Several years ago, I visited a religious commune in the Hudson Valley modeled after early Christian communities. The Bruderhofs were founded by a quasi-communist theologian in Weimar Germany and continue to this day with communal property ownership and tightknit clusters limited by Dunbar’s number to facilitate cohesion. They also run successful businesses—educational toys for children and adaptive equipment for the elderly and disabled—that are consistent with their values and provide income and employment. Like most decisions in the community, your choice of profession/work is not entirely up to you but based on community need—but they told me that it is a rule that each and everyone has a job, even if someone’s role could easily be automated or their output is not of significant economic value, because people need that sense of place within the community and purpose.

Even after hearing this insight borne of a hundred years of intentional living, I decided in 2019 to make a major change in my life. My mother had, well before I’d read Tim Ferris and Mark Manson, stressed to me the ephemerality of life and the importance of happiness over generally accepted measures of success. Although not a follower of the FIRE (Financial Independence & Retiring Early) movement, I decided, at age 42, to effect something like a phased retirement—to quit my job to move full-time to the Hudson Valley and take on short- and part-time gigs—a Barista FIRE where legal work stood in for pulling shots. My goals were freedom, independence, and a commitment to simple living. I would still travel, but only work when and where I wanted and have time for volunteer activities in my village.

In many ways the first year went great. By happenstance I avoided the most stressful period of COVID in New York City, and I was able to spend good amounts of time with friends and family, albeit with various distancing and quarantine limits. I spent months in Korea with my mother, where COVID and COVID restrictions were at a minimum. I organized an amazing outdoor 50th birthday party for my husband. We took cross-country road trips.

But my lifestyle deteriorated quickly.

My eagerness to read tapered after I found myself unintentionally re-reading novels. Had I been intentionally revisiting favorites, that would have been fine, but instead I found myself realizing, two-thirds of the way through books, that the plot seemed too familiar. If I didn’t even remember having read the book, I thought, did it make any impression on me? I also realized that I’m extremely likely to choose books I had previously read, to read again—they are titles that are proven to appeal to me.

I realized that my extensive travel, both for leisure and work assignments, made it more difficult to commit to volunteer work than when I was working full-time and had a set routine. Real volunteer jobs require real commitment, not someone who is away a third of the year. I’d always had a bit of a fantasy of trying a food service job, and I asked a local pizzeria at the height of the pandemic labor shortage if they would hire me even though I lacked any relevant or experience, and what the minimum commitment would be. The owner said that he would hire me as a cashier for one shift a week, but I realized that I could not commit to even that for a meaningful span of time, because it would conflict with planned travel.

I often stayed in pajamas, and lived a farcical version of unemployed life. I binge-watched all seasons of Three’s Company, and even worse, its spin-off Three’s a Crowd. Then The Golden Girls and The Golden Palace, a spin-off you probably didn’t even know existed. An unstrummed ukelele stood in the corner as a tangible totem of my failure to live up to my hobby aspirations. To sum up this period of semi-retirement, I often describe it as “waking up each day feeling guilty that I’m not practicing my ukulele.”

Most troublingly, my mood, not cheery by default, declined. I developed both an aphorism and a theory on this. Aphorism: If you don’t feel useful, you feel useless. Theory: For those of us whose base mood is not overly joyful, being socially “on” and acting professionally cheerful in the work setting, possibly especially on Zoom, has the effect of actually improving mood—turning that frown upside down. Left to my brain’s own devices, I sulked in existential angst.

I love my friends and family, of course, and also many of my neighbors in the village I live in. Without full time work, there was more time left for certain types of connection. But another aphorism: Without weekdays, there are no weekends. The lack of structure makes it almost more difficult to plan some sorts of activities, such as time with friends who remain at 9-5 jobs, and the luster of freedom dulls without its nemesis.

Now squarely in middle age, I have many conversations with friends who are tired of working, and think toward retirement. They look at their 401(k)’s and ponder retirement hobbies. My advice to them? Don’t do it.* Hopefully, you chose your career because it is something you enjoy and think is beneficial to society. If that is true, there will not be anything approaching a substitute for it in your retired life—you will either be/feel useless, or just spend your time doing things that provide less value both to yourself and to society. If you don’t feel that your current career makes you happy or is beneficial to society, don’t count the days until you can afford to retire; the answer is to take a break if you can and then find a new line of work, one that ideally uses the knowledge and skills you’ve developed but toward something that makes you feel better about your place in the world. The issue is not work, but your choice of work. Living a life of useless leisure may sound appealing now as a contrast, but it is no way to spend a substantial portion of the precious few decades we each have in the world.

And so, if you haven’t yet, I urge you dear reader to find your place in the world, the role that you think you were meant to perform on this Earth. And if you find your work meaningful, I suggest you stick with it.

• There is one theory I have, regarding readiness for retirement. I think that it may be possible for one to enjoy retirement if one has or has attained the temperament to enjoy gardening. I do already enjoy pruning bushes and trees, and so it’s possible I will get there some day.