FIRE, standing for “Financial Independence, Retire Early,” has risen in popularity, especially among younger adults. The idea is that achieving financial independence quickly leads to a happier life, as it enables us to spend the rest of our life not needing to work. I get it. I remember one day when my wife Esther and I were driving to downtown Vancouver for our work together at 8 a.m. on a Monday, with traffic on Highway 1 ahead of us, feeling tired and disgruntled. We found ourselves complaining about our jobs: “Why do we need to work?” and wondering when the day would come that we wouldn’t need to work.
The underlying premise of FIRE is that work serves only as a means to earn money. While viewing work as a path to financial stability may not be a bad idea, it does, however, overlook the deeper and more complete purpose of vocation as it was meant to be.
In an essay “The Two Economies,”[1] Wendell Berry dives into the problems of the industrial economy by noting its tendency to disconnect and disintegrate itself from the rest of the world. He argues that even though its existence is very much dependent on its surroundings—people, places, and the planet—it refuses to see and operate comprehensively and holistically and destroys what it does not comprehend.
Often, living and working in the world of industrial economy, we do not see our work as something that is connected to our communities and world. For instance, in “These are the Most Fulfilling Jobs in America,” published by The Washington Post, Andrew Van Dam reveals a survey about how people view their community contribution through work. The survey asked workers across different occupations if they agreed with the statement “I contribute to the community through my work.” The highest agreement was at 54% for workers in the social service industry, while all other industries—including management, healthcare, legal, arts, production, administrative support, and others—scored below 49%, with the vast majority in the range of 20%–30%, highlighting a significant disconnect between people’s view of work and its connection to the community.
As an attempt to move the world in the right direction, Berry introduces two economies: the lesser and the greater. The lesser economy represents the world as it currently operates, while the greater economy embodies the underlying reality—seen or unseen—by which the lesser economy should operate and abide. The greater economy is the Kingdom of God, where economics is placed rightly in relation to people, places, and the planet.
This is the world of creation, the world that God intended, where our vocations were meant to be more than FIRE, deeply rooted and connected to the people and places of communities in the world, working towards mutual flourishing of worker and world, filling the world with the goodness and glory of the Lord. What does this world of creation show us about what our vocation was truly meant to be? Where might it give us something more than FIRE as a reason for our labor and work?
You can continue reading at https://washingtoninst.org/creation-calls-us-to-more-than-early-retirement/
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