Freedom's just another word

During my walk to church this morning I was thinking about some of the college students I used to teach 25 or 30 years ago. The university was best known for its engineering school and many of the students who took my classes were engineering students. When we got into conversations about their futures, there were a group of students who'd tell me their plan was to work hard until they were 45, make lots of money, and then enjoy themselves the rest of their lives.

They were always male. I can never remember a female student having this particular dream for their life. The guys told me they were studying engineering but they did not particularly enjoy engineering classes or the kind of work engineers did. They were often from working class families in the near suburbs and the kind of salaries engineers earned in those days looked like a lot of money to them. They figured if they put in 25 years making that kind of money they'd have it made for the rest of their lives.

I had a standard response when students told me this. "What is it that you plan to do after you retire from engineering at 45?" I'd ask. Sometimes students knew, and then I'd ask them if they'd every thought about trying to make a living doing what they really enjoyed doing. Rather than working for 25 years at a job you don't like to make enough money to spend the rest of your life fishing, have you researched whether you could make a living as a charter fishing boat captain or in the state fish and wildlife department?

More often, the student didn't know what he wanted to do. He didn't really have a dream for what he'd do after he quit engineering. What he was looking for was financial security so he would have the freedom to do whatever he felt like doing the rest of his life.

I doubt those students' life plan worked out for many of them. Engineers' salaries turned out not to be as much money as they thought it would be in the middle-class world they were entering. Lots of them probably fell in love and became parents and discovered that retiring at 45 was a feeble dream compared to the joys and challenges of parenthood. Some probably discovered that, by the time they got into their mid-30s or 40s, the dream of financial security had faded and been replaced by a longing for significance and meaning.

I hope those students found happy lives one way or another. I just doubt that many of them found happiness via the path of becoming rich enough by 45 so they would not to have to work anymore.

Money is a weird thing. Part of the purpose of Michele Singletary's book and her money fast is to help us think about what security, happiness and freedom really are and how we find them. Part of her point, I think, is that there are two ways to prosper -- one is to increase our wealth and the other is to purify our desires.

The life plans of those students from years ago reminds me that it is probably not a good idea to have a goal of accumulating money unless we really know what we hope to buy with it. What if it turns out that what we wanted we could have had for free? What if it turns out what worked 25 years to buy can't be bought?