We had a high performing co-worker who was scared witless after a lay-off episode and this was not because he was worried about lacking money or loss of prestige., but because he could not come to terms with the simple fact of facing the 9 am on a Monday morning with absolutely no expectations. It freaked so much to not feel the hustle and the adrenaline rush of experiencing the blues Monday morning!?

Another colleague used to drive up to the parking lot of their previous employer, post lay-off., so that he could feel normal., and he did this for well over 6 - 8 months. Pack bags, wave to his wife and family, drive up in his Porsche to the parking lot and I guess feel normal !?

I think that kind of thing strikes many people. Sometimes like with Socrates and his daimonion which restrained him from risk and other times like with one of my favourite lines in all literature where Ahab of Moby Dick remarks:

> What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me?

I find so much of this relatable in my own way, billions absent. It's good to see there are others who feel this way. Community from afar.

I don't mean this in a creepy way at all, but I got the impression the greatest source of joy was hanging around with younger people. A hungry grad, a cleaner, a nurse, male, female, whatever.

I'm sure he enjoyed his peers as well, but I could detect a shade of boredom of those interactions, which inevitably had stress and responsibility attached.

I think what I'm trying to say is that work isn't just about challenge, it's about socialization and having fun. And one of the greatest benefits of being financially independent is being able to navigate to those kinds of moments without the pressure of being on the make.

Is it? I know people who are really happy without doing much in their retirement. Probably because they weren't workaholics.

To my mind, if one doesn't have hobbies during the working years, then they will struggle to find purpose when they retite.

It can be something other than a job. It just can't be done alone.

We are social creatures and need to be needed by each other. Luckily there are plenty of people in need.

Is this generated by AI? English is all over the place in the article.

Company got sold, the owners were great and made sure everyone was taken care of.

Almost all the owners are now back working in one way or another. It's about +5 year since the sale.

- 1 spent the first year travelling

- 1 did loads of house stuff

- 2 got really deep into woodworking

Still the same people; I just think they got bored of the banality.

I think the more important goal in FIRE is the 'FI' part - financial independence. Something that allows you to retire early - not necessary that you have to use this privilage. Something that allows you to next day take a day off or week off or 1 year sabbatical to recharge without asking anyone for permission or worrying if you will be able to pay the bills.

I think even in 4-hour-workweek Tim Ferriss called it taking mini-retirements throughout your life rather than at the end of you life.

I said "Yes! If you don't mind that all the balls land on the floor."

Sergey found someone else to juggle with.

That person became CEO of a major Alphabet company.

It's pretty cool doing whatever I want for now, but I don't think I can do this for another 40 years. I feel like there's something missing - the sense of accomplishment whenever I finish a task. Also, sitting around doing nothing feels so much better when it's either before work or after work.

So maybe at the end of summer 2026 I'll wait for recruiter emails and start responding to some of them. I'm done with applying to 100 jobs to get one response. Maybe I'll try a startup job to experience working in a place that doesn't have a 50-page document describing level expectations.

That's also the reason why these multi-billionaires never retire. They've retired from real work a long time ago.

Google has made some subtle moves that a lot of folks missed, possibly with Sergey's influence. Like hiring back Noam Shazeer, who practically invented the backbone of the technology.

It's good to have folks with presumptions of being scientists actually run companies for once.

That being said, I wish his ex-wife hadn't spent her millions in the divorce proceedings to get RFK Jr into a cabinet level position to gut billions in research spending. :(

but maybe being in a corporate environment (any any env) shapes your thinking in such a way that it’s really hard to think outside tha conditioning. feels like that to me only a few years int working

FIRE is sick. Go for it as soon as possible, before marriage.

They never have to work. They do it because they want to.

Retirement implies there was work you didn't want to do. You did it because you had (or wanted) to make some money. Now you have enough money. You've retired.

Hell, it isn't even applicable to many wealthy software engineers who got rich from tech startups. Many are coding as much as when they were working.

It lines up with the AI arms race kicking into overdrive around ChatGPT's triumph in late 2022. Brin pops out of hiding right then, admitting Google "messed up" and starts coding, analysing losses, and basically playing dictator with his super-voting shares to shove the company back on track.

Rivals like OpenAI yanked him in and now he's in the office daily because the "trajectory of AI is so exciting" - translation: his ego couldn't handle watching his empire get outpaced, and with those voting rights, he can bulldoze through bureaucracy to keep the throne.

Ultimately, it's less about some profound quest for purpose and more about a control freak safeguarding his legacy and billions as the tech world burns. He never really let his kingdom go.

But I was still "working" the whole time. I was running a small startup, and still keeping up on tech and taking speaking gigs. I was not great at fully retiring.

I unretired when the second kid got to 1st grade. We could no longer travel on a whim and the house was empty 6 hours a day. I didn't seek work, but someone reached out with an interesting job and I didn't say no.

Funny enough, my wife and I were just talking about how we were both bad at retirement (she also retired and has since gone back to work). But we talked about how the next retirement will be better, because the kids will be gone and we'll just sit around making art and building Lego all day.

We'll see if that actually happens!

"The tech founder’s return to full-time work is a reminder that even billions can’t guarantee a happy retirement if you don’t also do this. "

The only thing I don't quite get about Brin is going back to Google. Since he doesn't need the money, why not support open source AI projects?

It’s as if they’ve never heard of Maslow‘s Hierarchy of Needs before and further did they don’t know Self Actualizing is right at the very top.

Without that key stone on the top the human being is still a wanting animal. And if you somehow “mission complete” one Self Actualizing, then you immediately start to want something fresh “purpose” etc.

And obviously Self Actualizing doesn’t have to come in the form of work, although often it does.

Retirement is a scam. Figure out what you want to do and do it until you drop.

I took a semi retirement approach to the business, there really wasn't a lot of things to do, my role was sort of just "managing" programmers. I got so much free time that I could even start a second business on the side.

Despite my best ability to stretch my work, I couldn't even fill up half of my working hours. One would have thought that this is heaven. But the time I was most free was also the time I was most miserable. I wasn't happy, I was gaining weight, I was perennially asking myself why the business couldn't be bigger and I couldn't sell it, so that I can be real millionaires and billionaires with financial freedom!

Then fate intervened, the sudden fortune disappeared and I no longer had the luxury of just "managing people"; I have to do hands-on. And it was this activity, the feeling that I was contributing to something, that I was writing code again and actually building stuffs, that made me happy again.

Today we are bigger than what we once we were, but still, I am writing code and pretty much hands-on.I vow that I will never retire, even though if I could. Because it's the meaningful work that sustains life and provides happiness. Being able to work on it is a luxury that I will never want to give up, ever.

He did a bit of consulting, was a rural mail carrier for a year and ended up managing a county program for a few years. He also discovered teaching as an adjunct professor, which he loved deeply. At some point, he was ready, and he had several good years of retirement with grandchildren and travel.

With a story like this, I choose to see what we have in common with a very successful, very rich person. Many people think “If only I had a more, everything would be grand.”

Well… Brin is a billionaire controlling one of the most powerful corporations on the earth. He found meaning in his work, or chose his work because of the meaning to him. Either way, given the ability to do anything, he made his choice. Don’t worship the guy, but perhaps see the humanity that we all share.

I'm curious to know how many retirees end up like Sergey and how many you don't hear about because they're too busy enjoying their retirement.

If only we all had a time in life to do what we love, get paid, and face no paywalls. I call that "liberated work". If only at least retirement was like that.

Snark aside, good for him. Absolute non-news though, as is any extraordinary individual action during and contributing to a bubble. It'll be interesting to see what stays when, or if, the bubble ever pops.

There were a bunch of people, from across the country, MANY in retirement, trying their best to sell themselves that they are the right candidate.

Sergey can just make a phone call and he gets to build Gemini and run a billion dollar organization and have meaning in old-age. This is what wealth buys you. The rest of us, I guess, we will be arm-wresteling for the few open oppertunities to make an impact.

Then I got cheated out of my position in the crypto project. Literally scammed by the project founder with the full support of government regulators who are supposed to be preventing this stuff and lost all my income overnight. The regulators literally facilitated fraud instead of preventing it... And I had the pleasure of being gaslit about it while also being gaslit about COVID by a different set of regulators. I became a conspiracy theorist during this time! Now I'm forced to work again...

It's especially infuriating in this age of perma-bailouts where the system is basically bailing out everyone with assets.

I figured out that the system is a scam. I can prove it to anyone in excruciating detail, with citations. If anyone should be bailed out, it should be me. I shouldn't be forced back in the hamster wheel. It's hard to compete against others who think the system works a certain way and don't realize how the hamster wheel works. I shouldn't have to compete with delusional fools who think that their effort spent on the hamster wheel is going to yield any rewards.

Anyway it drives me nuts how the only people who can afford to retire, choose not to... And those who are desperate to retire, can't! This is so pervasive, it feels like a psyop.

Actually just jobless, but I was doing side projects here and there

Retirement gets boring fast —- and you lose connections to the rhythm of society fast.

For the vast majority of humans, an idle mind is depressing and destructive

All in the knowledge that no one is going to be time-tracking me or doing performance reviews, and I can just not do work at any moment I don't feel like it or have something better to do that day, like go to my private island or take my private jet to burning man etc (or as it turns out do a talk at Stanford). All while you have so much money that the price of anything from clothes to cars to houses is just some arbitrary number that has no meaning to you it is so absolutely tiny number... not that you actually buy anything yourself any more, mainly your team of personal staff deal with that grubby reality.

As for the rest of us, well we need to pay the bills while playing "the game" and politics and cowtowing to keep the money coming.

Seriously, I'm glad he came back and found something he's interested in. I bet his role has grown some responsibilities, too.

The fact he's allowed back inside Google means Google still has a massively unresolved workplace sexual harassment issue.

> "Going back to work just for fun might sound like a uniquely billionaire move."

Ah yeah? Can be boredom too. I fail to see why this article wants to promote this.

> Like many people, Brin had a relaxing vision for his post-working life. “I was gonna sit in cafés and study physics, which was my passion at the time,” he told the Stanford audience.

Any why would anyone take this at face value? How many of the guys there were paid to go there by the way?

Would I would really like bored FIRE people to do is advocate for shortening the work-week. The world needs to chill the fuck out, and leisure should be more abundant. Bored retirees have a unique credibility in advocating for this, and the time to do both grassroots and grasstops advocacy. (Think tanking and lobbying are descendants of the original retirement project, if you think about aristocracry as the original governmance system.)

What's the point of all that money if you won't even hire someone to help you find hobbies.

So many STEM universities have online courses. The art world froths itself mad over smart people with stupid money. Local projects beg for angels like him.

Hell even just doing the AI schtick but for free open source or as a pet startup.

My mind reels with ideas. Why didn't his?

That's in contrast with all of us who see the companies led by these guys as the cancer of society and we'd quit and never look back if we had FU money.

My feelings aside, if all their purpose is to grow their company, I kinda get why they wouldn't give a damn about bettering the mankind, improving their communities or raising a healthy family.

One thing I wish more people would understand though is that this is also the best case for some kind of guarantee of basic necessities for every human (UBI, State Subsidies, whatever). Once we know we won’t just die, people might then spend their time on trying out different things and figuring out what works best for them. I believe we could achieve an overall better society this way.

In the early days, many considered Sergey Brin to be the soul or the conscience of Google. He was reportedly the driving force in Google originally pulling out of China rather than capitulating to the censorship regime [1]. This was also after the apparent state-sponsored hack of Google in China [2] so perhaps the motivations were mixed? I don't know.

But Sergey I think is a good example of someone for whom his creation outgrew him. I'm reminded of an old Jeff Atwood blog post where he quoted Accidental Empires [3]. Sergey was a commando. By 2010 Google needed an army. Now? Police.

GoogleX has Sergey's playground but if you look at the track record, possibly the only success I think is Waymo. Glass (mentioned in the article) was not a success and his affair with a subordinate also destroyed his marriage [4].

To me it felt like Sergey was drifting many years before he stepped away. His stepping away felt more like formalizing something that had already happened.

I'm not a billionaire. Not even close. Honestly, I think I'm glad about that because it seems like despite being surrounded with unimaginable wealth, many such people end up isolated and rudderless, desperately dsearching for meaning and connection. Or maybe that's just cope (from me).

The article mentions Gates and how he keeps busy with his philanthropy. Well, there's another piece of common ground between Gates and Brin: Jeffrey Epstein [5]. That's not intended as an implicit or explicit accusation of child predation by Gates or Brin or even of either having knowledge of such malfeasance, to be clear.

But even with a fraction of the DoJ's documents disclosed as well as from the Epstein estate, we can begin to paint a macabre picture of the connections between rich and powerful people that for some reason always seem to have Jeffrey Epstein at their nexus and that means something though we don't really know what.

Has Sergey had a substantial impact on Gemini? Will he? I have no idea. I do wonder if someone worth $100 billion really has the perspective and drive to move something like this. Google has a deep bench of talent and one thing Google is very good at is optimizing code that runs at scale by making their own networking, servers, racks, data centers, data center operating system (ie Borg) and code and efficiency is going to be a huge deal in the LLM space for the foreseeable future.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704266504575141...

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11920616

[3]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/

[4]: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-...

[5]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/lolita-passports-and-m...