If you don’t do your job, you won’t let yourself enjoy anything ever again, no matter how much money you have saved away.
There is a self-loathing that comes with free-loading
Your Mom might have called it, “living up to your potential,” but if you don’t do it, if you don’t get out there and do your absolute best at something, for as long and hard as possible, you’ll never truly believe it when your brain says, “You done good, son.”
The key to happiness lies somewhere in between exhaustion and excellence, no matter how that looks, whether you are pulling weeds for a living or selling cars.
This fact—that hard work is essential to our spiritual health and happiness—is something we seem to have forgotten. The modern era is obsessed with early retirement and financial independence.
There is a movement called the F.I.R.E. movement (”Financial Independence, Retire Early”), that attracts millennials working in cubicles like moths to a flame. As stated by Dave Ramsey’s website: “The goal is to save and invest very aggressively—somewhere between 50–75% of your income—so you can retire sometime in your 30s or 40s.”
The message is to get debt-free, then save enough to create enough income to survive. Youtube is full of videos of young-ish people living in tiny houses or on the road, who “retired” at 35 years old, and now live a life more like gypsies than debt-free business-people.
Which, back to the point.
If we humans were designed with a purpose, let’s call it the business of life, then that business is ours to do, no matter how much revenue it brings, how long we live, how much money we make. That is our business. Escaping from it is only good for a short while.
But escaping is what the F.I.R.E folks seem to be trying to do.
If athletes were the same, they would play one year and hang up the spikes because they have enough to retire on. If musicians were the same, they would play one major concert and throw in the towel. If politicians were the same, they’d get wealthy and go home to be by themselves and free.
But all of these people are doing something with their lives far greater than survival. They are flourishing, and they are crushing it, year after year, fighting the long battle of life.
They are the backbone of civilization, deeply engaged in the business of life, working every day as if it were their last.
Why do they do it?
Because they have heard the voice of their Maker, late at night, when no one is listening, and they’ve heard Him say, “You done good, son”, and they’ve become dependent on it. They need to hear Him say it.
And so they get up again the next day, working their tails off, because they know if they don’t, the only voice they will hear is their own.