You’ve probably seen this painting periodically throughout
your life called American Gothic by the artist Grant Wood. It shows an
older man and woman, farmers presumably, standing stoically in front of a
farmhouse, the man holding a pitchfork.
Art is subjective—what you see may not be what someone else
sees—but even the casual viewer of this painting will see two people
devoid of any emotion that would make the viewer stoked about the idea
of ‘hard work.’
The painting, so the myth goes at least, points toward the
idea that hard work is a rewarding virtue in itself. It’s implied as if
the reward of hard work is something that just naturally happens as a
result of our having ‘paid dues.’
Please understand I’m not ragging on farming or anything
that requires hard, physical labor. I am, however, ragging on the idea
that hard work is a ‘virtue’ that we should be carrying into our
retirement years.
Unfortunately, these myths we grow up with impact our
psychology more than we sometimes give credit. So many people judge
success on superficial factors—like the prideful vanity of using a line
like “I work hard” to bludgeon other people with—but also on the wrong
metrics of measuring success to begin with. The number of hours worked
and tasks completed may produce more money per paycheck, but it’ll also
mean you’ll end up with those long, tight faces like in American Gothic.
Do years of hard work and little enjoyment of life, yet
having a ‘comfortable’ retirement, equate to success? Maybe, but you
could just as easily look at it as poor time management and a waste of
personal strengths and skills—doing stuff that (often) makes us
miserable for a little bit more money and for vanity’s sake—“I’m a hard
worker.”
If we’re honest with ourselves, the only realistic goal of
playing the money game while being truly happy and fulfilled is to play
for eventual freedom from work—way sooner than retirement.
Don’t
misunderstand me here: the most valuable things in life aren’t going to
come easy and they’re often not going to come without some pain and
effort.
If you’re going to work hard, you might as well be working hard at working less.
The real measure of success is how free you
are—financially, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—to live life the
way you want to live it.
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