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https://fortune.com/2022/09/11/the-soft-life-of-dar/
Honestly I get it and don't blame them one bit . I've been in manufacturing for close to 40 years and mentally I've pretty much checked out . I can't afford to do what this person is doing but I've pumped the brakes a bit . I've cut my overtime . I won't work on the weekend . Life is not about working .
Honestly I get it and don't blame them one bit . I've been in manufacturing for close to 40 years and mentally I've pretty much checked out . I can't afford to do what this person is doing but I've pumped the brakes a bit . I've cut my overtime . I won't work on the weekend . Life is not about working .
BY TREY WILLIAMS
September 11, 2022, 11:00 AM UTC
There are some people who live to work. They relish being a hustler, grinding it out. They chortle at your nine-to-five regimen, and they can’t understand why anyone would be attracted to “quiet quitting.”
Then there are those who work only to live the life Instagram fabricates. They collect their paycheck and take it to Lisbon or Paris or Madrid, where they flood social media with images of all the experiences their hard-earned cash bought them.
But Dar LaBeach is part of a new ilk, who are out here just living to live.
Life has changed a lot in the last two years, and many people are embracing a so-called soft life—a rejection of the struggle, stress, and anxiety that come with working a traditional nine-to-five career and spinning away your days on life’s hamster wheel. Instead, living the soft life is about throwing yourself into joy, and prioritizing the richness of experiences.
In the midst of the pandemic, LaBeach was at a crossroads and decided it was time to make a dramatic change. After being laid off from his marketing job in New York City in spring 2021, he went to Mexico. He had been earning between $100,000 and $150,000 a year but was stressed, disenchanted, and tired of living for something other than himself.
“It was very much, ‘F- all this,'” LaBeach tells Fortune.
He lost his job on a Tuesday, booked a flight on Wednesday, and by the end of the week he was sitting on a beach in Oaxaca, Mexico. He needed a break, to breathe.
“It was while I was there that I realized I can really do this in a sustainable way,” LaBeach says. Do what? Be on a beach, frolic, just live. “I realized, ‘Wow, I don’t need to be in New York.’ I really leaned into the idea that if I need it, I’ll figure it out.”
LaBeach, 31, splits his time between New York and Mexico nowadays. He’s able to do so without spending more than $1,000 a month for rent in either city. When in Mexico he primarily rents places via Airbnb, and he shares an apartment with a roommate in Brooklyn.
He had some savings set aside when he opted to shift his focus away from work, and he received a severance package when he lost his job, though he says it was pretty insignificant. LaBeach says he doesn’t worry about money, and he admits that he’s only fortunate enough to live this way now because he opted in to capitalism for so long.
“Money comes and money goes, and when I need money, I’m able to book projects, work, et cetera, so I don’t let it stress me,” LaBeach says. Since losing his job in 2020, he’s developed a sort of work-at-will freelance career doing marketing and strategy consulting. “There are plenty of ways to make money, and I give myself credit for developing a diverse enough set of skills over the years in business, strategy, entertainment, service, travel, and more to make that happen.”
A shift away from traditional success
It takes having “an existential conversation” with yourself before reaching the point of pursuing a soft life, says New York University sociology professor Deirdre Royster. The pandemic fast-tracked a lot of those conversations, but life and what people value was shifting even before everything shut down.
The script for a “good American life,” for “the American Dream,” has been completely flipped, Royster says. No longer is it simply a family of four settling down in the suburbs with the tidy home and a white picket fence. Royster herself, a tenured professor at NYU, found herself pursuing a whim during the pandemic to follow her passion for interior design. She applied to the Pratt Institute and was granted a partial scholarship.
“In the ’80s people asked ‘How do we maximize?’ But now people are asking, ‘What’s the minimal amount I need to live a sustainable life?’ I love that idea,” Royster says.
LeBeach’s experience in those first months in Mexico, while he recovered from burnout and a life in service to his career, made a few things very clear to him: “Never again would I not take the trip, book the flight, eat the thing, because of money…Needing money is not going to interrupt my need to live life,” he says.
He’s like many Americans who used the pandemic as an opportunity to disrupt their lives. The collective trauma of this worldwide tragedy allowed some to pump the brakes, turn into the skid, and realize that perhaps there was something more important in their lives than the stressing over whether they were living for their job hard enough.
“Quiet quitting”—the internet’s favorite workforce term of the moment—its distant cousin, “lying flat,” and “soft life” have all popped up as symptoms of a shift away from the traditional expectations of what it looks like to be successful in America. Living a soft life doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have a job, it just means your job is not your whole world.
For LaBeach, embracing the soft life has meant becoming a staunch anticapitalist, he says. When he moved to Mexico City, he got involved in local mutual aid. He says in connecting with his community there, he’s come to understand that “a lot of Black people are moving to Mexico City without realizing we’re gentrifiers.”
As the world initiates the pandemic’s soft closing, and people are finding new ways to return to life, Mexico City has become a haven for some Americans looking for a change while they take full advantage of the work-from-anywhere era. The Mexican government recorded more than 5.3 million Americans flying into Mexican airports from January to May 2022, CNN recently reported. That’s nearly a million more than the same period in 2019.
LaBeach looked around at all the people coming to Mexico from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Brazil, and so on, and set out to form a new community of like-minded people. He and his friend and roommate Raven Rodriguez hosted dinners for Black and brown expats and immigrants. He helped to amplify protests and the voices of local activists advocating for women’s rights. Even if it was just his small community, he wanted to be sure they were getting involved.
The rise of the soft life
The term “soft life” really picked up some steam among Black women earlier this year. The cottage industry of advice, lifestyle hacks, and femininity within the YouTube vlogosphere is littered with videos like “How to live your best soft life,” “How I created a softer life for myself,” and “The truth about the ‘soft’ life.” All are geared toward Black women.
“I feel like I’ve stepped into my era of living a soft life,” creator Courtney Daniella Boateng says in a video about the hard work that goes into living a soft life. “I’ve really invested in slowing down and detaching my self-worth or my productivity from these ideas of high levels of stress and just struggle.”
But many of these creators are painting a very opulent picture of the #softlife: more a Sofia Coppola Marie Antoinette-era version.
“Soft life, in the way that it’s portrayed online, can often look like luxury and true levels of enjoyment,” says Boateng in the video. “However, there is a reality to living a soft life, which everyone in the real world needs to be exposed to, such as, you need to work, you need to make money. Life is not always roses.”
Friends and family often ask LaBeach how he affords to live the way he is. It’s not like he has a nest egg funding his life. He’s taken a “$10 in; $20 out” approach, he says, and it works for him. He’s booked commercials while living in Mexico—last year he appeared in a commercial FanDuel run during NFL games, and he even has a line—and that provides some extra income doing work he enjoys. He does his freelance while chilling on the beach, or even sitting in the stands at the U.S. Open.
“I have zero regrets,” he says. “Maybe I’ll go back [to a full-time job], and the only way I could at this point is because I know what it means to me to be in that space. I know I’m not there because I have to be… There are now stipulations and boundaries in place that allow me to live the life I want to live.”
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that LaBeach lost his job and moved to Mexico in 2021.
I do get it though...it sucks putting in hours and hours for "the man" at something you don't love to do...I work about 20 hours a week, and have done that for about the past half decade...sure I could make more money if I worked a full 40...but I don't like my job that much, and (unlike that guy in that story) I'm in the top 5% of earners at 20 hours a week...so I'm good, and see very little motivation for working more. Lots of time to spend with family, ride my dirt bike, ride my mountain bike, enjoy life.
I am starting a new business...and that will take up some more time...but its something that I like and gets me excited, so it will be easy to spend time on it and it doesn't feel like work.
The Shop
I suppose if you had $10M in the bank, you cold get away with living soft and not spending much.
What an epiphany he’s had. Being on the beach is better then the dog eat dog world in New York City.
Who knew????
This guys a modern day Socrates, let me tell ya.
Our business culture has changed too much to attract good young talent to commit to manufacturing companies long term. Back in the glory days of American manufacturing, people were willing to do the unglamorous stuff that we ask them to do because they had a relatively high degree of job security and were rewarded for their commitment with decent pensions to carry them through retirement after their bodies were used up. Now the only thing most of our companies are concerned with is how our quarterly earnings will be received by our stockholders or holding companies. There is very little allegiance to workers, so it’s hard to expect those workers to want to sacrifice their bodies for the success of the company.
I don’t have any clue how we’d get back to the culture of lifelong commitment between employers and employees, but it’d sure be a lot better if we could.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/01/the-number-of-people-i…
"A growing share of the population resides in multigenerational family households. By 2016, 20% of Americans lived in a multigenerational household, up from 12% in 1980. On average, these families have about two more members than other households. This partly reflects the country’s increasing racial and ethnic diversity. The Asian, black and Hispanic populations are more likely to live in multigenerational households than non-Hispanic whites.
In addition, more Americans in the wake of the Great Recession are “doubled up” in shared living quarters. This arrangement refers to the presence of an “extra adult” in the household, who might be an adult child or parent of the householder, or simply a roommate or boarder in the household. In 2019, 20% of households are shared households, up from 17% in 2007.
Since 2010, more adults ages 35 and older live in households with at least three peopleMost age groups are living in larger households this decade. The change is most apparent for adults ages 35 and older. For example, in 2017, 67% of 35- to 54-year-olds lived in a household with three or more people, an increase from 64% in 2010. A similar increase in households of three or more is apparent among 55- to 64-year-olds.
While bigger households may be bad for the wider economy, they are often advantageous for the households themselves. The additional household members may be working adults who contribute to household income. The widely noted arrangement of young adults residing with their parents demonstrates the economic benefits of bigger households. Last year, 6% of families that had at least one adult child age 25 to 34 living in the home were in poverty. The Census Bureau estimates that the poverty rate for these families would have been 11.5% if the young adult were not a member of the household.
Average household size will likely exceed 2.58 persons in 2020 if the current pace of household growth holds."
Life is all about give and take. Yeah that job might suck and be monotonous some days but think about your health benefits, retirement plan and steady reliable income, door dash and Uber ain’t gonna give you any of that!
I could see doing the “soft life” thing for a while when you get burnt out but doesn’t sound like a very good long term deal to me.
I might just be lucky as hell but I absolutely love my “horrible monotonous 9-5” career and am looking at buying out the owner of this small 4 employee construction company along with a partner. We all make a pretty decent living and I can’t see myself doing anything else as it’s the only job I’ve ever had from 16 years old.
We’re all fixing to head to seaside for a week of paid vacation this Sunday with lodging provided at a real nice Airbnb
Pit Row
At my new job on my first day another lead tech that moved over and I got to sit with the service manager and set the applied service rate they will be charging for us. Still crazy to me how open with everything they are.
Was at work every day, smart, in the perfect position to learn a very lucrative trade.
One that will pay well long into the future.
Left to go work at Walmart.
(I shit you not).
Less hours and a dollar more an hour.
So I guess the ambition change to having a dead end job where the best you could hope for is working your way up to manager ??
So I guess that I can retract the "smart" comment I made about him.
TM
business name then become instantly profitable with no time investment.
I would bet a doughnut you worked your share of more than 8 hour days.
BTW, you are now an inspiration.
TM
If I liked it more (if it didn't feel so much like work to me) I could earn double/triple what I do...the top guys in my company are earning into the 7 figures each year...but they are still doing the long days (well, in all reality, they are also probably way smarter than me...so I probably couldn't make that much no matter how hard I worked), but I just don't like it that much, and I'm comfortable with my lifestyle.
I'm no inspiration...I just picked a career with unlimited earning potential and which income is only limited by my own ambition. Paid my dues, used my brain...and its worked out...so far.
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