Go to any financial independence blog post, social media post, or book review section, and you will find comments along the lines of, “I am financially independent, but I could not imagine quitting my job,” or “I don’t know what I would do with myself if I stopped working!” Each time I see or hear a comment like that, I feel sad for that person.
If work is that important in your life, you are likely missing out on everything else life has to offer.
This is not a hard line suggesting that if you retire early you should refuse any paid activity. My mom tutors students, but this gives her value beyond money and would definitely not provide a large enough income to support her lifestyle. Plenty of activities are near-volunteer but offer small stipends as a token of appreciation towards folks who dedicate their time and energy towards important causes. These activities are different from full-time jobs that require you to forgo some control over your schedule and make sacrifices in your personal life to accommodate workplace priorities.
But it can be difficult to remove something that consumes 40 hours of your life every week and still feel fulfilled. Making the transition from work to retirement, or forms of part-time or volunteer work that you complete for fulfillment rather than the paycheck, is more difficult when you dedicate more time and energy towards your work relative to other activities. This means the best way to learn how to give up work is to gradually shift your time and energy towards non-work activities to eventually make the transition easier.
Why Make the Shift: Work is Unpredictable
Your life should be more than your job because you can always lose your job. If you are throwing all or most of your time and energy into working for someone, know that you can be fired from that job at any point. Even if you are an indispensable employee, the business can go bankrupt. The industry can suddenly tank, prompting mass layoffs. Just like you should have an emergency fund to plan for the worst-case financial scenario, you should also have other activities that keep you mentally engaged and happy in the event of sudden job loss.
Even if you run your own business, emergencies or economic downturns can make staying afloat difficult. At a minimum, during times of stress at your job or running your business, having an activity that helps you reduce stress will improve your mood and health so you can weather difficult times.
When we think about our finances, we know not to invest every dollar in one stock. If that company goes out of business, we lose all of our money. In investing, we emphasize the importance of diversification to enjoy the growth of the entire market. Think of your life energy in a similar way. If you invest all your energy in your job, and you lose it, you will experience much more pain than if you still have other outside activities. Diversify your life in the same way you diversify your financial portfolio to decrease the risk to your mental wellbeing.
How to Shift: Decrease Your Energy Towards Work
Adding a bunch of new activities to your life may sound like a lovely concept that is impossible since you already feel your time and energy constrained by work. Adding a bunch of non-work activities to an already full schedule is not a great idea. Before adding new areas of fulfillment to your life, decrease the amount of energy you put towards work.
How? Quiet quitting points the way: It is possible to complete your job requirements without going above and beyond and expending extra time or energy where it will not bring you the most fulfillment. I want to emphasize the energy side of this point. It is often difficult to claim back time from a full-time job that has a standard number of hours per week. (Unless you are working unpaid overtime—in that case, stop!) However, you can control how much energy you use to complete your job. This can vary significantly. When I taught high school math, it was easy to keep to my contract hours because correcting math exams takes a lot less time than grading essays or science labs. However, fewer students are excited about math. To generate more excitement, I threw my full energy into teaching each class to engage students in the material. I worked fewer hours than many other teachers, but I used more energy during those hours than teachers with subjects generally considered more exciting.
If you want to start diversifying your life and prioritizing activities outside of work, you cannot give that math teacher energy to your work everyday. (I am sorry if you are a math teacher. This will be difficult if you are.) At least dial back to the history teacher that can let students take over the entire discussion at times. Ideally, dial back farther to the employee who will complete the necessary tasks on any given day without going beyond their job requirements.
Decreasing your energy towards your job does not necessarily mean that you decrease your energy consistently. I prefer to have days where I sit down and put in some serious work for my job. I ideally plan for these days to happen when I do not need that extra energy for more important non-work activities on the same day. On days when I have important non-work activities, I go back to doing the minimum at work. People are pretty inconsistent creatures when it comes to energy, so this will not seem weird to your employer. Just find a good pattern that allows you to do enough to do your job well while saving as much energy as possible for your life outside of work.
What to Shift: Diversify Your Life
Once you have extra energy, you have the exciting problem of figuring out what to do with that energy! Most of us have something that we say we would do if we just had more time. Often, thinking we need more time is a misunderstanding, and finding more energy is enough to make these activities possible. Once you figure out how to remove some of your life energy from your work, really analyze whether you could do that thing you have been wishing you could do.
On the other hand, you may have to brainstorm a bit if you do not have an obvious activity you have been waiting to add to your life. If you have no idea where to start, there is a common idea that you should find three hobbies: one to make you money, one to make you healthy, and one to make you happy. Start there. Hobbies that cover a couple categories are even better. For me, the happy and healthy aspects tend to go together quite easily. You may find a different pairing works well for you, but any hobby that hits two categories is a great one!
When to Shift: Well Before You Retire
When you start your very first job and are scrambling to figure out how to complete your basic assignments, you should still ideally have a hobby or activity outside of work. Having outside hobbies keeps us happy! If you are young and feeling stressed when it comes to work, this hobby can be small. Maybe you volunteer once a month or participate in a Saturday morning 5K run group. The time commitment is minimal, but it gives you a social circle beyond your coworkers and a meaning beyond your full-time job.
That one activity is great at first, but adding more life fulfillment outside of work over time is also important. Some of these outside commitments may be raising a family or remodeling a home to complete a live-in flip. (A live-in flip does qualify as a hobby that makes you money! Plus, it fosters creativity.) As you add hobbies, adding some that connect you to your community and others that give you time to yourself can provide a healthy balance of social time and self-focused creative time.
Since securing the last promotion that I plan to seek in my career and fully embracing quiet quitting while on my autopilot FIRE path, I have had the opportunity to allocate even more energy outside of my full-time job and add new fulfilling activities to my own life. To be fair, I am the type of person that entered my first career, as a high school math teacher, while going to graduate school and playing for a nationally ranked rugby team. However, over the decade since starting my post-college life as a math teacher/graduate student/rugby player I gradually allocated more time and energy to non-work priorities.
Over that decade, this gave me the space to add some “make money” hobbies by starting an Etsy side hustle, doing some career consulting and resume writing, and writing all these Phippen Tax articles. Allocating more energy away from work also gave me the space to “be healthy” and “be happy/creative” by creating the rugby team I wished existed, dedicating more time to my personal fitness, and serving in various leadership positions in my team and the Capital Rugby Union. From a purely “be happy” standpoint, giving myself more time and energy has allowed me to attend more baseball games, even if it means missing work, and to travel whenever I want to fly somewhere. The only constraints on my travel dreams are now my other hobbies. Work is never an obstacle.
Most recently, I have been able to take the reallocation of energy farther by stepping into a coaching position with one of the local college rugby teams. This has been one of the most fulfilling experiences to date because it allows me to give back to the rugby community, my happy/healthy hobby place. In my final match of the fall season as a player, a bunch of the players I coach showed up to cheer me on in one of the most heartwarming moments of my year. I would not have been able to fulfill this commitment last spring when I was working to secure my promotion, but now that I have it, I get to put that energy to something that gives me joy and helps a community that has long been important to me.
I cannot imagine a job that would provide more fulfillment than giving back to a community that has long supported me. When folks say they cannot imagine leaving their jobs because they do not know what they do instead, I feel sad because I fear they have not found a community outside of work in which they feel supported. If that describes you, it may be time to start looking for a happy space outside the office.
I still have a few years until my early retirement, but the journey there keeps getting better. I love having an array of activities outside of the workplace, and I look forward to the next moment when I feel like I can allocate enough energy for another fulfilling experience outside of my full-time job. When it is time for retirement, it will be an easy transition. Owning two small businesses, playing and coaching rugby, traveling the world, and attending all the sporting events I choose already sounds like a fulfilling existence to me, but I cannot wait for whatever additions happen between now and 2028.
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