My dad worked until he was 89. Here’s what he taught me about work
My lovely dad died earlier this year. He was 89 years old and still working.
When I tell people that, they often assume he had to work. He didn’t. He wasn’t working because he needed the money or because he couldn’t afford to retire. He worked because he genuinely loved it and, looking back, I think it gave him something incredibly important: purpose.
My dad didn’t get that Sunday night feeling so many of us know. He didn’t spend the weekend dreading Monday morning or count down the days until his next holiday. He liked getting up and having somewhere to go. He enjoyed seeing people, being busy, solving problems and feeling useful. Work was simply a part of his life that he enjoyed.
Now, I’m definitely not suggesting we should all carry on working until we’re 89. I certainly have no intention of doing that. But since Dad died, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about his attitude to work and how different it was from the way so many of us experience it.
We spend a huge amount of our lives working, yet we seem to have accepted that it’s perfectly normal not to enjoy it. We talk about the Sunday Evening feeling counting down to Friday, needing a holiday and dreaming about retirement as though work is something we simply have to endure until we’re finally allowed to stop.
But wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t feel like that?
I’m not talking about finding your “passion” or waking up every morning desperate to get to work. I’m far too realistic for that. Work is still work. There will always be boring days, annoying people, difficult meetings and mornings when staying in bed feels like a much better option.
But there’s a big difference between not loving every minute of your job and actively dreading it.
Wouldn’t it be nice to wake up on a Monday and feel okay about going to work? To have work that interests you, uses the skills you’re good at and gives you something back, rather than leaving you permanently exhausted? To have enough space and energy left over for the rest of your life?
I think this becomes particularly important in midlife.
By this point, many of us have spent decades building careers. We’ve worked our way up, taken on more responsibility, earned more money and become very good at what we do. Somewhere along the way, though, it’s easy to stop asking whether we actually still want the career we’ve built.
Redundancy can bring that question crashing into your life whether you’re ready for it or not.
For many of the women I talk to, the immediate instinct is to find another version of the job they’ve just lost. Update the CV, get on LinkedIn, start looking at vacancies and get back out there as quickly as possible.
But sometimes there’s another feeling underneath the panic.
Relief.
And that can be quite unsettling. Because if part of you is relieved that the job has gone, perhaps the question isn’t simply, “How do I get another job?”
Perhaps it’s, “What do I actually want work to look like now?”
That doesn’t necessarily mean starting a business, changing career completely or doing something dramatic. It might mean working fewer hours. It might mean less responsibility, more flexibility or doing similar work in a completely different environment. It might even mean earning less in exchange for getting more of your life back.
There isn’t one version of work that fits everyone. And what fitted us at 30 may not fit us at 50.
I think that’s what my dad understood, even if he would never have described it that way. He found work that fitted him. It gave him routine, connection, interest and a sense of purpose, and he carried on doing it because he wanted to.
I don’t want to work until I’m 89.
But I would quite like to feel about work the way my dad did.
Not desperate for Monday morning. Not skipping into the office every day. Just doing something that feels worthwhile, that has a place in my life rather than taking it over, and that doesn’t make me spend Sunday evening wishing it was Friday.
Maybe that’s a much better ambition than simply counting down the years until we can retire.
