Summary
Younger generations are embracing “micro-retirements,” short sabbaticals or lifestyle shifts, to combat burnout and improve work-life balance.
This trend is fueled by pandemic-related stress, declining workplace flexibility, and increased burnout reports.
Millennials and Gen Z, facing financial and mental health pressures, are prioritizing their well-being, even at the expense of promotions, as they reject the traditional career model of working until age 65.
Meanwhile, older generations like boomers and Gen X struggle to retire due to financial insecurity and rising costs, with many “unretiring” to stretch limited savings.
Fucks sake, why does anyone read Fortune? We need regulation, unions, and no billionaires. Talking about people taking sabbaticals, which should be provided, and ending retirement to make ends meet is symptomatic of larger systemic problems. 18% increase in homelessness in 2024, and Fortune is talking about “micro-retirements” and softening these sharp issues with trend pieces. Fuck off Fortune.
To be fair, at least they don’t highjack your copy/paste to tell you that copying and pasting is breaking their licensing terms like the Financial Times did with me earlier today when I was just trying to quote one sentence from the article.
But yeah, places like FT and Fortune are not where people should be getting their information on economics and wealth because they only serve to prop up this broken fucking system.
On fire fox click in the top right corner for options, there should be something similar to “display page contents” or “text only mode”
Id like to see them stop you from copying that
Hear hear, Fortune is a neoliberal bullhorn, can we at least squelch it here on lemmy?
Who the fuck can afford to do that?
Put it in the same bag as the stories about “19-year-old works 15 minutes a week and makes $100 gazillion” and “Laura and Joe run an organic artisanal buttplug business and their real estate budget is $4 million.” Not worth expending mental effort on.
I put it in the “teddy bear” category. If we see people with a teddy bear at the carnival, we’ll try the games
Spam us with getrich quick schemes and we fall in line…
organic artisanal buttplug business
OK… I’m interested… Is it like organic rubber? I hope they don’t test on animals, although…
organic rubber
Alt: gelatinous cube
Edit: Alt Alt: tire from the movie rubber
They pour the latex into the mold straight from the tree.
I mean, without further context I assume Laura and Joe both organic and artists, so couldn’t the butt plugging be is less a manufacturing and more a per-hour rental-type business?
deleted by creator
Yep. LinkedIn added “Career Break” as an experience type. It just means “I couldn’t find a job for a while and thought it was too much of a gap for the people who care about that.”
I can - not easily but with careful planning.
I’m able to work remotely and my partner is on disability so for the last three months of this year we’ve been in a significantly low CoL area of Spain with our costs only marginally higher than living at home in BC. When the cost of air travel and trains is amortized over three months it’s pretty minimal and we hunted for affordable long term accommodations.
It’s definitely a luxury not available to everyone, and we’re not staying in high class digs, but it’s worth skimping during the rest of the year to afford as we both deeply love being able to explore a new place.
I wonder how many of these “micro-retirees” are people looking for jobs, or people who are burnt out and no longer looking after having been looking for months. My main freelance gig dried up over a month ago, and I haven’t been able to find anything substantial, that pays my bills, since then. I’ve been looking at all sorts of different things, but the reality is, I can leave the industry I’ve worked in for 15 years and take a big pay cut to take a job with skills I gained from hobbies. Or, I can somehow come up with ~$5k to pay for additional training and certifications I would need to get a better job that would pay my bills. That’s an oversimplification of my situation, but I really wonder how many people are caught in situations similar to mine in which, there aren’t really many options that work for me, or that I can reasonably obtain without outright lying on my resume.
Especially given that US unemployment metrics drop people that can’t find work off the unemployment percentage after 6 months, so it never shows a true picture.
Why is downsizing or reducing spending not an option that could work?
Because I have nothing to downsize to aside from moving back in with parents… Not doing that. I share a house with 5 roommates. My and my partners vehicles are both junk cars that I’m constantly fixing. We have no luxuries, we don’t go out, and we rarely eat out. Not sure what else to cut.
A lot of professionals.
Micro retiring is a funny way of saying giving the fuck up because a career doesn’t buy you shit.
It’s pay walled, so I figured before finding a way around it, if see if the author was an idiot…
https://fortune.com/author/chloe-berger/
Absolutely no one should listen to anything that person has ever thought.
LOL “Gen Z and millennials are welcoming mysterious drones and a potential alien invasion so they can avoid the office”
real strong “why are millenials killing ________” vibes, but seriously, any outlet with words like “fortune,” “economy,” “financial,” etc in its name are specifically targeting a boomer audience who get off on shifting blame for the shitty world they created on to the generations having to grow up in it
thanks for the quick research very helpful. :-)
Imagine living in a country where people take “short sabbaticals” (the developed societies know those as holidays, are paid and you are entitled to them each year) that can affect even potential promotions.
im X and doing a micro-retirment right now. also known as unemployment.
Mass layoffs… Micro retirement
Luigi please.
I don’t think it’s complete bullshit or hiding unemployment. I’m doing it right now. It’ll eat into my retirement funds, no doubt. Retiring at 72 when I’m completely broken anyway doesn’t sound all that great. But at least now I’m at an age I can maybe still do something worthwhile with my time. I’m just lucky enough I can afford to do it.
Calling her strategy “microdosing retirement,” 30-year-old tech consultant and content creator Liz Lee says she knows she’s not the only one terrified of going into an office every day until the age of 65 “and having to fit decades worth of living into the time you have left.”
Real though.
Some are bored and going part time back to work. Others have had inflation smash them in the face and have no choice. I feel for the ones that have to go back. Their bosses are going to hammer them.
Fuck everything.
