I love working on software, so that wouldn’t change in general. If money was a complete non-issue, I would be only doing open source projects.

I’m in the middle of taking a year off of work to answer this exact question. My answer turned out to be:

-Spend a month driving my Jeep around the northwest US, camping my way through National Forests and BLM land

-Buying a sailboat on the Puget Sound and spending a few months fitting it out with modern electronics and Starlink internet

-Sailing from abandoned island to abandoned island, stopping to explore the historic downtown waterfront district of some random town every week or so

(Posted from 30 yards off the shore of Hope Island Marine State Park near Olympia, WA)

I’m not a hypothetical after a broken neck/back 2/26/14.

Learned hobby electronics/KiCAD/etching PCBs, 3D CAD design, 3D printing, reading sci-fi, learning programming and going through computer science lectures, and adopting Linux is how I’ve spent most of the last 9 years.

Learning CAM, kernel hacking, and getting more into amateur radio are on my bucket list.

I’d really like to spend a good chunk of time learning how to play/produce music. It’s a lifelong dream and something I’m slowly dipping my toes into, but real-life commitments make it difficult to keep up :(

• Software side projects, including a serious crack at a game I’ve been noodling with in my head

• Hardware side projects, starting with smart home stuff

• The physical house-construction part of smart home stuff, and some other diy projects too

• Mini painting and board gaming, especially trying to pull together some overlapping friend groups

• And yeah, some time no-lifing a game or two

I’d be playing and running a lot more D&D. I’d go outside more. I’d drive less. I’d spend more time with friends, my family’s kind of awful, and my siblings and I don’t talk much with them as it is. If money weren’t an issue in this hypothetical, I’d travel a little more than I do. Maybe go to the beach more often than one weekend every five years. Maybe go see other countries.

I think long term I’d get into writing, or game dev. I’m trying not to let my job keep me from doing that now, but with the effort I’ve put in and the hours I work, I’ve been in a quasi-permanent state of burnout for the last ten years or so. I spend a lot of time feeling like a zombie, and even when I have some downtime, I find it hard to remember who I am and what I like. Even minimal amounts of effort inside or outside of work overwhelm me at this point. I’m not going to kill myself or wish that I get hit by a bus, but I really don’t enjoy the prospect of living through another 20-40 years of this shit, and I don’t think there’s any significant change that I can effect that will keep me from having to work until I die.

A regular weekly schedule would look something like:

• Practical volunteering with a local wildlife organisation.
• Studying something, maybe with the OU.
• Working on the house and garden
• Reading
• A decent length hike
• Working on a particular project: woodworking, writing, painting, coding, maybe putting whatever I have learnt recently into practice.
• Visiting somewhere.

Projects! So many projects!

Right now? Focus on family. If it was just me who didn’t have to work I’d be a “stay at home dad” but even better if neither of us had to work and we could be a family together without having to disappear for 8+ hours every weekday.

Go to the park, Go to museums, Go to the bay or the beech, Walk in the woods, go to the library, go to soft play, go to role play, visit other friends and family, have a nice day at home and in the garden… there’s just so much to do before we even start worrying about expensive activities. Would be absolutely lovely if this wasn’t limited to the weekends.

I have severe chronic pain, when it’s bad I’m housebound, when it’s good I’m lucky to go out at all. Prior to this happening to me, I was a gigging musician, going to culinary school as well. Spent a large portion of my time since it all started avoiding cooking and music altogether, both of which I’m now occasionally able to enjoy in moderation. I also picked up programming, Linux computing and microcontroller projects, 3d printing, modeling for both animation and CAD, some creative writing, kombucha brewing, even been recording some of my music lately.

I would sew costumes, clothes, and stuffed animals!

I would also give away stuffed animals to people in my town. It’d be fun to hide them around different areas to be discovered, with a note encouraging people who want them to take them home.

Therapy and house improvements first, making my home livable and pleasant. Exercise. Looking after my health.

If I were to become wealthy enough to have this luxury, I would probably goof off and video game the first month. I say this because it’s what I used to do when I was in school and had summers off.

After the boredom kicks in, my brain usually shifts to more creative endeavors. I imagine I’d do some of the projects I used to love. Calligraphy, creating my own language, photography, astrophotography, light gardening, travel to see museums, hiking, visit parks, read, wood working and carving, small projects around the house. Oh wouldn’t it be grand!

Like many others:

• Work on my free time tech projects out of passion
• learn new languages
• play videogames and consume a lot of movies and series’
• Travel my heart out, and not only via planes. If I actually had a lot of free time without the need to check in somewhere, I would just fill a backpack with all the necessary stuff and travel to my destinations via trains, hiking, renting a car, etc. since time would not be an issue
• Just be… while sitting somewhere outside, might move sometimes to another spot
• Actually meet new people. I don’t because I feel like I barely have time for my current friends. That is so god damn sad that I alienated some of my friends due to work and keeping up with closer friends. Fuck work.

In early April I started using Personal Kanban (visualize your work; limit WIP) and I went from thinking I was an unambitious and boring person to realizing I wasn’t giving myself enough credit for all the things I want to do! Being able to see the entire backlog of large and small projects was overwhelming at first, but also a lesson in - what do I really prioritize that’s important to me?

So, if I didn’t have to work to support myself, I’d spend more time with all my personal projects. This includes, but isn’t limited to:

• building a perfume oil database website
• scanning all of my baby photos
• scanning all my written journals
• writing in and organizing my wiki
• publishing my wiki online
• creating photo zines from my phone photos
• reviewing all of my perfume oil collection
• making a lot of linoleum carvings for letterboxes
• and ofc playing games, watching movies, and listening to music!