The Nature of Work: What Happened When I Took A Mini-Retirement

How Taking a Break from Full-Time Work Changed My Perspective on Life

Today I just wanted to share with you a personal story about my recent state of affairs, and my ongoing relationship with the nature of work. I’ve started this blog to discuss frugal living, a little bit of our real estate adventures – including our home renovation projects, and some finance/investing topics. This post is more about my background and what’s led up to where I am today. Hope you enjoy!

Work and I have a had a long, complicated relationship. I started working when I was 15. It was an easy, fun summer job that mainly consisted of me laying out by the pool all day for $6.50 an hour and it was awesome. It was even a full fledged part-time gig, with a 401k that I paid into and everything.

I felt very official because I had to get a special work permit from the city in order to hold a job that young. However, because it was also an actual, real job, I had to show up and be responsible for it.

My weekends were booked, and even afternoons while school was still in session it was expected that I be there. I said no to a lot of things I wanted to do in the name of “work ethic”. Already I was choosing that over time with friends and family.

Thinking About the Nature of Work

The thing about the nature of work is, even at that age, you quickly and easily get used to having that extra money around. Like some addictive drug, it becomes your new normal without you even realizing it. Before long you are willing to make all kinds of sacrifices because you feel like you need it.

You’re young, you’ve got tons of time that’s going to pass anyway, so why not make some small sacrifices in trading that time for these shiny awesome things that you want right now? And when you don’t find that you have a passion for any one thing to drive you into a specific direction (like me), you’re going to try a lot of different things.

Society also has these expectations for work. Especially American society, where we don’t take hardly any vacation. According to this Bankrate summer vacation survey of 2019, just 28% percent of Americans don’t plan on vacationing that summer.

Now part of that is because most said they can’t afford it but that is a whole different conversation for a future post. What I’d like to point out here is that it’s expected and accepted pretty much everywhere that we should be working for 99.9% of our time.

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History of My Work Life

So for the next 15 years I continued to pick up all kinds of jobs, never going more than a couple months without one, and with the exception of a couple, never holding them for more than about 10-12 months.

In addition to being the previously stated pool attendant, I’ve been a dance studio receptionist, a deli clerk, a babysitter, a pizza parlor waitress, a university caterer, someone who folds and refolds clothes in a store at the mall, a clinical trials screener, an online freelancer, a collections specialist for a telecom giant, a lab tech for a healthcare giant, a real estate agent, and a teacher.

Often I held two or three of these jobs at the same time. My longest, however, was the job in a laboratory which I held for over 7 years. Even though it was difficult at times, it was the most money I’d ever made at a job to date and I was using my Bachelor’s of Science in Biology degree.

I met many long term friends there and really enjoyed the work itself. While I had settled comfortably into this for quite some time, it wasn’t something I wanted to continue to pursue forever, because I had developed a love for real estate and renovation. I knew I was going to need to make a change, again.

Master of None

Changing perspective on the Nature of Work

But as you might imagine, this master of none legacy could potentially wreak some havoc on a person’s psyche, especially when said person hits a sort of milestone like say, turning 30 years old. There was a lot of the typical “What am I doing with my life?” and “Why haven’t I accomplished more, or anything of note, really?”

It felt like I had all these interests, and work was always getting in the way of the life I wanted to be living, but I still needed the work to live at all so it was kind of a love-hate circular relationship.

Somewhere though, in the years building up to this I had also spent a LOT of time reading books/listening to podcasts about financial independence. Getting these crazy ideas of escaping the rat race, building passive income, and a life of work that I truly enjoyed so that it never feels like work.

I finally realized that I needed a major overhaul in how I perceived my relationship with the nature of work in my life. So naturally I resolved to work my butt off even more in order to save up some money so that by the time I turned 31 I could break away from this job and have a stretch of time to just figure it all out.

Changing Life, Changing Attitudes About Work

And as fate would have it, apparently the universe agreed. Because about 6 months before I turned 31, my husband was offered a promotion into the corporate world of his company. It was a great opportunity for his career, even though it meant we’d have to move just far enough away so that I couldn’t continue to commute to my job even if I wanted to.

But after looking at our finances, what he would earn, and what I had saved, we decided he should go for it. With my newly developed frugality skills, trimming the fat from our budget, and practicing the mindset that more things don’t actually make you happier, we would luckily be fine without any of my income for a good long while.

I’d always thought about the nature of work as really just a measure of how much income you could bring in, not how much joy you could bring in.

So I did it, I left that comfortable job in the laboratory. I moved with my husband to an unfamiliar place, where I didn’t know anyone and had no real estate prospects. Luckily there wasn’t also the added pressure of needing to bring in income right away, and I was truly grateful for that.

But do you know what happens when you’ve worked for more than half of your life, tied your worthiness and your identity to it and then you suddenly up and remove it all from your life altogether? Yeah, major existential anxiety to the max! I was a cog out of the machine, a loose bolt no longer holding anything together, untitled and useless.

At least that’s how it felt anyway. I still cooked and cleaned and took care of all the day to day stuff, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I wasn’t using every minute doing something meaningful or earning money, I was wasting it. I’d always thought about the nature of work as really just a measure of how much income you could bring in, not how much joy you could bring in. Now I finally had all this time to do things that I enjoyed, but the guilt was so much that I couldn’t actually enjoy any of it!

Resolution About the Nature of Work

So after many tears, and long conversations with myself and my husband (who has always been confoundingly supportive), I finally just had to accept that no matter what society tells you, work does not make you who you are. Your worth is not tied to a title, or the amount of money you can bring in.

You have innate value already, simply because you are a human person, capable of almost infinite things. We create our own purpose, in our lives, for ourselves. And let me tell you, working to overcome the expectations that I didn’t even know I had for myself has been an ongoing work in progress.

Most of the time, I think I’ve come to terms with letting it go and I’m just able to be happy for who and where I am in my life right now. But sometimes, that feeling of insignificance just comes up out of nowhere and slaps me in the face and I have to give myself a pep talk all over again. But I’m going to keep at it, with the hopes that one day that occasional little voice that whispers “you’re not ____ enough” will be silenced forever.

P.S.

In case you were wondering, after this little “mini-retirement”, I’ve now finally found the most flexible, amazing, part-time job ever. I’m a VIPKID Teacher, teaching English as a second language online in one-on-one video calls to children of all ages in China.

If you’d like to learn more about that, you can check out this post about My New Favorite Side Hustle, but in the meantime I just wanted to share the good news. Though I was technically “self-employed full time” through real estate and this blog during that 6 months, it wasn’t until I started working a regularly scheduled job like VIPKid that I truly felt like my working self again. I’m sure that’s tied to having a (mostly) regular income cycle, but still, I’m happy.