Happy Are You Poor

This is a hard journey: to leave certain economic security in exchange for personal fulfillment.  In a way it seems idiotic – being content with yourself doesn’t feed you, doesn’t clothe you, doesn’t house you.  Unjobbing in a way has a complete lack of focus on the material end of our existence whereas the traditional job has a sole focus on the material end of our existence.  And with years of training ourselves that our material possessions are the goal of work, it can be understandable that there will be some turbulence making the jump into unjobbing.

Why do I want to go the unjobbing route?  Well in short, I am unhappy with all of the traditional jobs that I have held.  I sit in a cube and do what I am told.  I analyze data for companies so that they can optimize their financial strategy to produce superior results – or at least not subpar results.  It is hard for someone who doesn’t care about money to get excited about making someone else money.  Furthermore – since money is both impermanent in our lives (i.e. we can’t take it with us when we die) and illusory in itself (e.g. think about what the value of our assets would be if inflation flew out of control), having it as the sole focus is a waste of life.  This first principle is often at odds with most everyone that I interact with at work which makes conversations either very superficial or totally klunky.  Most of the time it’s the latter.

The companion to unjobbing as the source of income is poverty as our our income management.  Hey Sven – aren’t you selling yourself short?!  No no no….just wait a minute.  Not like poverty as in urban outdoorsman poverty.  I mean poverty as in seeing what we materially have as merely tools to an end, not the end itself.  And so, by using only what we need, we can give the remaining to people who don’t have enough to meet their own needs.  We are satisfied and they are satisfied.  The world is better off.

Real quick – you might see this as communism.  You would be right – if this was mandated by the state.  I do not advocate the state to take any more control than it needs.  This type of choosing to spare wealth in order to share is clearly and should always be voluntary.  Otherwise it really doesn’t help anyone.

From the second paragraph, you can see that I don’t really care or buy into the idea of financial security as being attainable or worthy of our pursuit in life.  Money though is necessary, yes, because we need to buy food, we need to buy supplies for our work, pay rent, service vehicles, etc.  But we need to strike that balance; we need to have a proper relationship with money.

I have been reading (and my wife finished reading) a fantastic book on evangelical poverty called “Happy are You Poor”.  I don’t know all of the ins and outs, but I have picked up enough to know that this goes hand in hand with unjobbing.  See, unjobbing focuses on us fulfilling our God-given purpose.  That can look radically different from person to person, both in terms of what they do, and where they do it.  Being an actuary truly could be someone’s “unjob”.  Not for me, but that is OK.

But wait…how do we get fed then?  That is where Evangelical poverty comes in.  The basis of poverty is this: all material goods are God’s to give.  We truly possess nothing.  Furthermore, if God cares so much for us that he knows every hair on our head, don’t you think that he cares for our physical needs as well?  Indeed – but how often have we put that level of trust in Him?  How often have we worried about our temporal life and just stuck to what the world has told us to do – to just work the job, pay the bills, buy the expensive toys, and stick to ourselves?  We pursue wealth under the guise of taking care of our needs – but how much of it is our needs?  How much do we really need?

By paring down to what we need, we alleviate much of the projected “need” in terms of income for unjobbing hopefully to the point that we don’t worry about whether we can make enough money to survive.  How often do we have whole rooms dedicated to housing stuff that we no longer do anything with?  If we had just what we needed, then we wouldn’t need to have a large fancy house.  Maybe a small fancy house?  Or you could go for one of those ubersmall trailers or microapartments.  A tent?

Also having less stuff means less time and energy we need to focus on managing stuff.  I remember seeing an advertisement for a wealth management company with the slogan, “Solving the problems that wealth creates.”  Has anyone thought about the problems that wealth creates and figured that it was worth it?  Imagine how tough it would be to see it ripped from you at death?

We are just getting started in applying poverty in our lives, but I feel a great liberty in giving it all to God.  And by no means are we poster children for it yet…our garage is filled with boxes we haven’t even touched since we moved here over a year ago!  But it is a journey and we just need to make one step at a time.

God bless,

Sven

P.S. Happy Leap Day!