The business of life is not the accumulation of money, but the transformation of one’s own soul.
I work with people who have enough money to stop working. And yet, some of them experience serious anxiety about this. They have enough. But important questions remain unanswered. Postponed, perhaps, until now.
They have more freedom over their time. But that freedom only invites more questions.
The people I most want to emulate are not necessarily my richest clients. They are the ones with close friendships, a sense of contentment, meaningful work or service, and some degree of inner peace. Some of my richest clients have these things too, but not all of them.
This is one reason retirement can be such a difficult transition. It does not merely change how you spend your time. It can take away the measuring stick you have used for most of your adult life.
If work, for you, was primarily about earning more money, receiving promotions, growing your net worth, and acquiring the things that represented success, retirement brings that entire project to an end. You go from earning and accumulating to withdrawing and spending. Your paycheck disappears. Promotions stop. Your professional status may begin to fade. Your net worth may no longer rise every year.
If those were your primary measures of progress, you now need an entirely new measuring stick.
The question becomes less about how much you have and more about what you are doing with your life.
Are you helping anyone? Are you deepening your relationships? Are you growing in patience, courage, generosity, and peace? Are you attending to the parts of yourself that life keeps asking you to confront?
A career can be viewed as an effort to ascend through Corporate America, earn promotions, buy a boat or a vacation home, and accumulate nice things. Or the same career can be viewed as a journey of service: helping customers, developing employees, building an organization, solving problems, and contributing to human flourishing.
It may be the same life either way. But one is inherently about one’s self and one’s own accomplishments, while the other is primarily about helping others.
Someone whose identity was built entirely around financial progress may feel disoriented when that progress ends. The anxiety they experience at that point is a strong signal that they may need to change something about their perspective. Meanwhile, someone whose work was grounded in service, contribution, growth, and relationship can continue living by those same values even after they are retired.
And by the way, as I describe these two people, I invite you to reflect on how you feel about each one. Does the first person seem kind of dry, intense, competitive, and maybe a little intimidating? Does the second person sound, by contrast, safe, easy to be around, someone you can joke with? That’s what comes up for me, anyway.
None of this means that money is unimportant. It is good to remove scarcity from your life and enjoy some abundance. I think that can be part of a person’s growth journey as well.
But money cannot decide what your life is about.
Eventually, the same question remains: What am I doing with my life?
If the answer was always “making money,” retirement can bring a reckoning. You may have succeeded at the goal and still find yourself wondering what the success was supposed to accomplish.
The deeper work of life is often taking place beneath the visible achievements.
Life works on us through disappointments, irritations, fears, relationships, intrusive thoughts, and people who test our patience. It continually reveals the things that still have power over us: resentment, insecurity, envy, the need to prove ourselves, the desire to control what cannot be controlled.
People who are engaged in this inner journey of growth can make sense and meaning of anything life throws at them. “Ah, another disappointment. Another irritation. Such fertile ground for growth.”
Even if not greeted with quite such equanimity, these experiences create opportunities to let go of what does not matter and to cultivate a degree of inner peace.
It is easy to avoid this work because life offers an endless supply of distractions.
A vacation home is a useful example.
There is nothing wrong with owning one. It is not a moral failure to have a second home while someone else has none. A vacation home can be a place where a family spends meaningful time together and builds memories over many years.
But it can also become an elaborate distraction from the life you are already living.
First, you can obsess over not having one. Then you can spend years figuring out how to afford one, where to buy it, whether you are getting a good deal, and whether you paid too much. After you buy it, there are repairs, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, and the opportunity cost of the money invested in it.
You may arrive for vacation and find yourself wondering whether the house is still worth it, what might break next, and whether you should sell it.
A person can spend years mentally occupied by the idea of a vacation home without ever becoming more present, peaceful, or connected to the people around them.
Another person can buy the same house, feel grateful for it, and genuinely enjoy the time spent there with family and friends.
This is also where financial planning becomes about more than whether a person can technically afford something. The question is whether the money is doing a good job supporting the life the person actually wants.
Does the vacation home create more time with family, or more maintenance and anxiety?
Does retiring early create space for service and relationships, or simply remove the structure that was keeping deeper questions at bay?
Does a larger portfolio create useful security, or has the continued accumulation become a way to postpone living?
These are not purely financial questions. But they are often the questions beneath the financial ones.
A financial plan should help remove unnecessary fear and give a person greater freedom to live well. It should not become another scoreboard, another source of obsession, or another way to avoid deciding what matters.
Money is most useful when it supports a life whose purpose has been defined by something other than money.