What Would You Do If You Never Had To Work For Money Again?
This is perhaps the most important question to ask yourself
For most of our human history we have engaged in a hunter-gatherer lifestyle while living in small communities. The collection of food didn’t take up as much time as modern day labour does, but the ancient way of life included other duties such as the raising of children, repair of tools, building new huts and a range of social obligations to satisfy the tribes need for cohesion. There was no such distinction between work and leisure, it was just life.
Fast forward some 12,000 years, and through agricultural, industrial and technological revolutions we have internalised concepts called work and leisure. We have freed ourselves from food production and rigid class systems to allow specialisation, education and wage labour. We have completely changed the way we structure our days and our societies, working 8–10 hours a day in exchange for money that can again be exchanged for whatever we want.
While we as individuals may dislike our jobs and yearn for a Neolithic lifestyle of simplicity, nature and tending to a small garden, we as a species have never had it so good. The working week has declined, developed countries have created safety nets and healthcare systems, and many people enjoy a comfortable labourless retirement, unheard of a mere 150 years ago.
Today’s work culture is a mix of individual appetites, political decisions, economic institutions and societies’ perceived ideas of the nature of work. We work long hours in office cubicles, squash into public transport twice a day and take out large mortgages that will keep us in debt and working for the next 30 years. We create side hustles in our leisure time to work on our passions, and fail to take enough leisure time to relax. This is the major narrative of today — we work hard, play hard, hustle hard. Even with the shock of Covid19 seeking to change the way we work, many of us want to get back to normal, instead of exploring new structures and ways to work.
What would you do if you never had to work for money again?
One of the most incredible benefits we have from being born in this age is the luxury to follow our dreams. A peasant 150 years ago didn’t have the ability to quit their job, couldn’t read or write, and didn’t have access to a world of information on a smartphone or laptop. Our grandparents didn’t have the luxury of social mobility or geo-arbitrage, and even our parents missed out on the technological revolution that has changed our lives so profoundly today.
We are truly living in an incredible time, and yet many of us don’t fully make the most of it.
We have the luxury of self reflection, and we can choose and change our future direction if we so wish to. One of the most profound questions we could ask ourselves today is, ‘What would you do if you never had to work for money again?’
It is not necessarily a question with an immediate answer, but it is a question to ask yourself repeatedly. Likely it will also bring up more questions;
- What would I do if I no longer needed to exchange time for money?
- Why am I working?
- What fulfils me?
- What is my life’s mission?
- How would I spend my time if I was completely free?
In the last 15 years a community has emerged called the FIRE (Financial Independent / Retire Early) movement. It offers a glimpse into people who have accumulated enough money to no longer need traditional employment, and instead have battled these questions, while raising more. For some a few properties that bring in rental income have allowed them to stop working, for others steady investments into the stock market have brought enough returns to live comfortably. Some have scaled back to the bare essentials to live a life that could be easily sustained by little money. But all the different characters in the FIRE movement are showing a different way of living, a way to be truly free of work altogether.
Financial freedom is both a gift and a burden. Many of us dream of this, but at the same time, this freedom comes with full responsibility for your own life, and what you make of it.
Sigmund Freud so aptly summarized that:
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
While we dream about ‘retirement’, what is most interesting about many of the people who have achieved Financial Independence is that they continue working in some form or other. After all, doing nothing all day is a job in itself and quite quickly gets boring. If you work a 9–5, regardless of how much you like it, you have a reason to wake up in the morning, you have a structure and a purpose to your day. Once you give that up, it is entirely up to you what you do during your days. From books to blogs, podcasts to Medium publications, it’s still easier to focus on what you know than what you don’t, to do what you have always done rather than radically change your lifestyle overnight. Even without the need of money, we seem to have a need to work, or rather to produce.
What, then, would you do if you didn’t have to work anymore? How would you spend your days? What would be your life’s work? If you can confidently answer these questions then it is your responsibility to find a way to free yourself from traditional work to follow that dream. The responsibility lies not just within yourself, but also for the countless souls who over the last 12,000 years have toiled at work, not having an option to change or quit.
If we are brave and able enough to move to a situation past needing to work for the sake of work, then we are contributing to moving society past the wage labour and toil, and towards a new form of freedom for the individual. We cannot go back in history, but we can, as a society, go forwards.
