01:15

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This in HPR episode 2008 102 entitled Midlife Assessment.
It is hosted by Clacket and in about 17 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summer is, it seems life goes faster and faster and then turns around and goes slower and slower.
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Hi, I'm Clacket and I'm 40 years old.
If I can assume that I will live to be at least 80 years old, then maybe this is a good time for a midlife assessment on things.
I look back and I look forward.
Since 1998, I've lived in eight different cities or towns, now at 18 different addresses.
I haven't ever intended to move frequently, it's just the way that it's been turning out for reasons that made sense at the time.
Now we have stayed in the same place for two years and it's time to move on.
We're just moving one kilometer or so, but we're moving.
I was starting to feel really at home here in the place we have now, but I'm used to moving, so I think I will feel quite at home in our next place.
For part of it, it's kind of the same surroundings, it's not too far away.
We'll be going to some of the same places we've been going in the place we're living now.
So if we look back at my first 40 years, how did they look?
I think we can divide them into different parts and it seems that as life progresses, each part moves faster and faster, each part becomes smaller.
So the first chunk is just the first half, 20 years.
I lived with my parents, I grew up, I had my childhood and I went to school and I did military service and then it was time to leave the home base.
So the second half is where I moved away from my parents, created my own life with the base I had got from being raised by them.
And then we can kind of look at the next quarter of my life so far, so the next 10 years after the first 20 years.
I lived in the city where I went to university, I was studying, I was working part of the time, I was doing theatre, I was singing on stage and everything was chaotic and mixed up and wonderful.
And then I left my university town and came to the fourth quarter of my life so far, the last 10 years.
I've split it pretty evenly between Hong Kong and Sweden, I've been married during that decade.
So yeah, we married in 2009, so we've been married for 10 years this year.
And I've been working full time for these last 10 years.
Instead of splitting my time between work and studies and everything, I've been working or being unemployed but not mixing work with other things.
Mostly doing some suicide work but also doing some coding, I've been trying to do coding because that's what I want to do.
In the last year it was mostly coding which was really nice and in a language I love as well, so that was a really great year, work wise.
But then this last quarter of my life can be divided into two eighths.
But last five years, we're actually now even six years, we've been a family of three and that has been quite different from the first four years of the decade when it was just us, just two of us.
So here we are, so far things have been moving faster and faster, like I said, but from this point on I sort of expected to go the other way.
My son, our son, for the next five years, he'll start school, he'll start school this autumn.
And by the end of this first eighth on the second half of my 80 years, by the end of the coming five years, he will be near puberty.
That will be a new phase of life for sure.
And by the end of the next ten years, he'll be 16 years old and some of my friends actually moved out at that time.
I know that kids today have a difficult time moving out and they stay with their parents much longer than my generation did, but we'll do our best to give him a chance to stand on his own leg.
I found it really good for me to be let go of my parents' continued presence and be forced to take care of my own stuff.
That was a really important part of my life and I think when it was nice, I found it really comfortable that I didn't have to do that until I was 20, 21 years old.
But I think it would have been really good for me to move out earlier, actually.
So we'll try to give him that. Of course we will not kick him out if he doesn't want to or if he doesn't have the tools necessary, but we'll try hard to give him these tools.
And also I'm forcing this a bit to get into this nice 5, 10, 20 pattern. So in 10 years maybe he moves out.
So then the second quarter of the second half of these 80 years. So in 10 to 20 years from now.
That's when we'll be sort of a family of two again.
That will be quite different from the baby years and the child years and the teenage years.
We'll be interesting to see how that turns out.
We'll have more time for each other. That will be great.
And our professional careers probably we have been able to save a lot of money. That's what we intend to do.
We own an apartment but we don't live there and we have a lot of loans on it. Hopefully we'll pay it off a large part of that by that time.
We'll probably not be finished though.
And then in 20 years from now.
So I'll be 60. It's not quite retirement age but let's call it retirement age.
I think people today mostly expect that I'll never retire. They're going to move and move the deadline and people get older, people need to work longer.
But the way the trajectory in my life looks right now. I think if I'm working in saving money for the next 20 years, I think I have a pretty good chance of retiring.
Especially if you consider that retirement doesn't mean you stop working and you stop earning money from work and you rely on your savings entirely.
I don't think I want to do that. But retiring I just mean stop having to work just to get money for the rent.
Find out what I want to do, how I want to improve the world, what projects I want to do.
And I mean I could work on a project for a year until I find a way to make it profitable.
It's probably quite a different situation from now and I hope I will be there in 20 years.
So that's what I call retirement.
And I hope that's what I would do for the rest of my life. From 60 to 80.
I hope I will be in good shape. My parents are almost 80 now. They're still doing great.
They're not doing salary work but my father, he gets flattered when people call him and say they need his help.
And he offers them a fee and they say that's too low, let's raise it.
Because he's just working because he enjoys work and he likes that people want him to work.
And he's not working too much. If he does, my mother tells him so and then he cuts down.
But I remember one year I saw him working on his taxes and he was paying more in VAT that year.
Because he was invoicing from his own company. He was paying more in VAT that year than I was earning on my salary.
So he's doing pretty well for himself, even working, not even half time, maybe quarter time.
And then, yeah, I hope I will be in a similar position when I'm 80.
And from there on, I just see it's steady cruising. I hope I will stay healthy. Of course, the joints and the organs and everything will start breaking down at some point.
But for my parents so far, it's looking pretty good. There's a couple of issues, but modern science takes care of them pretty well.
And of course, around the time of my retirement, then our son will also be in the age where we might have grandchildren.
No pressure boy, seriously, no pressure. The world has enough people and you should only add more people if you know that you want it and you know you can provide well for them.
But the Queen of Sweden calls grandchildren the dessert of life. And I believe her. I look at my parents and how they treat my son and I'm really looking forward to being in their position a few decades from now.
Otherwise, I'll be doing great. That's also fine.
And then we'll see. It's my grandfather. He lived to be 80 something, but his brothers, he had three brothers and they all lived to be over a hundred years old.
I think I have a pretty good chance. My parents are way healthier than my grandparents were at their age. My grandma died before 80.
She was, I don't know if she was even 60. Sorry, 70. I think she was 60 something when she died.
And my grandfather, on my mother's side, he worked in a factory and they removed asbestos stuff from some facilities there and it killed his lungs.
So I just remember a few fragments in my early childhood of my mother's father.
So if they had had access to the good working conditions we have now and the health care we have now, who knows how all they would have been.
I hope my parents will be at least a hundred. But I think I have a pretty good chance of being at least a hundred.
And the funny thing is that the longer you live, the better chance you have to live long enough that medical science progresses enough that you can live even longer.
So I mean, I don't expect to become a hundred and twenty. But I wouldn't be entirely surprised if my son would be a hundred and twenty before he died.
Of course, I wouldn't be able to be surprised because I would be dead at that time. But I wouldn't be surprised now if I would find out that my son was going to live to be a hundred and twenty.
Time will tell.
And so, yeah, that's how I look at my life.
I'm currently looking for employment. The place I've found I came back from an interview today.
It looks like a really nice place and they really want me to work there.
And we'll see about salary level and if they can accommodate me staying home and taking care of my son a lot because my wife is working full time.
And so I have to make sure that I'm there for him and Hong Kong kindergarten is just half day.
But then in the autumn, he will start primary school and then he will be going full day. So that things will become quite a lot easier.
But I hope I will be able to, that the guys and gals at the company I was interviewing for, I hope that they can convince their managers that they will be able to arrange something flexible for me until September.
Because it seems like a really nice place to work.
Otherwise, I've also been applying for a job at GitLab and they're super remote. So if I get to work there, I'll be very flexible.
And that would be very suitable. But we'll see, I have a phone interview with them next week and then we'll see how it goes from there.
So that's my 40 years so far and my guess is for the next 40 to 80 years.
How are you looking at your life? What have you done so far and where do you think you're going?
Recording show for Hacker Public Radio. Let's have a discussion.
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