A friend posted this question on Facebook today. So, this little post is an answer to her. As I have written here previously, I obliged myself (and my family) to be in a position to do this very thing almost three years ago. For me, it wasn't about "having" the financial wherewithal, it was about making the financial wherewithal. I think that's the more common situation. Short of winning the lottery, few and far between are the people who suddenly say to themselves, "Wow, this family could live on one income. Let's go ahead and do that." It goes against our culture to downsize. We're always supposed to be increasing materially. Yet (as I have wrestled with in a number of posts here before), the desire to buy things, own things, easily becomes disordered thinking.
So, the beginning of my friend's Facebook post, "If you had the financial wherewithal..." is fraught with difficulties. This became apparent in the responses her post received. Some mentioned the desire to do volunteer work or be a "lady who lunches" in their responses. I think this reflects how we are conditioned to see not being employed as a fantasy situation available only to the rich. But what if "having the financial wherewithal" meant simply being able to pay the bills with enough left over to not be destitute? That's the premise on which I quit my job and my experience with it makes me want to write this post in response to my friend's Facebook post.
Four Surprises about Choosing not to Be Employed:
1. Our lifestyle hasn't diminished. When I decided to quit my job (with my husband's blessing), we sold our house and two cars. We gave away a lot of stuff. We moved in with my mother who had been living alone a block away.
This is is the part that seemed wrenching at first. We had just had a new porch installed on the house and the housing market had just crashed. It was the worst time to put a house on the market. My husband gave me perspective though. He said, "Well, if we consider the amount of money we've lost on the house as the rent we had to pay for the seven years we lived in it, we got a pretty good deal." (Yeah, I know how to pick a husband.)
Now, almost three years later, some aspects of our lifestyle have changed. I no longer have a fancy wardrobe of clothing. I do not shop recreationally. I do not have the latest of electronics. We do not eat out. But my husband and I still can buy the occasional toy -- a book, a sari, a carefully planned electronic upgrade.
The fact that we now live with my mother has made our family life more complete. I don't have to worry about how she's doing, if she's eating well, if she's lonely. We are a family together and that has been an unexpected up-grade in our lifestyle.
We don't hire cleaning people to come in every other week any more of course which brings me to my next point.
2. There is no such thing as "spare time." When contemplating quitting work, people always imagine what they would do instead. Work expands to fit the time and when you are home, there is plenty of work everywhere. I now regard my job as running the house. There is not enough time in the day to have the laundry, cleaning, cooking, etc. "done." I am busy every minute, as busy as I ever was while employed. There may not be the same kind of intellectual creativity demanded of me as when I was a university professor but I'm never bored. Making the house work is interesting and is best done with creativity and love. I've been enjoying this kind of work -- mostly because I feel so very useful doing it. And that brings me to the next point.
3. Work doesn't miss me. This is the ego-crusher but it's really important to know about this. No one at work pines for my return. My students are just fine. The world goes right on turning and it's as if I were never there. I was never vital to anyone at work. I did good work, sometimes really exceptional work, but that never mattered much to anyone but me. I see that now. I put in long days thinking how lucky the university was to have me to clean up the messes and put things in order but my students never understood the ways in which I was making things better behind the scenes and my supervisors never cared. Having enormous responsibility for what happened in 1000-level classrooms but having almost no real authority was always the worst aspect of being the comp/rhet professor on faculty. I now have insight into that issue.
4. Resolving the difficulty of having responsibility without authority is enlightening. My responsibilities are now given to me by those over whom I have "authority." This is a good situation. And what's even better is that I don't have to deal with issues of actual "authority" at all. Which is to say, I get to be a human being. I negotiate with my family what should be done in the house and they trust me to make decisions in a pinch. They don't micro-manage me and I make decisions based on what is best for them. Yes, that would be the case in the ideal work place too but what makes it work for sure in the home is love. If the work isn't glamorous, that's more than compensated for by the working conditions.
I am glad I made the decision to leave my career. Just sayin'.
