That’s a very thought-provoking post, kwlf.
I wonder whether expectations have simply risen i.e. people expect to achieve more in their lives today compared to say 40 years ago. That in turn will generate a lot of misery because most people have straight jobs and thus have little control over their earnings and work hours (outside of a relatively narrow band, say 30% in money terms) i.e. they have little control over their life’s waking hours. Throw in the increasing expectations and misery is bound to result, with all the well documented clinical manifestations of a perceived under-achievement.
For the most part, peoples’ self esteem is driven by peer group approval (not by the salary) and this is probably disappearing in today’s tightly managed big firms.
The only way to break out of this trap is to start your own business, and preferably do something where you aren’t just billing your time – because there are only 24hrs you can bill and you have to sleep some of them. Even top lawyers make most of the money not from billing their time but by passing most work to “juniors” who are billed out at the company rate 
Unfortunately starting a business and making a success of it is way harder than getting a job.
You mention the work-life balance. I think that is crucial but is tied up in the above. Every once in a while I have to interview a string of candidates for my only full time employee: an office manager[ess]. The job pays say 25k. I get a fair number of people (mostly women, given the job title) who work in London and get 40k. They want a job down here, near home, but they want 40k…… well, they aren’t going to get it! They spend 4hrs/day commuting and pay 7k for that, after tax of course. So they probably take home only a few k more, in return for destroying their entire working life, up at 6am and getting home 8pm. What for? Probably the only positive reason is that working in London you work with a lot more sharp and outgoing people than in the provinces – which is exactly why so many firms are still in London, employing people who are happy to destroy their lives to be there.
Unsurprisingly, most people I know who are happy where they are in life, flying-wise and other-wise, are people who have a business, or some profession where most of the work can be subcontracted.
Certainly keeping your currency up should be a factor
I wonder therefore if currency can compensate for going senile. I am not saying this tongue in cheek… It undoubtedly does work. But also flying will help the brain working usefully.
It would be interesting to know if the “hardcore” element of flyers has signifcantly changed. I think what has changed is the number of people who fly to settle a life ambition – the intellectual and life skill experience, but realise quickly for various reasons it has little utlity value. I think there was once a lot of people who had the disposable income who learnt for that reason alone.
What hasnt changed is most pilots realise quite quickly that without a lot of extra effort private flying has little utility value. Of course that is why so many give up quickly.
It is also possibly why so many sports / past times seem to be struggling. Golf twenty years ago, and it was all but impossible to find a half reasonable course without a waiting list, and a substantial joining fee, now almost no one charges a joining fee and welcomes new memebers with open arms.
I guess we all have less disposable income, less “free” time, more matrimonial and family constraints, and more mundane life styles – or perhpas not, just get out thrills in different ways!
I would agree, Peter, that the contented people I’ve met are often successful businesspeople. I also feel that they are generally catering to niche markets. My theory is that to win in selling commodities (coffee, groceries, call centres…) you have to be more ruthless than your competitors. If you are in a large organization you ‘win’ by trampling on everyone else. But if you can find a secure place in a niche market then you have some slack to treat people well, and still do well yourself. The other class of people who seem contented are good craftsmen. They may not get terribly rich, but making things is good for the soul.
So I admire some businesspeople a lot and like to see them do well, but that isn’t to say that everyone who does not take that gamble of starting a business deserves a life on the treadmill. Certainly many professions involve giving your all (academia, surgeons). We had one surgical trainee who left his core training scheme and took a higher training job 3 months early – which seemed highly irregular given that medical training in the UK is very inflexible. When we asked him how he did it, he said that he’d pointed out that he’d come in every weekend and most evenings over the previous 21 months aside from one where he’d attended a wedding. He therefore had more experience than fellow trainees who had completed their basic training – and of whom most, incidentally, will fall by the wayside and end up in other specialities. My little brother is going to a medical school with lots of American medical students and reckons that many if not most of them take amphetamines so that they can sleep less and spend more time revising. I’m not convinced that starting a business can involve harder work, because I don’t think people can work much harder. I accept that with a business you have more chance of failure and that a willingness to take on risk deserves compensation. I often used to win friends and influence people by pointing out that medical students are clever but boring – work hard and your life was more or less mapped out and you were more or less guaranteed a decent salary – or so we thought at the time. If you studied engineering you would come to the end of your course, and your future was wide open. Really brave people studied English Literature.
But at the end of the day our GDP is sufficient that anybody who does an honest day’s work ought to have enough income to own a house and enjoy a decent standard of living and healthcare with a bit of time off for leisure. It seems to me a great paradox that when I grew up in the 1980s this seemed more true than it is now. I don’t think the degree of stress is solely or even primarily due to ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ – partly there is too much competition for too little housing. Secondly I think there is a general culture of micromanagement, centralisation and cost-cutting in the public services that means that the people who actually do the work are disempowered and under-resourced. And also the globalised ‘winner take all’ nature of modern commerce means that organisations are larger and need to exploit their human resources to the maximum extent permitted by law. Or so it seems to me.
@RobertL18C : fully agree that there is a alternative to quitting and that is to fly with a buddy or buddies. That would probably be my plan B whenever for some reason it is no longer safe or medically possible to fly. An alternative to flying with a old and trusted buddy would be to look for younger people that have their license, have a passion for aviation, may for instance need hour building to get into professional aviation but cannot afford that.. Everyone wins, plus the added bonus that that young aviator or aviatrix may benefit from some mentoring and you may enjoy passing your experience along.. Quite nice to contribute to keep GA alive this way, not?
kwlf wrote:
Secondly I think there is a general culture of micromanagement, centralisation and cost-cutting in the public services that means that the people who actually do the work are disempowered and under-resourced. And also the globalised ‘winner take all’ nature of modern commerce means that organisations are larger and need to exploit their human resources to the maximum extent permitted by law. Or so it seems to me.
Very true. I would add to this that we are flock animals. We automatically do what we are “supposed” to do, whether we are aware of it or not. We follow trends (the flock), and think this is “right” for me, without offering it much thought. We all want to be “good people”. This is also kind of strange, because there are alternative ways of living, much more so today than before. In later years, last 10 maybe, I do think I see more people doing “alternative” stuff. It is still possible to start with two empty hands, take up a loan, purchase a fishing boat, and become a millionaire in a couple of years. It’s high risk, but high reward. It’s also possible to purchase an old farm in the middle of nowhere (preferably with a landing strip 
), and live life the “easy” way, with a spare time professional job where you only need a internet connection. This is also kind of high risk, but in a different way (you won’t “come back” in the same position after such an endeavor, but you won’t be completely broke either). Plus an endless array of other ways. Anyway, what I mean, is there are lots of ways getting out of the globalized trends, but not without personal sacrifice and risk. But there are forces working actively against it. If you think about it, “good people” do everything to minimize risk these days, they do everything to keep status quo (to create a secure and safe life for the children and elderly). But really, what this is all about, more and more, is to feed this globalized “winner take all” nature, and to feed the establishment of “risk averse” bureaucrats. – or something like that
I also feel that they are generally catering to niche markets
Yes, because to make money in a business you need to have a significant (many say “dominant”) market share. A small outfit therefore has to work in a small niche. A nail bar needs to achieve a decent market share of the local council estate A manufacturer of some industrial electronic widget needs to do likewise but can do it while selling worldwide, if his product is sufficiently specialised. The lowest stress business is making a very boring product.
Come to one of our fly-ins; you won’t see anyone working on the bleeding edge. All the people who have a business are making or selling ordinary boring things
the people who actually do the work are disempowered
That’s another self esteem destroyer and probably is a change in recent decades. However not many of these people will be flying anything.
It would be interesting to know if the “hardcore” element of flyers has signifcantly changed.
Probably not much in terms of where their money comes from. It does seem the average age goes up though. They say the average age at Oshkosh goes up a year every year, which (if Osh was representative of the US GA scene as a whole) is a looming disaster.
I think what has changed is the number of people who fly to settle a life ambition – the intellectual and life skill experience, but realise quickly for various reasons it has little utlity value. I think there was once a lot of people who had the disposable income who learnt for that reason alone.
I am sure, but I think the reasons why people learn, and why most give up soon after getting their PPL, is a different topic. We have had many threads on it. I think mentoring would be the best approach to that one, but it’s not easy to implement. It’s been a near total failure in the UK…
there is a alternative to quitting and that is to fly with a buddy or buddies
Definitely. It needs an environment where people can meet, though. The traditional school environment is not suited to that – they want a good throughput.
aart agree on helping out on hour building – have done some of that already and knowing it helps someone starting out to save money is its own reward.
Can someone explain to me the connection between the way someone conducts his/her business, and flying ?
kwlf wrote:
But at the end of the day our GDP is sufficient that anybody who does an honest day’s work ought to have enough income to own a house and enjoy a decent standard of living and healthcare with a bit of time off for leisure. It seems to me a great paradox that when I grew up in the 1980s this seemed more true than it is now.We see that not only in the UK and I really don’t think it is a paradox at all but the consequence of very conscious efforts. But I guess that is a discussion best left outside EuroGA.
Patrick wrote:
I’m always surprised at your pessimistic perception regarding this topic. I think the opposite is the case on a large scale. I think people in our Western societies never before in history
All in all this may well be the case but it’s not what I experience and what I hear from many people I talk to when it comes to the subject on why they stop flying. My own experience is that my “free” days where I do not have to be on call or otherwise at work have gone down by 60-80% over the last several years. Matching the remainder with other stuff which stays behind as well and needs to be done and then weather makes flying simply impossible. Clearly I am trying to change that, as it also makes a family life almost impossible. And vaccation time then imposes additional stress as it means organizing things and so on, so most people I know opt for a carefree AI holiday somewhere at a beach. I don’t blame them one bit.
One major fact is that with age above 50, people can not change jobs very easily, which makes it very easy for employers to use often illegal or at least unethical work conditions on these people. That is what I am seeing all over here. Above 50, people are unwanted in the job market as they are expensive, have more holidays (5 weeks rather than 4) and are at the top of their salary stage. Therefore, they are panicked about getting fired or layed off and will accept almost anything to drag it out to pension.
A lot of people in these situations are technically burned out but hang in there by their teeth because they know the moment they fall ill or resign due to these problems, they will enter a social downwards spiral which ends in a place where nobody wants to be. That is the reality I see here and it has been responsible for many of the people I know who have given up flying, and not only that but almost everything else other than work.
Work/Life Balance may still work for young people who are carefree without families or spouses and have a choice in workplaces, but it does definitly not work for many people in their 50ties to pension age who very often have no work/life balance at all, particularly for extra work/family activities.
