# You’re Not Supposed to Live Like This?

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/asiandadenergy-s-substack-podcast-7711112/you-re-not-supposed-to-live-like-this
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/asiandadenergy-s-substack-podcast-7711112/you-re-not-supposed-to-live-like-this.md
Podcast: [AsianDadEnergy's Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/asiandadenergy-s-substack-podcast-7711112)
Published: 2026-08-19T14:52:03+00:00
Episode link: https://asiandadenergy.substack.com/p/youre-not-supposed-to-live-like-this
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/211867117/b19e26aed0ff99c0ed8a0cc9039acb0f.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/asiandadenergy-s-substack-podcast-7711112/episodes/you-re-not-supposed-to-live-like-this
Duration seconds: 691

## Resource

Hello, world. I’m an unemployed former Big Tech software engineer with 25 years of experience in the technology industry. And one of the strangest things about early retirement is discovering something I never seemed to have enough of while working: time. Free time gives you the opportunity to notice things you were too busy to notice before. And once I slowed down, I started thinking about a paradox that I find increasingly difficult to ignore. The Good Life Paradox Look at the news. Scroll through social media. Listen to people talk about their lives. It seems like we’re living through crisis after crisis. A cost-of-living crisis. A loneliness crisis. A mental-health crisis. A birth-rate crisis. A meaning crisis. And underneath all of these is a broader feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong with our society. Yet here’s the strange part. If you look at our material standard of living , we are living in an age of extraordinary abundance. The average American today has access to things that would have been unimaginable to even the wealthiest people a few centuries ago. Our homes are heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. We have clean running water and electricity. We can eat food from virtually anywhere on Earth, year-round. We have modern medicine. We have instant communication with people on the other side of the planet. And we carry, in our pockets, access to an astonishing percentage of humanity’s accumulated knowledge. A relatively ordinary person today can watch a movie, have dinner, talk to someone across the world, summon transportation, access a library containing millions of books, and ask an AI to explain quantum mechanics, all before going to bed. By almost any historical measure, we live incredibly comfortable lives. And yet... A huge…

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## Transcript

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