To Work or Not to Work?

Would you rather get paid to do nothing?

Or would you pre­fer to have an impor­tant, chal­leng­ing job?

Tim­o­thy Fer­ris (in The 4 Hour Work Week) basi­cally advo­cates the no-work option. What could be bet­ter than doing noth­ing all day and still get­ting paid? Per­son­ally I wouldn’t refuse being paid to laze around the pool of the lux­iou­ri­ous Can­dado Plaza Hotel (which is how and where I read the 4HWW). I know if I found myself retired I would want to go to a place like that and at least take 6 months to gatehr my thoughts.

However, retired peo­ple, those who actu­ally have the option of laz­ing around as much as they want to, say they’d rather be work­ing. (Well, 78% of New Zealand retirees say that any­way.) They say they would pre­fer to work, as long as they job allowed them to work with more flexibly.

I find this just a lit­tle bit sur­pris­ing. I can under­stand want­ing to make your­self use­ful, but why not take on a non-job or two instead? I’m look­ing for­ward to retire­ment as a time to build com­mu­nity, indulge my cre­ativ­ity and maybe catch up on my life list. Not to go back to work.

Gretchen Rubin over at the Hap­pi­ness Project got some insight on this from Amer­i­can Jus­tice San­dra Day O’Connor. O’Connor says that the secret of hap­pi­ness is sim­ply this: Work extremely hard at some­thing worth doing. That’s it. It’s not rela­tion­ships. It’s not peace of mind. Do good work and the good life will fol­low. I’m not sure I agree entirely. State­ments like that remind me of the episode of Cheers where one of them sagely explains what life is all about, “the mean­ing of life my friends: com­fort­able shoes.” Comfortable shoes are good, but maybe there is just a lit­tle more to life.

But I still can’t com­pletely fig­ure out why New Zealand retirees don’t want to stay retired. A recent 60 Min­utes news show dis­cussed the fact that Mil­len­ni­als (Gen­er­a­tion Y) make excep­tion­ally dif­fi­cult employ­ees. They are a new breed, say the com­men­ta­tors. They refuse to work if they don’t under­stand the pur­pose of the work. They won’t do busy work, even when work­ing for min­i­mum wage. They need to be nego­ti­ated with. The show, clearly appeal­ing more to the over-40 crowd, pre­sented this as entirely unrea­son­able. Where do these young peo­ple get the nerve to try to work on their own terms?!

No one wants to waste their lives doing mean­ing­less work.

It seems that the answer is not about work­ing hard or not; it’s the rea­son for the work that matters.

Maybe it’s not actu­ally free­dom that we long for at the sum­mit of our careers. For most of us it’s not really about money either. The real chal­lenge is about find­ing work that we feel is mean­ing­ful, so we don’t waste our time  –in retire­ment, and even before we retire.

So the ques­tion becomes: how can we find or cre­ate some mean­ing­ful work?

A good place to start is to try to lead a tribe, try to gather around you peo­ple who have sim­i­lar inter­ests and work with them toward some­thing worth­while. Or, if you’re more of a lone wolf, get stuck into your own cre­ative prac­tice. We should all make sure that, by the time we reach retire­ment, we are seri­ously involved in work we find exhil­a­rat­ing and important.

(Image care of Rebel Shoots).