A Languid, Drifting Thing? No Thanks.
Someone asked me this question once, “What would you do if you won the lottery and never had to worry about money again?” It was followed by, “There. Whatever your answer is, that’s what you should be doing.”
But I’m not completely sure that question is all-knowing in the end. I think it gives a hint toward the activity I might want to pursue, but I think the whole lottery thing throws me off. Having all the money I’ve ever wanted or needed is not an especially good thing. I think having to make money helps me strive.
I have a close friend who has so much money that she doesn’t have to work.
I have another close friend who was married to a man who made so much money that she didn’t have to work either.
Imagine this: never having to work.
Admittedly, I like this idea very, very much. It sounds really nice, doesn’t it?
But there’s something that work for pay does for me. It provides structure in my day: the time I leave for work and the time I come home; for some it provides a social network of friends and connections that they can use when they want to buy a house, say, or know of a really good dentist; work provides me with an income so I can go out to eat, pay my electric bill, or afford a Hawaiian vacation. And there’s something else that I’d venture to say work does not just for me, but for a lot of people: it gives a sense of purpose.
Granted, work isn’t the only means of finding purpose. Family or faith does that for people, too. But I’d say that for an American, work is the big definer of who we think we are. It’s the biggie. It’s a part of our getting-to-know-you questions. “What do you do for work?” new friends will ask us. And when we tell them, they say, “Well, that’s one way to make a living.” We even get a “cost of living” increase on our paychecks. The words work and living are almost synonymous.
Winning the lottery? It would almost be a curse. Of my two friends who don’t have to work, I would have to say that both of them seem a little lost. Without a need for money, they are on a permanent vacation: they can wake up whenever they’d like, they can do whatever they’d like. But in the end, sometimes that means that they might wake up at 11 in the late morning, go to bed at 2 in the early morning, and in between, they sit and watch TV all day. Without that monkey on their backs forcing them to make money, they are without a routine that drives them into action, into goals, into purpose.
It’s a little like Odysseus. There he is, the big hero returning from battle, heading home to his wife and kingdom. Along the way, he hears a siren song. He’s enchanted. He follows it. Up on the island, under Circe’s spell, his men turn to pigs. And he ends up flabby and suntanned. He has everything he needs brought to him. All his needs and wants are met. He doesn’t have to lift a finger. He languishes on that island because he isn’t doing the work he’s made for. The man is a soldier, a warrior, a king. He isn’t striving. He isn’t working. He basically isn’t himself anymore.
We all have something we’d like to be doing. Some of us even have gifts and talents that help point us along the path of what we should be doing. Little nuggets in us glow when we’ve come upon our purpose. We even know it when it’s happening: we feel good, we feel happy. Just like we know when it isn’t: we feel angry, we feel stressed. Those nuggets are in us so that we can answer a question like what would we do if we didn’t have to worry about money. That answer is still critical. It still shines a light. It still gives us a sense of what we might try, just for the heck of it. Just because it might lead to something else.
There’s something to figuring out what we want to do with the time we’re spending on this planet. Of finding the things that make our time feel worthwhile and significant. How we spend our time really is how we spend our lives. And as work usually gets about 8 hours from us every day, that’s a significant amount of our time being spent at something that should be at least be connected to what feels like purpose.
