living intentionally personal finance: Calvinism iron cage life Protestant work ethic work
by ermine
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What’s up with this Calvinist Work Is Good For You Thing?
There seems to be a lot of Protestant work ethic out there in the PF blogosphere. We have Frugal Zeitgeist wondering Does a Minimalist Lifestyle Breed Laziness while Financial Samurai is concerned about The Dark Side of Early Retirement and observing Being Overly Content Can Be Detrimental To Your Career.
What’s up with that? We seem to definitely be in the ‘no pain no gain‘ zone. Work is there to pay the rent, not there to give meaning to life. Saying it is necessary and good for the soul seems downright Calvinist to me.
When I started work, true, it did give me some meaning, because it was a continuation of the arc that I had been preparing for, as I accepted society’s view of what a good lifestyle would look like. That path runs along these lines
- get born
- go to school
- go to university
- get job
- get married
- have kids
- retire
- die
All very 1950s, and I wasn’t even born then, but this expectation ran on through the 1970s.
At the same time, however, I was working and living life, and there was the process of what Carl Jung termed individuation going on in me. According to Jung, it is
the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated [from other human beings]; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology.
Psychological Types, Coll. Works V6
Max Weber's seminal book on the work ethic and capitalism
Work is good for the soul is probably the force that drives Western capitalism according to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I’d go along with him in that the notion that work is good for you is part of western collective psychology, indeed I had to get to middle age before I found it possible to conceive that this was not a natural part of the way life is. That takes some doing, for instance this lady waited till retirement itself to challenge it, she has seen the light now 
Compare my failure to challenge the status quo with Weber’s agricultural labourers on page 59:
since the interest of the employer in a speeding- up of harvesting increases with the increase of the results and the intensity of the work, the attempt has again and again been made, by increasing the piece-rates of the workmen, thereby giving them an opportunity to earn what is for them a very high wage, to interest them in increasing their own efficiency. But a peculiar difficulty has been met with surprising frequency: raising the piece-rates has often had the result that not more but less has been accomplished in the same time, because the worker reacted to the increase not by increasing but by decreasing the amount of his work.
Compared with those guys I have 150 years of educational advances, two college degrees, the hindsight of the Enlightenment. They spotted something I didn’t – enough is enough, the aim of life is to have a good time and probably a few beers with their mates. They could recognise what enough looked like, where I had to see more than four decades before I could even recognise the concept.
Of course, I’m selling the Protestant work ethic short. It was part of putting men on the moon, it drove people to cure smallpox and all sorts of good stuff that the West has achieved. It’s problem is it knows no bounds, so it also gives us the BP oil spill, climate change, bad advertising, junk food. It adds energy, but little critical direction, apart from the search for more.
It may even be possible that work is good for some people at some times, but it isn’t necessarily good for everybody, all the time. Yes, we should not become freeloaders on society, to that extent we should do enough work to pay our way. Cutting costs and retiring early doesn’t mean living on benefits for me, unless they are ones everybody in Britain enjoys like using the NHS. I’ve paid my taxes and my NI stamps for more than 30 years.
Early in my career I did get meaning from work, because I had not begun the process of individuation and establishing what my own values were. As I got older, I realised that I was a debt slave, but in a velvet lined rut. I needed to work to be able to pay the mortgage.
Once I jumped to this, I realised that I didn’t like having other people having such control over my life, and looked at how to pay down this debt. I worked that out without PF blogs and suchlike, because there was no Internet at the time I started. It’s not that hard to work out that you have to spend less than you earn, and it was pretty obvious that if you don’t want other people controlling your life then don’t owe them any money
Even after paying down the mortgage I didn’t jump to the slavery part, until my declining but erstwhile good employer began to bring in nutty demeaning performance management BS, at the same time as the project I was working on was cancelled. The manager I worked for tried to use this to squeeze me out after having said he’d back me to retrain earlier on, before the credit crunch. It was at this point that I realised working for someone else, particularly in an office, is bad for you. D’oh…. So along the same lines as ‘if thy mortgage offends thee, pay the damned thing down or don’t take it out in the first place’, I realised that my office job was beginning to offend me.
Enter the PF blogosphere. I had failed to think independently and PF blogs made me realise that with grit and determination you can save enough to retire early, particularly if you spin off alternative income sources. I can only do the preparatory work and learning with alternative income while I am still working as I’m bloody well not going to pay 42% tax on any alternative income streams, sod that for a game of tin soldiers.
I managed to get one final, and pretty high-profile project in an unusual area for which I happen to have the right skills, which is due to complete in 2012. I have screwed down my outgoings to less than what I would retire on, and save well over half my earnings to the end of retiring early.
So I don’t get the Calvinist angle one bit. Work is not good for you per se. If you’re the sort that needs work to give you meaning, as I was to stage 4 of the list above, then yes, it is good for you. One you have individuated, you can make your own decisions. Work may be good for you, it may not. I’m with Max Weber, when he says
the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
Work isn’t good for me. What’s wrong with enough? Meaning in life can also come from who you are and who you relate to, not just what you do and what you own. To paraphrase the words of a song
I don’t need no stinkin’ iron cage…
Calvinist work ethic be damned. Freedom for self-determination is my birthright, and I’m going to claim it in the second half of life and continue the Jungian path to individuation. Know thyself…
A ropey copy of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism can be read free on archive.org. Go for the PDF, the text version is rough as guts
Page 2 of the Foreword lends credence to my viewpoint that for modern Westerners this work ethic is an atavistic echo of a religious nature. Like any element of the psyche that is part of an unconscious archetype, challenging the concept that work is an inherent good is met with fierce resistance and rejection. We had it right as part of the 1970s ideal of greater leisure, but urged onwards by those who could not brook the repudiation of such an archetype, we are unable to say enough is enough. We are still paralysed by monetary systems that require a long-term increase in GDP, despite the consequent environmental despoliation that is becoming increasingly clear.
The central idea to which Weber appeals in confirmation of his theory is expressed in the characteristic phrase “a calling.” For Luther, as for most mediaeval theologians, it had normally meant the state of life in which the individual had been set by Heaven, and against which it was impious to rebel. To the Calvinist, Weber argues, the calling is not a condition in which the individual is born, but a strenuous and exacting enterprise to be chosen by himself, and to be pursued with a sense of religious responsibility. Baptized in the bracing, if icy, waters of Calvinist theology, the life of business, once regarded as perilous to the soul
summe periculosa est emptionis et venditionis negotiatio
acquires a new sanctity. Labour is not merely an economic means : it is a spiritual end. Covetousness, if a danger to the soul, is a less formidable menace than sloth.
It’s Midsummer, June 21st, the Oak King is at his Zenith
It’s the longest day and the shortest night today. Something I’ve noticed from busting lots of consumerist junk from life is that I become more aware of the changing wheel of the year. Now is the time when the Oak King has vanquished the Holly King and reigns supreme, but in his ascendance lie the seeds of his own decline, just as for the Holly King the darkest time comes before the dawn.
A lovely day, blue sky and fluffy clouds and just the right temperature for the bike ride to work. My cycle journey wends through the outskirts of the town, runs by the side of farmland and onto heathland before returning to the town. All around birdlife is in full song, from the sparrows making out on the rooftops to the lovely sound of the blackbirds duelling it out across the streets. I took time to appreciate the birds that sang to grace my ride:
- blackbird
- house sparrow
- chiffchaff
- wren
- wood pigeon
- goldfinch
- magpie
- greenfinch
- chaffinch
- starling
I missed the yellowhammer that is on the farmland, he’s quiet today. It is a good midsummer, too good a day to be spent in the office but good nevertheless.
Oak Tree with Midsummer Poppies
living intentionally simple living: retire early wake-up call
by ermine
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Wake Up Call – Is Fear Standing In My Way
There’s a guy in the office whose worked for The Firm for 39 years, he’s been with it man and boy. Let’s call him X, he’s 59 now, working as a project manager, on a project which is basically doomed. The suppliers were screwed down so much on price that they lied about the functionality of the products, and as a result it has no chance of being launched on time. They’ll be lucky if it does anything at all even when it is launched.
X highlighted this, and as a result he’s been shifted to the bench. Don’t be the bringer of bad news, people don’t like it. Last week he wasn’t at work, and we found out why this week. He came in looking a shadow of his former self, apparently having suffered a TIA. Wikipedia doesn’t pull any punches – under treatment there is the stark phrase
TIA can be considered as the last warning.
Last year X discovered he had late diabetes, and generally the toll of working is showing on him. We’ve been getting onto him about it’s time he listened to his doctor and indeed his body, and simply pulled his ticket and left. He’s entitled to within a whisker of full pension, so money isn’t an issue.
The tragedy is, that his whole world-view is associated with going to work. He has interests outside, but he has no vision, no mental model of what his life would mean if he didn’t go to work.
He is holding, ready for the final approach, but has no map, no concept of where he is going to land. And so he fears leaving work, though he doesn’t need the money.
I thought of X as I read McKenna’s book. He needs to take a look at where he is, where he is going, and why the hell he is still working when warning sings are flashing Wrong Way, No Entry, Do Not Carry On. He doesn’t need the money, but something that beggars belief is that he is hung up on it. Yes, his pension is about half his salary. But he’s got no mortgage, he isn’t raising kids, what’s he need all that for. One thing is sure. He’s not taking it with him if the warning signals continue to get louder and one day they stop all of a sudden.
I thought of another guy who I used to work with, in his 50s. He hadn’t progressed as far as he would like, and could be bitter about it. He lived to go hiking with his wife, and was saving massively in AVCs and the like so he could leave early. He was physically very fit – you don’t get to do all that hiking without developing muscles like steel.
He never got there – in his mid 50s the clockwork stopped, and he died of a heart attack.
I would say mental health at The Firm is below average, partly because as an engineering facility it is male-dominated, and partly because its age profile is skewed towards the middle-aged. It can’t hold young-uns because it doesn’t attract many of them in the first place, and it is deskilling so they see a lack of future potential. This isn’t a great problem for HR, as it probably needs to thin out the ranks a little bit more.
Dmitry Orlov - Reinventing Collapse
Looking at it I would say that as people get over 50 they become vulnerable to the stress manifesting as physical ailments. Dmitry Orlov, in his book about the collapse of the Soviet Union said that the 45-60 age group was particularly sensitive to the stress of the loss of meaning and what they had worked for. They would look at what they expected and what they now had, and the fire within their minds would surrender and they’d top themselves.
That’s not unknown at work, though it’s always hushed up – I only heard about it through a guy that worked for me that was in the volunteer first aid service. I’ve never looked at a particular cracked paving slab in the same way after hearing how it got that way.
I thought of X when I read Early Retirement – Is Fear Standing In Your Way. Everything about him is trying to flag him down, his body is telling him that he is running out of road. And yet like a rabbit in headlights, because he cannot see a meaningful life without work, he is frozen in fear despite all the warning lights flashing red. What part of
TIA can be considered as the last warning.
does he not understand…
So often we stay with the tried and tested, either because we lack inspiration to do otherwise, or we fear the unknown. It is sometimes good to be reminded that it doesn’t have to be this way, and the inspirational RetiredSyd did that for me today, introducing me to Early Retirement – Is Fear Standing In Your Way and to Early Retirement Extreme’s The Voluntarily Dispossessed. A reminder of what is wrong about the status quo is neatly summarised in Never Forget.
Sometimes it’s good to come up for air.
living intentionally simple living: happiness micawber money
by ermine
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Does Money Buy You Happiness?
According to Financial Samurai‘s thesis, if you say money doesn’t buy happiness then you’re either poor or super-rich, and since I don’t have a super-yacht I guess that leaves poor.
I guess Sam hasn’t heard of necessary and sufficient conditionality. In general not having enough money results in some form of misery. Micawber was right there.
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and six pence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds and six pence, result misery.”
And having more money does buy you many of the things people say it doesn’t. It often buys health, since it enables you to eat right and avoid living in polluted places. And yet, as one gets older, money does lose some of its lustre. Part of that is simply that one’s net worth usually increases over time – for instance I own my house outright, so I don’t need to service a mortgage. I don’t need to push myself to earn the money to buy a house; I’ve done that.
And yet, as I consider retiring early, I am weighing this up, and for me greater happiness would be achieved in being able to stop doing certain things and get unwelcome influences out of my life – and these are nearly all to do with earning money. I want more of my time back – each day that passes is a day I won’t live again, and each of those spent in an office is in some ways a day wasted.
So on balance, for me, I’d have to disagree with Sam. Obviously for him this isn’t true, but I would say that money only buys me happiness up to a point, if I have to work for it. After that, the opportunities I have to pass up to get more money actually cost me happiness. Getting the balance right is what I want to nail these days.
we can generally have anything we want, we can’t have everything we want
Hat-tip to Get Rich Slowly for this piece of philosophy. There’s a deep truth in it – just like the lie has finally been given to the myth of ‘having it all’ that polluted womens’ magazines for so much of the 1990s. Life involves choices, and and what areas to focus one’s intent on is perhaps the most important choice of all.
It’s easy to want to have it all, and let’s face it, who doesn’t? But in a world of finite resources, and finite nervous energy, it is necessary to know our values and priorities.
In the case of that article, it was the case of a guy in his 20′s who was saving so much for his retirement that he wasn’t living life. He didn’t move out of his parents’ home, so he was missing out on one of the key rites of passage. It is far easier to become an independent adult in your 20s, not because you have lots of money – you don’t, you’re at the lowest point of your earning potential. It is because you are at your most adaptable, you aren’t weighed down by lifestyle expectations. You’ll put up with conditions that you’d find a hardship later on in life when you have experienced better.
I shared houses with students, and then with pals and workmates until I was 28. I could do that because I didn’t have expectations. I remember the first house I shared with four other guys which had a leaky washing machine. It was an upgrade for me because I didn’t have to go to the launderette. It was no bad thing that the kitchen floor got washed once a week as a byproduct of the leak. This was a house with five guys in it 15 years later when my own washing machine sprang a leak I was on the net to order a replacement within an hour – my expectations were totally different.
Eventually I looked and came to the conclusion that though I loved living in London I was making too many compromises to stay there. I wanted to be able to live on my own by the time I was 30 in a house I was buying. That meant I had to move out of London, and get a job with better pay and prospects. Staying in crummy shared houses was great in my 20s and reduced my costs, but I had to move on as I got older.
The 20s are a special time in life, however. This decade is the time when you are working out your place in society, many people look to finding that special someone to live with in this decade, you are building and consolidating the foundations of your career, and you may have to move area either for work, university or for that special someone.
In my view, one’s twenties aren’t the time to acquire illiquid assets like a mortgaged house or to stay at home with the parents saving like mad and deferring life, but each to their own, as long as they do intentionally rather than being sucked into the hype ‘you have to get on the housing ladder as early as you can‘. I couldn’t afford to buy a house until I was 29, but I still managed to pay the damn thing off in less than 20 years.
So the subject of that article deferring his development into an independent adult in favour of his 65-year old self is not necessarily A Good Thing. It depends on his values and priorities, as GRS said
we can generally have anything we want, we can’t have everything we want
I love it. There’s a world of difference between saving like a nutter for retirement in 45 years and saving like a nutter for retiring in five years!
living intentionally: living intentionally personal finance self-help
by ermine
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The Importance of Setting Goals
Every so often I’d come across a book like Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and they would go on about setting direction. I hated to-do lists, and here was someone advocating creating the mother of all to-do lists. So I’d skip on to the next chapter, move along, nothing interesting to see here.
It hit me, when I started looking at how I could retire early, that these self-help guys were right. I had a goal, though I hadn’t set it in a formal way. Now that I had a map, I could start to make things happen in a coherent way.