Why Pursue Financial Freedom: Fulfilling Retirement Activity vs. Ideal Job

How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free by Ernie Zelinski continues to offer smart observations on retirement. For example, when people are working, their idea of leisure is often passive: watching TV, listening to music, shopping, or eating at restaurants. However, in retirement, they need to replace all the intangibles besides money that working provided.

The Academy of Leisure Sciences has 8 criteria for finding a good leisure activity in retirement:

1. You have a genuine interest in it.
2. It is challenging.
3. There is some sense of accomplishment associated with completing only a portion of it.
4. It has many aspects to it so that it doesn’t become boring.
5. It helps you develop some skill.
6. You can get so immersed in it that you lose the sense of time.
7. It provides you with a sense of self-development.
8. It doesn’t cost too much.

Did you know even know the Academy of Leisure Sciences existed? Another new tidbit from this book.

My observation is that these are also same characteristics of a good job. Think of your own job and read it again:

1. You have a genuine interest in it.
2. It is challenging.
3. There is some sense of accomplishment associated with completing only a portion of it.
4. It has many aspects to it so that it doesn’t become boring.
5. It helps you develop some skill.
6. You can get so immersed in it that you lose the sense of time.
7. It provides you with a sense of self-development.
8. It pays enough to support your lifestyle.

Of course, this brings you to why saving up money to reach financial freedom is a worthy pursuit. The list of things that satisfies the top 8 leisure criteria should be pretty long. It might take a few tries to find something that fits, but you could play any sport, learn to cook, speak a new language, and so on.

However, adding the criteria that it has to pay you makes the list much shorter, perhaps non-existent. Compare picking up cycling for personal enjoyment vs. getting paid as a professional cyclist. Learning how to smoke some decent backyard BBQ vs. getting paid as a professional caterer. Start to speak a new language vs. becoming an (adequately-paid) French teacher. I’m sure some lucky people out there really do have a perfect job where they are getting paid for something that they would “do for free”. However, most of us don’t, so that’s where financial freedom comes in to remove that money requirement.