I will not voluntarily go back to a bad work culture, nor just be a free volunteer somewhere, and this co-op idea sounds very interesting now.

If it can pay even merely acceptable, then it would not be wasting time to have been doing that all the time, if the sales pitch is at all true.

I never chose to work in the huge shitty company, I was working in a small but continuously successful company that was sold to the big company. For 20 years I was perfectly happy making good but not faang money, and I would have loved to just keep doing that forever. (and the big company didn't even pay well, my money came from being a part owner and got part of the sale price)

There is always a chance to find a good fit and a good culture like that by specifically looking for smaller normal companies I suppose, but it seems to be uncommon. I think I just had a rare good gig.

But my rambling repetative point again is just that it's not wasting time to make a bit less such that you do have to keep working at something useful, because now that I don't have to, I want to. The daily life does matter more than the cash, even if the cash gets to the point where you don't have to work at all. I had a good daily life and a good sense of worth and purpose, since the company did upstanding boring but necessary and useful to society back end work not just any scammy way to extract cash from some process, and my part of that work was interesting, required me to be good and clever and thoughtful, and was appreciated and respected.

I don't have to suffer the bad parts of work, but I also no longer have the good parts of work, and even working on open source projects doesn't replace it.

Maybe this co-op idea is a way that more people can have that ideal life I had instead of just me being very lucky. I'm interested in it now let alone as my 25-years-ago self who just needs a job.