It is common to ask what people “do”, with the implication that they “work” at something for pay because that is the way that people generally live their lives. If someone can live off of income from investments, by this colloquial definition they no longer “work” at all. What does this mean in the context of a modern society?
Think of the social glorification of “work”, embodied in phrases like “work ethic”. The inverse of that statement is the implied assumption that if one does not “work”, he/she is a a lowly “bum” through sloth or “retired” because she/he earned it. Is someone pursuing a life where investments cover basic needs just “lazy” for simply looking for an easy life? How can meaning be found without a “work ethic”? Someone without motivation is quite uninspiring. It’s simply selfish, and isn’t a fulfilling goal. After all, what would one who worked so that they would never have to work again do with their life? Approaching it from a “normal” perspective like this, not having to work is really just is a short-sighted, misguided goal that won’t lead to any sort of personal fulfillment.
Work is held up as “fulfilling”, as a way to create and achieve goals, as the necessary means to provide for a family and, quite simply, as an essential part of reality for almost everybody. The current concept of “retirement” appears to be based on the dual concept of the impossibility of earning free time when any younger than 50 combined with some sort of “earned right” to not work and still not be considered morally questionable. After putting in one’s due effort and contribution, she/he is finally allowed to relax and enjoy the remaining, unproductive years that remain of her/his life. But what is this aside from the aggregate social assumption that everybody’s goal is to reach the state of an incapable bum? Go talk to people who are retired about their search for meaning or ask their family members, and you’ll probably get great insights.
Put another way, can one separate the idea of achievement and fulfillment as goals in life from the concept of “work” or lack thereof?
I definitely don’t know for sure what is important in life for everyone else, but here are my personal priorities:
This is my best attempt at laying out personal goals for a fulfilling life. Note that “success”, money, and work do not appear anywhere on that list. While it may not hold for everybody, I’ll assert that a majority of people in modern, quasi-capitalistic cultures of abundance share a desire for non-work, non-money goals such as these. So then the question is: how can these goals be achieved?
In fact,
the “normal” concept of “work” impedes every single one of these goals.
How many people “don’t have time” to eat well and stay fit? Staying fit can take as little as 6 hours a week, but yet we spend 40+ at “work”. Making one’s own, healthy food for her/his particular palate can take 4 hours a week if done en masse, but yet we wreck our diets and “stress eat” because of the constraints of and stress due to “work”. How often do people miss out on making quality connections with their children because of “work obligations”, or cannot fully be present and enjoy time with their family because they “had to make a tradeoff” for “work/life balance” and worry about the threat of the hammer coming down during their next performance review? I bet almost everybody has known a friend or co-worker that feels an insatiable itch to get out and learn something or try something different but feels “trapped in a job”.
The situations above illustrate the world that advocates of “work” uphold as right and moral. It is a world not of compromise between competing interests and necessities, but rather a wholesale land-grab which dictates that one of humanity’s most precious resources–joyful inspiration–is to be subjugated to the idea of “work”. Unfortunately, this is not simply something of others’ making, but rather an idea that the vast majority of people end up supporting by simply accepting it as “the way things are”.
One of the most common phrases related to this idea is “escap[ing] the rat race”, or escaping from what feels like an all-encompassing reality in which one simply feels like a rat running through a maze for a lab study without any larger sense of motivation other than trying to find rewards placed by someone else. However, despite the ubiquitous use of this phrase in the U.S., it seems that most people simply don’t know how to live any other way. As a result, those people work longer hours after having children to cover additional expenses, spend the equivalent of a year or more of salary to get married, pay tens or hundreds of times more for food than required so they can have it cooked and brought to them by fellow (wage) slaves.
In this context “work” is simply chasing the ability to provide more and more material comfort and luxury. Contrast this with the reality facing almost every human on the planet just a few hundred years ago: work just established a meagre base above starvation and was required for a good portion of every day in order to do so. By comparison, we work much less, make an obscene amount more, and still feel like we’re trapped in poverty. Just to get the juices flowing, think of what you’d do if shirts cost $2,000 USD or more instead of $4 on sale.
In “industrialized” countries, people lept at the chance to improve their standard of living, but failed to recognize the concept of “enough”. As a result, we “work” in order to keep chasing that improvement in our material comforts as aggressively as possible, even promising our future work to pay for more relative luxuries today by taking out loans against those future earnings that we promise to pay back with interest.
Here’s an artistic interpretation of the idea.
What we truly have in all so-called “rich” countries today is amazing abundance. While not everybody shares in this abundance, the ability to buy a loaf of bread most places in the U.S. for 1/10th or less of an hourly wage at the scale of hundreds of millions of people is amazing. As much as many people like to attack “big” anything (“big pharma”, “big banks”, “big corporations”, “big agriculture”), the reality is that operating at scale has brought humanity (on aggregate) an almost incomprehensible amount of material wealth.
When we “work” we exchange our time and effort for money to use in order to buy our chosen portion of this material wealth. But the degree to which we do so ends up conflicting with what most people consider a “good life” in which there is time to spend with family and friends, and exploring one’s passions. And underlying this choice is the lack of awareness of any alternative. But there are ways to tap into the abundance our societies have generated in order to align our actions with our desires. Financial Independence (FI) happens to be an amazing way to provide security as a base from which one can live their life passionately.
The details of a few ways to achieve FI will be outlined in future posts, but it amounts to allocating our resources away from consumption and towards building wealth. This is not done for the sake of wealth itself, but rather for establishing a base from which one can truly live their values. This is in stark contrast to doing “work” for the majority of their adult lives. After one’s investments can provide for basic needs, it is possible to live more fully, more authentically, and to put passion into how time is spent. In fact, the results may be even more productive than “work” since actions are backed by passion!
The first objection I get to mentioning this idea even in passing is almost always “but so many people are just scraping by …”. This is not something I deny, but I’d like to instead focus discussion on what a fulfilling life really costs in terms of time and money. Sadly these ideas cannot be made a reality for all, but I truly believe that Financial Independence is available to the vast majority of people in countries like the U.S., Canada, Japan, the U.K., South Korea, and many other places.
I hope this leaves you inspired to tap into the abundance all around us in the modern world in order to start living life from a secure and genuine happiness!
Published January 10th, 2018
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