It is amazing how many people I meet who report having easy, lucrative jobs. These are jobs that bring in $90,000 or more, often closer to $150,000, but which allow these people to run errands during the day and spend time with their kids.
This isn’t something to be discouraged. I think this situation is only going to get more common over time, particularly as our tools and technology keep getting better. Rather than fight it or criticize it, I think it is more useful to start reimagining how life might change in the coming decades.
Of course, this whole idea is nothing new. Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote a piece titled, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in which he imagined a life of leisure for future generations. It has proven quite prophetic, and if he had changed the title from “Grandchildren,” to “Great-Grandchildren,” he might have gotten it exactly right.
Keynes stated, rather boldly, that future generations (ie, all of us living today), will have an entirely new problem. The “permanent problem,” as he put it, would be “How to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy his leisure…to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
Now, cynics will probably reject any notion of this being a “real problem.” They might also say things like, “must be nice.” But from what I have seen and experienced, this is in fact a very real problem. It is quite probably the realest problem of our day.
Just to use myself as an example, I have been through periods in my life where I was not totally unemployed, but underemployed. In fact, through much of my adult life I have rarely worked a fully 40 hour, 9-5 week. But I have never been broke, I have a decent net worth for my age, and I own a home. And yet, for long stretches of my adult life, I have been utterly miserable. Near-total freedom of time does not solve your problem of how to live well, and you may find that it is all-too-easy to fill the void left by work with undesirable behaviors.
My typical schedule has been to start work at 10 and aim to finish by around 4 or 5, on average. What I have done with all those other hours, having won nearly twice the free time of your average 8-5 (plus commute) person, has varied.
There was a period where I used that free time to study, take tests and earn credentials for my job. But there were also periods where I’d crack a cold beer at 5:01, cook dinner (as quickly as possible), and then binge several hours of tv and video games, with a few more beers and bong hits peppered in. Weird as it may sound, this phase wasn’t “fun.” Not for me, and certainly not for my girlfriend-turned-wife-turned-ex-wife. Except for rare moments, usually while I was at work, I wasn’t present in my own life. In fact, I was doing just about everything I could to numb out.
There wasn’t just one bad phase. Occasionally, I’d bump into the necessity of work and put in a few good months of consistent effort. Then, the necessity would vanish and I’d go back to blissing out as I had before. These cycles repeated several times.
Oddly, I was happiest during those periods when I was working hardest and most consistently. The drive to go out and get money gave a structure and purpose to my days, and kept me from over-indulging in those stagnant/destructive behaviors. In that environment, I was more responsible about everything in my life, from cleaning house, to taking care of the dog, to exercising, studying, and being a good partner.
But then, I’d always run back into that old, hairy problem. What do you do when you don’t have to work very much?
Most people’s lives today are structured around their jobs. They have so little time off that they are either exhausted and plop down in front of the tv with a drink, or they scramble to squeeze in what few chores and recreation they can so as to restore themselves to working condition before the next workday. But life is gradually changing.
The possibility of remote work means less time spent commuting, and also a little less accountability for each hour spent throughout the day. Many employees are finding that they can get done in 3 hours what used to take 8 and a half. They are finding that they have the option of working out in the middle of the day, picking up groceries, and doing other household maintenance tasks during the time that they used to spend either at the office or commuting. As a result, they have free evenings which have not been clogged up with errands. In short, they are finding that they can have a life! And this rightly terrifies people.
Keynes said it better than I could, “Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.”
Many of the people I talk to express feelings of guilt. Not just towards their employers, but also for their future selves. They wonder if there’s something they ought to be doing which they are currently ignoring. They fear, perhaps, that they will someday wake up and face a reckoning of all the foregone drudgery that used to define their lives. They are afraid for their lives to go well, in other words, because they aren’t used to it. What we are used to is some threat looming on the horizon.
I relate to these fears. Especially as a self-employed person without a direct supervisor looking over my shoulder and assigning tasks to me. Even if those tasks were often pointless and unnecessary, they at least gave me a sense of, “this is what I’m supposed to be doing.” Today, my work hours are filled with a sense of, “this is probably important, but I might be missing something more important. How much time should I allocate to finding the more important thing vs doing the current thing? And how much time should I spend on that question of how much to allocate?”
But I think the issue might go even deeper than that. Even back in 1930, Keynes said, “To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard-those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me-those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties-to solve the problem which has been set them.”
In other words, the wealthy people of 1930 weren’t making very much of their lives. They were like me, some 85 years later, smoking weed and watching endless hours of Frasier in my studio apartment. Their circumstances were undoubtably fancier (although I think a flat-screen tv would have blown their minds), but they were just as miserable, bored, and undeveloped as I was! And when I talk to some retirees today, I get the sense that they’re struggling with the exact same problem!
Important though money is, and impactful as financial independence is, it is not enough. There is more to life than that. And while work helps us to develop and satisfy some of these other parts of our lives, work isn’t everything either.
So if life is more than money, and more than leisure, and more than work, what is it? What else are we here to do, and what are those things that so many of us are neglecting which might make our lives more satisfying?
I don’t know if I’ve got concrete answers to all those questions today, but I think with how things are going, those questions are only going to get more important over time.