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PaperclipPerfector  20hr ago (text post)   1051 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 16, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Any middle aged or approaching middle aged men here have fun ideas for blowing off steam when you want to blow up your life? Idk I'm just feeling very bored with the stupid corporate job and day to day grind.

Do you live anywhere with cheap plane tickets to somewhere warm? Go on a long weekend trip somewhere. One of my very best trips involved getting cheap last minute flights with my husband, getting trapped in Florida during a polar vortex, and just wandering around, kayaking to see manatees and whatnot, finding a different place to stay each night. One person I knew went on a long weekend vision quest with some friends in White Sands, which sounded interesting. Maybe we'll hike up a mesa to see an ancient defense tower this weekend. Logistics have become considerably more difficult with kids, though.

I misread that as fun ideas to blow up your life, and I was going to say quit your job and hike the Pacific Crest Trail.

For blowing off steam short of that, I like day hikes or shorter hiking trips (3-6 days). I get through months of shitty job work daydreaming about my upcoming trips.

you can make your own black powder, and your own cannons to shoot it out of.

As the founding fathers intended.

My recent hobby has been investing. I'm putting a fixed amount of money into it and I'm treating it like a loss from day one. Given that I'm only really picking low expense ETFs for now, it's basically saving with extra steps. Nonetheless, I'm telling myself that every dollar invested is another minute closer to leaving the rat race.

Ahh yeah I been doing ETFs since I was like 17 hah. I thought you meant day trading! I've thought about that but... idk. Might look into it.

I'm not spiritually prepared for day trading yet. It's only been in the last year that I've even been stable enough financially and emotionally to invest in equities outside of a retirement account at all.

If you do get into day trading, please occasionally fill us in.

If "every dollar invested is another minute closer to leaving the rat race," every dollar spent day trading is another minute further from leaving the rat race.

"Picking low expense ETFs" and sticking with them, and which are hopefully well-diversified ETFs, is the way to go.

That's precisely why I'm sticking to ETFs for now.

It's still fun to do the research, back testing, monte Carlo simulations, and all that, even if I do end up just buying more VTI/VT, SGOV, and SCHD.

VTI/VT plus SGOV is a solid choice if you're looking for a less-than-100%-equity portfolio, but SCHD just means tilting further toward a subset of your VTI/VT allocation, which does not provide additional diversification.

I can sympathize. I was actually going to wish you well myself! It took me several years plus some good fortune before I really became comfortable with a decent amount of risk, and I know well that it could have been quite different if things had gone poorly for me overall. Here's the story in case you're interested.

Once upon a time, several years distant, I embarked upon a similar path, setting aside a nice chunk of seed money and telling myself that I was going to treat it all as a loss and invest it. It's been one heckuva learning experience, and the first lesson was that I learned is that when I told myself I was going to treat it all as a loss, my emotional self didn't get the memo. This should have been obvious when I just let that account sit for a couple of years, never quite being brave enough to pull the trigger investing the time and effort to make some serious picks. Then a certain US manufacturer landed in hot water and I decided to roll the dice and bought in. Said manufacturer's stock continued to merrily dip and I watched on in anxious fear for around a week or so as ten percent of my investment potentially evaporated, reinforcing my first lesson. It turned out that I still cared very much about the money that I was allegedly treating as lost from square one! When it thankfully rebounded several days later, I sold with a tidy 6% gain and learned lesson number two, which was that I was gambling and not investing. Said stock continued chugging right back along at 150% of the price that I paid for it, teaching me what paper hands were, because I had them. I've since learned that my best actual investing is in the index funds that I plow my retirement money into every month, and that the little chunk of change that I set aside as an investment account can be much more exciting and emotionally rewarding (and occasionally nerve-wracking as well) for me personally as a vehicle for speculation and swing trading. It can be tons of fun, but for me it was most so when my then-boss and I would talk shop about hot and volatile stocks and what moves we were making. That in and of itself was as much as, if not more gratifying than the sweet picks and the nice trades. The hardest part for me has been managing my own emotions as I try to grow and manage that account, but the payoff has been in finding something that I just know is undervalued, investing in it, and watching it grow like gangbusters. The old cliche really is true: you miss 100% of the plays you never make in the first place!

have some kids?

Unironically this is the plan. We're getting married in October.

Congrats! Marriage and kids are fantastic. Highly recommend it. Made every aspect of my life and myself better.

Doesn't look like anyone has mentioned this yet, but have you tried grilling? Get charcoal so you can try smoking stuff too.

Grilling is typically cited as an activity for politically uninvolved boomers. Well, I say that you can't call yourself a griller without accepting insane radicals in your ranks.

You know I haven't grilled in a while, did it at our last place haven't done any this year. Might try it as it warms up again. We do have some nice grills hah. My fiance is vegetarian so that puts a bit of a damper on it, but I do love a good burger.

Maybe you could try soft-quitting? Office Space style. Just decide in your head that you're already done with the job and do the absolute bare minimum while giving zero fucks and angling for getting fired - if they have the ball(s)!! (nod to @PokerPirate :))

Yeahhhh I have thought about this, but a good buddy of mine got me the job and so it's a bit more complicated. I feel I'd be betraying him if I pulled that kind of thing.

Correct.

I turned 40 last month. For my midlife crisis a decided to get back into some of the things 20 year old me used to do. So I got a used unicycle and erg (a type of rowing machine). It's been a blast. But it almost wasn't... because I have one less testicle now than I did back then.

Both unicycling and erging are notorious ball crushers, and it's much worse when you've only got one bad boy dangling down there because it hangs right in the center where the seat is and it's constantly trying to get crushed. When you've got two, they hang just off to the side a bit and so you're much less likely to crush them. I've had to splurge and get special underwear so that I can do my unicycling/erging.

I lost the testicle when I was 29 to testicular cancer. One day I was straining a bit too hard on the toilet and heard a "pop" from my right dangler. Worst pain of my life by far. I was on the floor for the next 30 minutes unable to move, then I barfed a couple of times in the toilet, then I hobbled my way over to the ER where I got the diagnosis. Surgery was scheduled for about 1 month later.

The main thing to know about a cancer cell is that it wants to reproduce. This leads to exponential growth in tissue size, and my type of cancer cell had a reproduction rate of 3 days. So every 3 days, the size of the right little dude doubled. And soon he was not a little dude at all. By the time of the surgery he measured 4 inches in diameter.

The weirdest question I've ever been asked was the day before my surgery: "Do you want a prosthetic testicle?" The surgeon had a handful of models lined up on a shelf for me to pick from. The cheapest one looked like a rainbow colored bouncy ball and was $200. That was way more than I wanted to spend on something only my wife would ever see, and so I declined.

And so now---in the middle of my midlife crisis---whenever I ride my unicycle or sit down to exercise---I have to put on special underwear first.

This is... quite a comment. Thanks for sharing. Glad you made it.

This is tremendously quality content.

It seems insensitive to link the south park clip, but like...someone has to do it, right?

Buy a boat and take it out boating. It will easily suck up any spare time, money, ambition, and desire. Bonus: you can wear a captain's hat.

The best days of a boat owner's life: the day he bought the boat and the day he sold it.

Nowhere near that much money, as I said downthread. Kind of hilarious how almost every answer here is assuming I make a ton of money, lmao. I have barely six figures in retirement and make $50k/yr with no benefits.

make $50k/yr with no benefits.

What do you do?

Marketing contractor for a fortune 500 company. Did sales for 7 years and got extremely burnt out / fucked over at my last job. Was gonna get out of sales and marketing but I tried the trades and it was fucked. A buddy offered me this job and I took it because I had no clue what else to fucking do lol.

I wrote a bit about this here https://shapesinthefog.substack.com/p/from-laptop-to-shovel-and-back-again.

I’ve also done the sales roller coaster and got burned out. Old enough to have been through a few boom and bust cycles and I’ve been wiped out more than once.

What do you do now?

I’m in the ops/management side of my field now. I was a mortgage loan officer back in the good old days (pre-and post-‘08).

Haha, I have a friend who I found out had a boat when he was younger. I knew him for years before another friend (who had known him since college) mentioned this in our presence. When I said something like "I didn't know you used to have a boat", his response was "It's a part of my life I don't like to talk about".

I've found being actually unemployed a great way to appreciate that very boring and stupid corporate job. Having a mortgage, and tuition, and healthcare, and groceries piling up with no income really takes the romanticism out of blowing up your life.

Yeah, I was unemployed for 9 months before taking this job, so I feel you. It has been a year and a half now and I'm getting the itch again though.

Man, I don't know how you do it. I know another guy like you, who just quits jobs, lives off savings, and fucks around for months to years. Then when that runs out he just gets another job, white knuckles it as long as he can, and repeats.

I was out of my fucking brain 3 weeks into joblessness. I went from "I'm going to have so much fun making a game while I look for work" to "FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK I NEED TO UPDATE ALL MY SKILLS AND LEARN EVERYTHING OR MY FAMILY WILL STARVE AND I'LL DIE ALONE!" I kept asking him how he does it, but I guess the answer is just that we're built totally different.

Anyways, that's all over with now. But man, I am not built to be jobless until I well and truly discover an infinite money glitch.

I know another guy like you, who just quits jobs, lives off savings, and fucks around for months to years. Then when that runs out he just gets another job, white knuckles it as long as he can, and repeats.

That dude is living the dream. God willing, I will blow up my life that way next year.

I think the best period is when you've accepted the position and are waiting a few weeks for your start date, assuming you have enough money that you aren't desperately waiting for that first paycheck. It combines the joy of not working with the security of not wondering how you're going to pay the bills. And it's better than a vacation because it's usually longer and you're actually excited about going back to work rather than dreading it. It's also a situation I hope to never be in again.

I think losing my old job the way I did hit me with some deep rooted impostor syndrome. I'm probably going to spend the next 3 weeks until my start date studying up on what they told me about their tech stack so far. It's a senior position, so I feel like I need to show up like I know things.

I don't know if this pertains to your situation, but in general a pretty common thing for people is the employment lifecycle:

Get annoyed/bored/lazy/too comfortable with job ->
Performance suffers ->
Get PIPed/fired/laid off/managed out ->
Develop sudden sense of urgency to reskill and upskill while desperately finding next job ->
Finally find next job ->
Highly motivated to start off new job strong ->
Continue with job for a while ->
Get annoyed/bored/lazy/too comfortable with job...

I tried to follow this plan, but it went more like this:

Get annoyed/bored/lazy/too comfortable with job ->
Performance suffers ->
Promoted to management in a line of work where no one wants the job and I would massively have to fuck up to get fired ->
Stuck with golden silver tin? handcuffs

Failing upward is a #Winning state. One can soak up any trepidations related to guilt, imposter syndrome, or golden handcuffs along the lines of the wiping_tears_with_money.gif meme.

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It combines the joy of not working with the security of not wondering how you're going to pay the bills. And it's better than a vacation because it's usually longer and you're actually excited about going back to work rather than dreading it. It's also a situation I hope to never be in again.

You… hate joy? Calvin’s dad would approve.

I mean, I didn't exactly choose it. I got fired two weeks before my 1 year equity cliff at a startup I basically built half off, and was having so many intense health issues there was no way I could've held a job even if I wanted to. It was pretty brutal my man.

I also negotiated enough severance to keep me paying bills for a year, so that helped.

Last year we had a short vacation where I didn't look at the prices. Felt good to play my wife's role in the relationship for a while.

Ahaha my fiance is already the more budget conscious of us. I'm one step ahead of you.

I had a habit of renting exotic cars instead of cheap ones for a few years. The feeling of having hundreds of BHP at your disposal is a true thrill. A great way to turn money into heat, noise, and fun. Bonus points if you’re going bald and you rent a convertible to complete the middle age/midlife crisis look

If you really want to complete the look, and are bald, you should get a toupee to go along with the car and attach it insecurely enough that it moves around/has visible seams/blows off when driving with the top down. You also shouldn't drive the car faster than 40 mph under any circumstances.

Thankfully I’m not that far gone in the hair dept. although I got a minor sunburn on my scalp after renting a soft top in Florida. I imagine to the average motorist I was looking a bit like Jeremy Clarkson in that Jaaaaag.

Combover flapping in the breeze works just as well. In all seriousness, losing my hair was a blessing in disguise. Once you realize you can pull off the buzz cut look all the needless attention you've paid to your hair in the past will seem pointless. No more haircuts when you can spend five minutes doing it yourself for free with a pair of trimmers every week or two. No looking like you need a haircut. No looking like you just got a haircut. No more combing your hair. No more combing your hair and having it undone by a stiff breeze. No more hat hair. You can be out on the trail for a week and still look put-together. And perhaps most importantly, no more looking at your hairline in the mirror wondering how much time you have left. I now understand why some guys with perfectly good heads of hair elect for the #1 buzz.

tfw the buzz cut is the only reputable hairstyle for the blacks, so we don't have to deal with all this rigmarole

When you put it like that it sounds liberating indeed

Bonus points if you’re going bald and you rent a convertible to complete the middle age/midlife crisis look

Understandable. man_putting_hand_on_shoulder_bald_reedit.jpg: Also could be time to shave it all off and hop on the TRT to further the vibe.

The younger mistress isn’t going to attract herself.

Hah well sadly I don't make that much money. I make $50k a year with no benefits. So. Don't have the same options as many of the rich mfers on this site.

If only turning IQ into cash money was as easy as the HBD folks think it is...

I hear you on the IQ/$$ thing and I forget how much of a range of people there are around here. After we got married, we had a brief period where we could occasionally afford shit like that but decided to have a kid, so…Fun while it lasted. I guess less $$$ thrill-seeking might need to be tailored to local options. I’m looking for more, uh, sustainable ways to enjoy the finer things myself.

If exotics are out of your price range. You might consider buying a cheap motorcycle and riding the shit out of it. Also a classic midlife crisis look. Just make sure the bike kills you before the fiancé does for buying a motorcycle, otherwise you're in for a world of pain.

Lmao I love the black humor. Thanks my man much appreciated. Maybe I will... my dad rode a bike...

This would check all the boxes for sure

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