Would you like to retire early?

Ever thought of early retirement? I hadn’t, until I ran into a New York Times article about a movement of people who dream of retiring before old age, sometimes even in their youth.

It’s made of an impressive group of people. They work tirelessly, save radically, and often manage to retire earlier than usual. But, as I read the article, I also pitied them.

Many dreamed of riches and retirement as a solution for the suffering they had experienced as children. For instance,

Even before he really knew what it meant, Allen Wong wanted to be rich. As a kid, he didn’t yet equate the word with “luxury” or “status” or “expensive things” … What “rich” seemed to dangle was something simpler, more elementary, more a feeling than anything else: freedom from pain. Wong’s parents had fled poverty… Wong watched one parent peddle medicinal herbs all day long while the other toiled away in a Chinatown sweatshop… Wong’s father was ousted from his business, sank into a depression and committed suicide; his mother tripped down a spiral of mental illness... So he turbocharged his ambitions. 

The article recounts the various enterprises Wong launched and how he accumulated immense wealth. But it also shows that possessions are not a solution for the pain Wong experienced – they are merely possessions.

So, the writer concludes,

Life after early retirement: the elephant in the room. What to do after the cruises, the skydiving, the teetering stack of books on the night stand? The main danger of [early retirement] is that you might be running hard away from something rather than toward it — that you’re propelled only by the too-nebulous idea of escape.

In many cases, overwork and early retirement are efforts to escape something rather than to achieve something. We are often more motivated to avoid suffering more than to achieve a desirable outcome.

The unexpressed thought in our minds is: “I cannot feel this pain again! I will never let myself be in such a situation again!”

An illuminating question we can ask ourselves is: what am I trying to escape from? For Wong, it was seeing his parents be exploited at work, processing his father’s suicide and dealing with his mother’s illness.

And for you? What pain makes you vulnerable to false promises? What consumes your thoughts? What fascinates you more than it should? What makes you think, “when I get that... life will be finally great?”

The more we have suffered, the more we will dream of solutions for that suffering. If we have received little attention, we will yearn for much attention.

If we have suffered injustices, we will become interested in questions of justice. If our family has suffered financially, we will do everything we can to ensure that this never happens to us again.

But the writer of the book of Hebrews writes, “Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” (Hebrews 13:15).

Similarly, the book of Proverbs admonishes us to: Do not wear yourself out to get rich;  do not trust your own cleverness. Cast but a glance at riches, and they are gone, for they will surely sprout wings and fly off to the sky like an eagle. (Proverbs 23:4-5)

As I explain in The Paradox of Happiness, in Christ we know we have enough. By casting the sorrows that tempt us toward overwork or other escape mechanisms to Christ, we become serene and rich in spirit.

The more we grasp this truth, the more secure we feel and the less enslaved we are to money. Jesus, not riches, is our source of security and peace.

René Breuel is the author of The Paradox of Happiness and the founding pastor of Hopera, a church in Rome.

He has a Master of Divinity from Regent College, Vancouver, and a Master of Studies in Creative Writing from Oxford University. You can learn more about his work at renebreuel.org.