A Life of Meaning: Purpose, Volunteering and Giving Back

Introduction

Ask people what they will miss about work and the answer is rarely the commute, the appraisal cycle or the quarterly targets. They say they will miss being useful. For many of us, a job is where we feel needed: someone relies on our judgement, our skill turns up in something real, and at the end of the week there is proof we mattered. So one of the quiet fears about leaving work early is that a sense of purpose will leave with the payslip.

This chapter argues the opposite, and hopefully. Early retirement does not have to take purpose away. It can free purpose up. When your time no longer belongs to an employer, you can spend it on the causes, communities and people you care about most. You can give the energy of your fifties, or even your thirties and forties, to a food bank, a mentoring scheme, a conservation trust, a campaign, a grandchild’s school or a charity whose work moves you. You can give money as well as time, and give it deliberately rather than as an afterthought.

This matters because purpose is not a luxury. As the next section shows, a strong sense of purpose in later life is consistently linked with longer survival and better brain health. Volunteering, one of the most common ways retired people find purpose, is linked with lower mortality, less loneliness and more physical activity. Giving money to others seems to lift our own mood in ways that spending on ourselves often does not. Most of this evidence is observational, and we will be honest about its limits. But the direction is encouraging, and it fits what many early retirees say about their own lives.

The Japanese have a word for it, ikigai, roughly “a reason for being” or “a life worth living”. In the stories below you will meet people who stepped away from paid work years or decades before the usual age and found their ikigai in service. There is a Wall Street analyst who quit at about thirty-one and spent the rest of his life teaching others to do the same, giving away the royalties. There is a software engineer who retired at thirty and has given away hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is a political strategist who became a conservation leader and animal-shelter fundraiser, a doctor who took his family to Honduras on surgical missions, and a submariner who hands every penny of his writing income to military charities. None of them is a saint, and several are frank about the struggles. All of them found that freedom from work gave them the chance to matter in new ways.

What the research tells us

Purpose in life and a longer life

The most striking evidence comes from studies that measure people’s sense of purpose and then follow them for years. One of the most cited is by Alimujiang et al. (2019), published in JAMA Network Open. The team used data from the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative survey of Americans over fifty. They followed 6,985 adults from 2006 to 2010, having measured their life purpose with a standard psychological scale. After adjusting for a wide range of factors, people in the lowest purpose group were about 2.4 times more likely to die during follow-up than people with the highest purpose scores (hazard ratio 2.43). The link was especially strong for deaths from heart and circulatory disease. The authors are open about the limits: follow-up was only four years, some people did not complete the purpose questionnaire, and illness at the start may have lowered both purpose and survival. As they point out, there were no trials at the time showing that raising purpose extends life.

Other studies point the same way. Hill and Turiano (2014) analysed the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study: 6,163 adults followed for fourteen years, during which 569 died. Each one-standard-deviation increase in purpose was linked with about a 15% lower risk of death, even after controlling for other measures of wellbeing such as positive mood and relationships. One detail matters for this book. The protective link was much the same whether or not people had retired. Purpose seemed to help equally with or without a job, which suggests that what counts is having direction in life, not having an employer.

In Japan, Sone et al. (2008) followed 43,391 adults in the Ohsaki Study for seven years. Participants were simply asked whether they had ikigai in their lives. Those who said they did not had a 50% higher risk of all-cause death than those who did (hazard ratio 1.5), driven mainly by cardiovascular disease and external causes. There was no clear link with cancer deaths.

Purpose also seems to matter for the ageing brain. In the Rush Memory and Aging Project in Chicago, Boyle et al. (2010) followed 951 older people who did not have dementia at the start, for up to seven years. People with high purpose scores (around the 90th percentile) were about 2.4 times more likely to stay free of Alzheimer’s disease than those with low scores (around the 10th percentile). Higher purpose was also linked with lower risk of mild cognitive impairment and a slower rate of cognitive decline. The link held after adjusting for depressive symptoms, social network size and chronic illness.

None of these studies proves that purpose causes longer life. People who are healthier, better off or more optimistic may find purpose more easily. But the consistency across countries, cohorts and measures is striking. At the very least, purpose is a marker of a life going well, and a reasonable thing to protect as you plan to leave work.

Volunteering: good for others, and often for us

Volunteering is one of the most studied routes to purpose in later life. A careful place to start is the systematic review and meta-analysis by Jenkinson et al. (2013) at the University of Exeter. They examined forty papers, including five randomised controlled trials and seventeen cohort studies. In the cohort studies, volunteering was linked with less depression, higher life satisfaction and better wellbeing. When five cohorts were pooled, volunteers had a 22% lower risk of death than non-volunteers (95% confidence interval 10% to 34%). The trials, however, showed no consistent health benefits, and the authors warned that selection effects and reverse causation could not be ruled out. Volunteers often start out healthier and better off. Their overall verdict was that volunteering may benefit mental health and survival, but the causal mechanisms remain unclear.

More recent work has tried to address these problems. Kim et al. (2020) used HRS data on 12,998 Americans over fifty and looked at 34 separate outcomes over four years, controlling for a long list of earlier health and social factors. Adults who volunteered at least 100 hours a year (about two hours a week) had a lower risk of death and of physical limitations, more physical activity, and better psychological outcomes: more optimism, positive mood and purpose, and less depression, hopelessness and loneliness. The study is also usefully honest. Volunteering was not linked with most specific diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke and cancer, nor with life satisfaction. Its benefits seem to work mainly through connection, activity and meaning rather than as a medicine for particular conditions.

Why we volunteer may matter too. Konrath et al. (2012) analysed the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study and found that, as in earlier work, volunteers were less likely to die over the next four years, especially those who volunteered regularly. But the benefit appeared only for people who volunteered for other-oriented reasons, such as compassion or wanting to help. People who volunteered mainly for self-oriented reasons, such as escaping their own troubles, had a mortality risk similar to non-volunteers. It is a gentle reminder that the heart of giving is the giving.

There is also some experimental evidence. In the Experience Corps pilot trial in Baltimore, Fried et al. (2004) randomised 128 volunteers aged 60–86, almost all African American, to serve in public primary schools helping children with reading and other needs. After four to eight months, compared with controls, participants had more physical activity, strength, people they could turn to for help, and cognitive activity, and their walking speed declined less. It was a small, short pilot, but it showed that a well-designed volunteering role can increase exactly the kinds of activity that keep older people well, while helping children at the same time.

In England, older adults already lead the way. The government’s Community Life Survey for 2024/25 found that 17% of all adults took part in formal volunteering at least once a month, compared with 23% of those aged 65 to 74 and 20% of those aged 75 and over (Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2026). Early retirees can join that tradition ten or twenty years sooner, while they have the energy and skills to take on demanding roles such as chairing a trustee board, running a project or training others.

The happiness of giving money away

Giving time is one form of generosity; giving money is another. In a well-known paper in Science, Dunn, Aknin and Norton (2008) reported that spending more of one’s income on others predicted greater happiness, and that people randomly assigned to spend a small windfall on others felt happier than those told to spend it on themselves. Later work by Aknin et al. (2013) found that prosocial spending was linked with greater happiness in survey data from 136 countries, rich and poor alike, and experiments in Canada, Uganda, India and South Africa pointed the same way.

Science corrects itself, so it is worth adding that the original small experiment has not always replicated. Kim et al. (2022) repeated it and did not reproduce the main result using the same analysis, although an exploratory happiness measure did favour the prosocial spenders. The fairest summary is that the warm feeling of giving is real and widely observed, but its size in any single experiment is modest and variable. For early retirees who have built up more than they need, that is still an encouraging finding: generosity is unlikely to cost you happiness and may well add to it.

Why early retirement is a special opportunity

Put together, the evidence suggests three things. First, a sense of purpose is closely tied to health and survival in later life, whether or not you are employed. Second, regular, other-focused volunteering is linked with better wellbeing, more activity and less loneliness. Third, giving money wisely tends to feel good. Early retirement puts all three within reach at an age when many people still have decades of good health ahead. You have time for sustained commitment, not just the odd weekend. You may have skills from your career that charities badly need. And if you have been disciplined enough to reach financial independence, you may also be able to give money without anxiety.

Lives enriched: real stories

Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin — turning freedom into a movement

Joe Dominguez was a technical analyst on Wall Street. Born in New York in 1938, he had enough savings by 1969 to leave paid work, at around thirty-one, and lived for the rest of his life on the modest income from his investments (Associated Press, 1997). He did not spend those years idle. With his partner Vicki Robin he developed and taught a step-by-step programme for changing people’s relationship with money, which became the bestselling book Your Money or Your Life (Robin and Dominguez, 1992).

What stands out is what they did with the proceeds. According to material produced for the PBS documentary Affluenza, which was dedicated to his memory, all the money from book sales and their other financial literacy work went to the New Road Map Foundation. This was an all-volunteer non-profit they founded to encourage lower consumption in North America (PBS, n.d.). When Dominguez died in 1997, the foundation was still receiving the royalties from his work (Associated Press, 1997).

Vicki Robin has continued the work for decades. Her own biography describes a life of community activism on Whidbey Island in Washington State, covering affordable housing, local food and community investment, and service on the boards of groups including the Center for a New American Dream and Post Carbon Institute. It states that “financial independence allowed her” to practise this work “with love, immediacy and accuracy” (Robin, n.d.). Their story is perhaps the purest example of the idea behind this chapter: financial freedom used not for escape but for service.

Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache) — learning to give it away

Pete Adeney, a software engineer, left his career in 2005 at the age of thirty. He started the Mr. Money Mustache blog in 2011 to explain how (Adeney, 2011). He has written candidly about how hard he found it, even with plenty of money, to start giving it away. After years of “analysis paralysis”, in 2016 he gave $100,000 to a mix of charities chosen largely on effective altruism principles, including the Against Malaria Foundation, GiveDirectly, deworming programmes and Doctors Without Borders, alongside environmental groups, Khan Academy, a cycling advocacy group and his local primary school (Adeney, 2016).

How did it feel? He wrote that on the day he posted the cheques he “felt a great lightness”, and that he fell asleep that night with “the happy peace that comes from letting go of just a bit of selfishness and fear” (Adeney, 2016). The following year he gave again, a further $105,000, much of it as appreciated shares rather than cash, which he explained was more tax-efficient (Adeney, 2017). Looking back, he concluded that being a good person had been his most reliable source of happiness, and reasoned that if “hard work and generosity are what bring meaning to life”, it made sense to keep at it (Adeney, 2017). For someone whose public image is built on thrift, it is a telling conclusion: saving hard was the means, and generosity turned out to be one of the ends.

Tanja Hester — from political strategist to community activist

Tanja Hester and her husband Mark Bunge retired at the end of 2017, aged thirty-eight and forty-one. She had been a long-time political communications strategist, and they had moved from Los Angeles to North Lake Tahoe in California (Hester, n.d.). On her blog Our Next Life she describes herself as a community and environmental activist, and says that “generosity and service are essential components of a good life”.

Six months after retiring, Hester wrote an unusually honest account of what early retirement had and had not fixed. Her health problems had not gone away, happiness was not automatic, and some hobbies she had planned simply had not happened. But her days were full of service. She had become president of a local conservation group and was doing a great deal of volunteer fundraising and organisational work for the local animal shelter. Meanwhile Mark had become president of the regional avalanche centre, a volunteer role, and was canvassing for local candidates. Her conclusion was a careful distinction: she was not always happy, but she felt “deeply fulfilled” because she could use her time “on projects that speak to my soul, and that feel like they add up to something” (Hester, 2018b).

Mark put it just as clearly in a Q&A on the same blog. He described the avalanche centre presidency as a time-intensive volunteer role and said the only reason he could take it on was that they had retired. He also acknowledged the harder truth that, without work, it becomes your own job to find meaning (Hester, 2018a).

Leif Dahleen (Physician on FIRE) — a doctor who planned to give

Leif Dahleen, an anaesthesiologist, writes as Physician on FIRE. He left clinical medicine in August 2019, in his early forties (Dahle, 2021). Giving was part of his retirement plan from the start. Before retiring he set himself a goal of building his donor-advised funds up to about 10% of his target nest egg. He explained on his blog that he expected to feel some guilt about walking away from a well-paid career when the money could do good, and that building up the charitable fund should help ease that feeling (Dahleen, 2017).

In a podcast interview looking back on his first year of retirement, Dahleen described how, while still deciding whether to leave medicine, he had done “a couple of missions with One World Surgery down in Honduras”, taking his wife and children with him. He called them “really fulfilling”. He was also frank that he had half hoped the missions would rekindle his love of the job, and that they had not become a calling strong enough to keep him there. A year into retirement he described himself as better rested and less stressed, said he was learning Spanish, and said the family had enjoyed a lot of close time together (Dahle, 2021). His story is a realistic one. Early retirement did not turn him into a full-time volunteer, but his giving was planned in from the start, and his freedom now leaves room for generosity alongside family, health and rest.

Doug Nordman — a submariner’s second service

Doug Nordman served twenty years in the US Navy’s submarine force and retired in 2002 at the age of forty-one, having found that he and his spouse were already financially independent (Nordman, 2018). In retirement he wrote The Military Guide to Financial Independence and Retirement with input from more than seventy other service members and veterans, and started a website to help military families work towards financial independence.

Two things make his story fit this chapter. First, he gives away his earnings from this work: “I donate all of my writing revenue to military charities — over $12,000 so far!” (Nordman, 2018). Second, his writing is itself a form of mentoring. As he points out, only about 17% of service members earn a military pension, and his work shows the other 83% of veterans that they can still reach financial independence from their own savings (Nordman, 2018). Alongside the surfing, travel and family life he clearly enjoys, Nordman has turned the freedom he earned in uniform into a way of serving the community he came from.

A balanced view

It would be easy to read this chapter as a promise: retire early, volunteer, and you will live longer. The evidence does not support anything that simple.

First, nearly all the research on purpose and volunteering is observational. People who feel purposeful or who volunteer are, on average, healthier, better educated and better connected to begin with. Good studies adjust for these differences, but they cannot remove them completely. The one systematic review that looked specifically at randomised trials found no consistent health benefits from volunteering (Jenkinson et al., 2013). Associations of the size reported by Alimujiang et al. (2019) or Sone et al. (2008) are encouraging, but they are not guarantees.

Second, the kind of giving matters. Kim et al. (2020) found benefits mainly at around 100 hours a year or more, and Konrath et al. (2012) found that volunteering for mainly self-focused reasons was not linked with lower mortality. Doing a little out of guilt, or taking on a role mainly for status, may not bring the same rewards as a sustained commitment to people or causes you care about.

Third, purpose is not automatic. Several of the early retirees in this chapter say so openly. Tanja Hester wrote that early retirement did not fix her health or make her happy every day (Hester, 2018b). Mark Bunge said finding meaning becomes your own responsibility (Hester, 2018a). Leif Dahleen found volunteering fulfilling but not a calling (Dahle, 2021). Leaving work creates the opportunity for purpose; it does not deliver it.

Fourth, service can become another treadmill. Energetic early retirees are often snapped up by charities and boards, and it is possible to end up as over-committed as you were at work. Hester’s post describes a full calendar of unpaid roles, and her readers noticed. Protect time for rest, relationships and the other kinds of freedom described elsewhere in this book.

Finally, generosity is shaped by circumstance. Several people in this chapter had high incomes before retiring. Not every early retiree can give six-figure sums, and nobody should feel inadequate for giving in smaller ways. The research on prosocial spending suggests the emotional benefit comes from the act of giving, not the amount (Aknin et al., 2013). The science of that “warm glow” is also more modest and variable than early headlines suggested (Kim et al., 2022).

Putting it into practice

• Write a one-page purpose statement before you leave work. In two or three sentences, what do you want your freedom to be for? Revisit it after six months.
• Start volunteering before you retire. Try one role for a few hours a month while still working, so that you step into retirement with a commitment already in place rather than an empty diary.
• Aim for a regular rhythm. The strongest findings came at around 100 hours a year, roughly two hours a week (Kim et al., 2020). Consistency seems to matter more than intensity.
• Choose other-focused roles. Pick causes where you can see the benefit to others: mentoring young people, befriending isolated neighbours, supporting a school, conserving a place you love.
• Use your professional skills. Trustee boards, small charities and community groups often need finance, legal, IT, marketing, project and people-management skills. Organisations such as Reach Volunteering in the UK specialise in matching skilled volunteers with charities.
• Build giving into your financial plan. Decide on a percentage of your portfolio or annual spending for charity. If you are a UK taxpayer, use Gift Aid, and consider giving through a charitable account or payroll giving while you are still earning.
• Give thoughtfully, not anxiously. Use independent charity evaluators or your own research to find organisations that use money well, and then enjoy giving without second-guessing every pound.
• Keep a light hand on your diary. Say yes to one or two commitments that really matter and politely decline the rest. Service should enrich your freedom, not replace your old job.
• Share what you know. Like Doug Nordman and Joe Dominguez, consider mentoring others through the same journey, formally or informally.

Questions for reflection

1. When have you felt most useful in your life so far, and what exactly were you doing?
2. If money and time were no object, which cause, community or group of people would you most like to help?
3. What skills from your working life could make a real difference to a charity or community group?
4. How would you know whether your volunteering was driven mainly by care for others or by your own needs, and does it matter to you?
5. What proportion of your wealth or income would you feel good about giving away, and what stops you from giving it now?
6. How will you protect your early retirement from becoming just as busy as your working life, even with worthy commitments?
7. What would you like the people you have helped to say about your “freedom years” in twenty years’ time?

References