As much as we love to dunk on “corporate life”, it installs a tempo in your life and forces scarcity. We often hear: “If I didn’t have my job, I’d recover 50 hours a week. Imagine everything I could build/read/train/do.” But then people leave their job, and somehow accomplish less than in the 3h of spare time they had every day. Coffee takes 45 mins, gym becomes 2 hours, lunch becomes an event, grocery shopping for a whole afternoon, you read the random article instead of skimming it, fall into 3 rabbit holes, and suddenly the day is over. I'm experiencing the opposite in my 80h week job. Yes it's very intense, but weirdly it's the period I've been the most productive on my side hustles/quests outside of work. As if it was not only consuming my time, but also producing the intensity that makes the rest of my time productive (45 min workout, write/work on something for an hour, read stuff on the go, book trips/admin in 10 mins, basically going straight to the essential). Obviously having more time and chilling a bit is great, but having a hard constraint forces you to focus on the essential, and especially good for ADHD people like me who would otherwise strike in all directions and fall into every possible rabbit hole. People think quitting their job will give them the exact same urgency + 50 extra hours. Reality is it changes the tempo of everything else too.