If you follow the Arata Academy channel, you probably have heard of the book The Richest Man in Babylon. And because of that, you follow the golden rule of personal finance: pay yourself first.
The moment your income arrives, you transfer money straight into retirement savings and investments. Your bills are covered. You are doing everything the financial experts tell you to do.
So why do you feel guilty when you spend money on your weekend hobby? Look at what is happening. When you ‘pay yourself first,’ you are actually financing a future version of you who will stay at home doing nothing. Meanwhile, you refuse to spend money on the person you are right now. Every time you spend on tools, books, or materials for your passion feels like a mistake.
Before you reduce your hobby spending again, change what you are paying for. Stop saving money only for the day you quit. Start using your money to build skills, energy, and crafts you will love for the rest of your life.
1. Financial independence can kill what you love.
Here is the trap: when you dislike your job, retirement stops being a normal goal. It becomes a race to escape. And when you treat work like a prison you must flee as fast as possible, every dollar and every hour you spend on your hobby feels like you are delaying your freedom. You start to feel guilty just for enjoying your Saturday.
2. Never work again is not a natural goal.
There are books that study the “Blue Zones”, regions around the world that are famous for high quality of life. The idea I’m sharing today with you comes from one of the Blue Zones: Okinawa, Japan. In Japanese language there is no word for leaving work for good the way English uses retire. The idea of retirement is different from our concept. They don’t think about the day when they stop working for good. source
Do you think it is a good idea to be constantly calculating how much time it still takes to be able to retire? If this is how you think, all your choices will have an impact. It can make you think that you have to deal with problems that delay the day you leave work.
Do you understand the difference in how you perceive things? Do not think like you need to save so you can stop working. “Not working” is not the goal. It is important to stay busy doing something. So, it’s better to think how you can keep living well so you can keep working.
3. You need less money if you keep earning.
Just take a look at books about financial freedom. They teach how to calculate how much you need to stop working and keep your quality of life. But why would you want that? Do you see that the amount of money you will need is huge? If you have zero income, you will need to accumulate much more. Another approach is to ask how much money you need to keep living the life you want, but still having some income. Don’t make your plans so you stop working and reduce your income to zero.
In Okinawa it’s common to see seniors who kept a main job and a second job. Many kept a garden and sold food at the local market. Part of my family is from Okinawa and when I visited that region I felt sad when I saw seniors still working. I thought the economy was not going well so they were required to keep working. But after talking to the senior people, they made clear they enjoy that work and have enough savings so they would stop, but they prefer staying active because they find joy in doing so.
If you want to build a life with purpose, not only a plan to leave work, I invite you to visit this link.
4. Long life favors people who stay engaged.
Saving a huge amount of money to stop working completely can also be the wrong goal for a long life.
Most people believe that work makes you sick and avoiding work keeps you alive. But Dr. Howard Friedman discovered the exact opposite. His research team tracked over one thousand people across their entire lifetimes, for eighty years. They wanted to see who lived the longest. The surprise? It was not the people who retired early to take it easy. The longest-lived humans were the ones who stayed committed to meaningful work and kept solving real problems. source In other words, it is better to stay active doing work than being idle, having nothing to do.
I am not telling you to work until you get sick from exhaustion. Also, I’m not saying you must stay in a workplace you hate. You don’t need to be in love with your work, either. No need for extremes. You simply need to find the type of work that keeps you active. The simple fact you are working will help you be connected to society, feel productive, give you a sense of accomplishment.
This is why the main point of this message is that you need to be careful about waiting until old age to enjoy your life. Do not sacrifice what you love today just to stop working tomorrow. The idea of reaching financial independence so you can completely stop working can actually bring a shorter life and less vitality. As an example, just look at the stereotype of the grumpy pensioner who uses his free time to criticize everything and has a bitter life. You don’t want that for your future.
In our culture, people start counting down the years until age sixty-five so they can finally stop. Compare that to the painter Hokusai. At age seventy-three, he announced that his real career was just beginning. He said his paintings would become truly good at eighty. He was not counting down the days until an empty retirement. He was excited to wake up every morning and get better at his craft over the next years ahead.
Another famous example is Osamu Tezuka, the creator of modern manga. In nineteen eighty-nine, Tezuka was in a hospital bed during his final days. Even while sick in bed, he held a pen and continued sketching new pages. When the nurse tried to take his drawing board away so he would rest, Tezuka pleaded: ‘Please, just let me work.’ When you find meaningful work or a craft you love, stopping is the last thing you want to do. source
These examples are not rules you must copy. But they show a different mindset. In this mindset, leaving work for good is not the main goal. Why sacrifice your current happiness to fund an empty retirement that healthy, driven people never wanted in the first place?
5. Buy the life you want to keep living.
Retirement feels stressful because the formula assumes you will earn nothing for thirty years. But what if you never fully stop working? If you keep earning even a small income doing things you enjoy, your savings goal drops instantly. You do not need an enormous amount of savings.
This changes how you make choices to use your money on your hobbies and your quality of life now. You no longer see this as taking money away from your retirement savings.
You are not wasting money on a distraction. You are practicing the exact craft and skills that will keep you energized and productive for decades to come.
Stop saving money only for the day you quit. Start using your money to build a life you will never want to leave.
If you want help building that path with purpose, visit this link.