My Ever Changing Pursuit of Happiness

“Happiness Matters” is one of my core beliefs I mentioned early on. This might sound simple, but for me happiness isn’t just following what sounds good at any given moment. I also don’t feel that happiness is the only thing to strive for. Happiness does matter, but there’s more to life than choosing happiness, and it’s been an always changing pursuit for me. I’ll touch briefly on choices I make and hope to make when it comes to happiness as it relates to my job, my financial journey, and Financial Independence.

My Job

My job is currently a source of happiness. Yep, I said it. Most of the time, whether I’m working from home or in the office, I’m enjoying the experience. Now don’t get me wrong, I do admit that a commitment of 40 hours a week prevents me from potentially obtaining even more joy with other things. But nevertheless I do enjoy most of the projects I’m working on, and even the tedious tasks I have from time to time are fine most of the time. 

Throughout my career I’ve been very fortunate that my supervisors have trusted me with challenging work to help the organization and community. They’ve known that I like to (and need to) constantly learn, and so they’ve set me up with training and work that has helped me grow.

The fact that I can spend most of the time working from home is a huge plus. During the school year I’m only working a little bit while the kids are at home, but I enjoy an hour lunch every work day to enjoy some exercise or any errands I might need to run. Living close to both my job and the kids’ school, and not far from the store makes it easy to get most places in 15 minutes or less. 

I didn’t have much vacation early on, but now I’m accruing a good portion of time off that I usually use during school breaks so that I can spend more time with my family.

How did I get to this point? I chose a sort of happy medium I’d say. With every job there are compromises, with factors such as hours worked, commuting, income, stress, the people you work with, and so on. I scored a job with a great work-life balance. I compromised with the pay, and was fortunate to get most everything else, including great people to work with.

Could everything change in an instant? Yes! I could lose my job for one. My supervisor or a colleague could leave and be replaced by a stress-inducing individual who causes my job to be unbearable. I could have some unforeseen health issue come up that causes me to no longer be able to do my job.

Happiness in a job can be temporary. If my job loses joy, I can see myself changing paths if needed. Although we are a long way from Financial Independence, we are investing and saving, so being without a job for a short or even extended period might not be too stressful. Perhaps taking some time away from work or trying something else part-time could do me good, if my current job changed for the worse.

We’ll see if my fortune can continue through the end of my current career, which may only be needed for another decade or so. One thing is for sure though: increasing knowledge and the steps we’ve taken so far in our finances are giving us more confidence to focus on our work-life balance as we will start to consider the next stages of our lives.

My Financial Journey 

So at the beginning of my financial journey I was striving for happiness… in the short term. It was great. I spent all the money I made on the things I wanted to do, and I was very happy.

I attended all the concerts I wanted, went on trips, spent more than I needed on food, and purchased the music I wanted. I would decide on the spur of the moment to go for a drive, visit family or friends, or catch a movie at the theater.

I enjoyed being independent and spending time and money when and how I wanted. Looking back, I don’t necessarily think this was a mistake entirely, but I was definitely living in the moment for the joy of it, without much thought for the future or consequences.

Unfortunately, despite Scout explaining some sound savings and investing advice and resources, it took me years to grasp the impact of some actionable steps that I could have taken to consider longer term happiness. 

This long-term outlook that I needed, with the goal of also living in the moment, finally came to fruition when I got married. We started to save and invest right away, but also took wonderful trips that created lasting memories. 

When the kids came we continued to add more physical items and experiences to our lives, but also slowly invested more for the future along the way. We want them to learn in a safe and diverse environment where they feel a desire to try new things and be okay with fault. We are working on saving for college as well.

The goal has become thinking about and planning for our kids and our own future happy selves and laying out a framework that would allow for us to explore our many interests. Of course we’d like to fulfill this goal in the present, but also knowing that our jobs do create a bit of a restriction on time, Financial Independence is a pursuit that I’ve been thinking about for several years now.

Financial Independence

Right now, Financial Independence represents to me the time in which I can finally explore all that life has to offer without the restraint of those 40-50 hours a week that we now are focused on a job. This job, which I’ve mentioned that I do enjoy, still does commit me to about 220 days a year to which the majority of my prime waking hours are dedicated toward.

It also turns out that I’m not uniquely skilled to where I’m the only one in the world who could perform the tasks for my job. My job could fairly easily be taken over by someone else. In fact it’s very possible that others could do my job better and more efficiently, which would help them develop their own skills, and be better for everybody.

Knowing this, I try not to identify myself with my job, but rather I think of my job as something that I happen to currently spend a lot of time with. I’ll eventually move on to doing other things with my time, whether it involves another job, or pursuing other interests that come about.

When I imagine the other things I could do and explore by myself, with my family, and with friends over 220 days a year, it really excites me! These curiosities and ideas that I have is what I’d like to place more focus onto over the upcoming years. I’ve been pretty bad at noting these new ideas when inspiration hits, so this is something I’d like to start to do in the upcoming years. Having an updated list of topics that interest me I think would help inspire me to experiment as I approach Financial Independence.

I think that happiness is something that can dynamically change over time. Depending on my stage of life, what interests my kids and wife, and my current goals, I can see taking any number of paths when a paid job is no longer necessary. 

What I have noticed from myself is that I am most happy when I’m making progress toward goals, when I’m learning something new, and when I’m helping others. This brings me to think that I don’t have one specific path ahead, but rather a number of trial and errors ahead of me in my pursuit of happiness.

Reader Questions

• Are you in pursuit of happiness? Why or why not?

Leave your answers or comments below – or email us directly at info@epicfinancialjourney.com