Forgotten Employee (2002)
I read it a while back. The story is probably fiction, but I have no trouble believing there must be shitload of people who must have worked an arrangement like that for themselves—taking paychecks without work. What surprises me is that almost always these people don't use their free time to do something productive—like picking up a hobby or up-skilling, they squander most of it. Ex: a programmer who outsourced his job to China and used his free time to watch cat videos and Reddit[1].<p>I am not deriding that choice, just that it's a curious thing. We all blame our day jobs for eating most of our time. But when we do get total freedom, we hardly remain as productive as we imagined ourselves to be. I thought I was different. But no!  Recently, I took a career-break and I thought I would use the newfound free time to learn all the things I was putting on the back-burner. Instead, I found myself to be dramatically less productive compared to when I was working. Lacking objective, or structure in the day, I found myself playing video games or surfing web pretty much all day.<p>I realized maybe 9-5 isn't as bad as it sounds and early retirement isn't as good.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21043693</a>