“But what will you do with all the extra time?”
That is the question I hear most when I mention my intent to retire before age 40. At this point, it is difficult for me to even comprehend why someone would ask this question since I spend more time and, more importantly, more energy in areas outside of my day job. But I know that is abnormal for an American with a full-time job in 2024, so I try to reflect on when I had fewer responsibilities outside of my day job before considering the answer.
The reason this is the first question asked by Americans, and many individuals from overworked countries, is the culture that puts our jobs at the center of our lives. Our obsession with work has allowed job responsibilities to usurp time and energy that should be allocated for other parts of our lives. The overcommitment to our jobs can be obvious when a parent misses their child playing in the championship game, but it is less apparent when we let a work call go long and shorten our planned 10k run to a 5k run so we can still make it home in time for dinner. Jobs are creeping into the other areas of our lives, and this makes it more difficult to imagine living without a job.
What Jobs Give Us
Jobs are not all bad. They give us two healthy attributes: connection and purpose. Working with people and finding a community that shares your values and objectives in working towards a common purpose is fulfilling. Jobs allow us to be part of something larger than ourselves and, ideally, work to create something we believe in with the help of a community.
Without jobs, we may not fall into settings that introduce us to important figures in our lives with whom we share values. Meeting our people is important to assembling communities that support us throughout our lives. While not everyone in your community should come from a workplace, you are likely to meet some of these people in your life if you work in a job that aligns with your values and priorities.
Particularly when we are young and lack connections that we may have later in life, finding a job that brings together a group of our people to work towards a common purpose hugely impacts fulfillment levels. Later in life, we may have the ability to assemble common interest networks without the existence of preexisting organizations. But early on, finding a job that plugs you into something that makes you excited to work passionately towards a goal is one of the best ways to start your journey towards finding energizing purpose in your life.
How Americans Misuse Jobs for More than Connection and Purpose
Jobs are healthy when they motivate you to work with a community towards a goal. Jobs become unhealthy when they become your entire identity.
Letting a job become integral to your identity is problematic for a few reasons. Most jobs are tied to making money rather than a greater purpose that will provide fulfillment. Only working for money will eventually leave you feeling empty.
Even jobs that align more directly with purpose are risky because jobs are inherently unstable. You may work at a nonprofit working to make the change you wish to see in the world, but you could lose that job at any time. Even as someone with an extremely secure job and multiple employment contingencies that would still allow me to work within my field and team, I still accept that job loss is a possibility that is ultimately out of my control.
Figuring out how to replace income when we lose a job is a normal challenge that we can overcome. But losing a job that has become our identity for many years can hit harder and make even the process of searching for a replacement feel impossible. Losing a large piece of our identity is debilitating. Creating a healthy boundary between our jobs and ourselves allows us to maintain our own unique identities while enjoying the connection and purpose that a job can provide.
Separating our jobs from our identities is essential regardless of when we retire. The New York Times recently documented the anti-climatic last days of workers set to retire after 30 years, 40 years, or more of time dedicated to their jobs. It does not matter if you dedicate a year or five decades to a job. Your employer will just replace you with someone else.
To prepare for that eventual change, whether at age 30 or 80, we need to identify other pieces of our identities unattached to our jobs that we can still hold when we retire. If these pieces of identity can also provide us purpose, the transition to retirement is much easier.
Finding Purpose Outside the Workplace
While jobs offer connection and purpose, that connection and purpose can feel forced at times. You likely have or had coworkers that you would rather not work with even if you appreciate the objective to which you are working at the time. At other times, connecting a particular project to our ideal purpose can feel a bit strained if it is a stretch from the norm.
These elements of a job can lead to a degree of inauthenticity. When we find purpose outside of our jobs, it tends to be more authentic. We are spending time how we want to spend time rather than how we have to in order to make a living.
That said, finding communities where we find these authentic ties can be more difficult than just popping into the workplace with a preset group of collaborators. The difficulty is what adds authenticity. Nobody has to join together in a community working towards a common purpose when there is no looming threat of losing income. You are truly united only by a common purpose, forging a community for something great by choice.
Creating purpose outside of a job does not have to mean eliminating streams of income altogether, but it may. At Phippen Tax & Financial Services, we get to see clients build their dream businesses to help others by creating community, supporting health and wellness goals, innovating creative solutions, and so much more. These entrepreneurs are following a purpose to provide a service aligned with their values to their communities. Some are lucky enough to profit from these ventures. If this is you, you may as well enjoy the profits received by bringing your dream to life to help others.
However, some dreams pay better than others. Take it from someone passionate about increasing inclusivity in sports, particularly in women’s leagues. This effort does not pay well, but that does not make it any less important. Eventually leaving my day job will give me the freedom to dedicate more time to my current ideas surrounding this purpose.
What About the Extra Time?
It is easier for me to critique the expansion of jobs into other parts of our lives than many others who rely more heavily on their primary streams of income. I am married to a successful entrepreneur who had the freedom to leave a GS-15 salary to start a business now making six-figures annually. On top of that, I designed my own job description, giving me more unique expertise within my field and the job security that comes with it. We even have additional small streams of income that could be bolstered as needed. Oh, and we do not have kids. Our current position is privileged and flexible.
So take my parents instead: They did not encounter the difficult transition from work to retirement that so many retirees do when they lose their entire identity because they had more in their lives than their jobs. My parents were both teachers. They were not bringing in the money of a government consultant or tax attorney. They also had a child (hi!). Despite working jobs that most claim are overworked and underpaid, they set the boundaries on their work lives to attend pretty much every game and event of my childhood, a significant effort since I had a lot of games and a fair number of other events.
But they also participated in their own interests. My dad consistently taught at the local college to keep learning and teach more challenging topics. He frequently participated in negotiations for the teachers’ union to secure more favorable contracts for himself and his coworkers. My mom played tennis on a weekly basis with a consistent group of tennis friends my entire life. In the summer, she played even more tennis while also allocating hours of pool time for me (no wonder I needed to move somewhere with a pool!) that included plenty of time for me to visit with my grandparents. She also worked as a team leader, taking on extra responsibilities to lead other teachers.
Unsurprisingly, she retired easily. She continues staying active, tutors a couple students each year, serves as president for the local organization raising money for the library, spends time and creative energy designing new ideas for raising money for the senior center, helps the town as a poll worker for elections, and generally dedicates time and energy to the community.
My mom did not lose her identity when she stopped teaching. Instead, she embraced it further by diving into her purpose even further than she could as a teacher. Despite retiring, she educates future generations and increases their passion for learning through the direct connections that only tutoring can provide. She supports literacy in her community, expresses the importance of all young readers maintaining access to all books, and facilitates the operations required for the educated electorate she helps create to vote. She could only work on one small piece of her purpose while she had a job. Now, she can do it all.
I am one of the lucky ones since I have parents who showed me that a full life consisted of more than just a job, or even just a job and a family. Today, too many of us are exposed to the norm that there is no time or energy for anything beyond a job and our nuclear families. The second we break free from that constraining reality, we have so much more potential to spend our time realizing our purpose with fewer limitations.
So what will I do with all the extra time (and energy) from not having a job? Probably use it to more completely align with the goals that give me purpose and more fully participate in the communities that fulfill me. I currently feel the time I spend at a job reducing my creativity and energy towards the parts of my life I love the most. For me, early retirement means realizing a more authentic alignment with my purpose. While the exact allocation of hours in a day is unknown, I have a great example showing me how to happily live the fullest life possible. I look forward to the day that I leave my day job and more fully live my purpose.
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