I took my dogs to the dog park with my dad this afternoon. He is also retired, and he had some good advice for me.
He said it doesn't make any sense to think about the hourly wage you could make by working. Work is never again going to be measured in dollars, at this point, so if my only motivation to do this particular work is the hourly wage they're offering then I shouldn't be doing it at all. And that in this case, I have to do this particular project because I said I would, regardless of the money.
And it kind of makes sense to me. I've taken on a variety of "work" type projects in my retirement, things that consume large chunks of my time on a recurring interval in exchange for supporting some organization or cause that I believe in and want to advance. They tend to cost me money, instead of paying me money, but I do them enthusiastically anyway because that's how I want to spend my time. This paying side job, by contrast, pays me much more per hour than my old 9-5 ever did but I just can't seem to find the motivation to give it more than the bare minimum of effort. It's like the value of my work is no longer measured in dollars.
Now that I've figured that out, it seems silly that I let someone talk me into doing work I didn't really want to do just because it had dollars attached. That was dumb. I should be looking for work that I want to do, regardless of whether it pays or not. The money side of life is solved already.
Interestingly, the few such opportunities that I have found since retiring pay nothing at all in terms of dollars, but do come with considerable social capital. That still makes them feel worthwhile to me in a way that exceeds just the utility of the work itself. They flatter my sense of self-importance with titles that make me seem responsible, and they put me in touch with networks of people in my community who are eager for me to succeed in those positions.
Seeing that written out has reminded me that I used to enjoy similar benefits at my old job. Many people, here and on other retirement blogs, have written about finding their new "identity" in retirement, as if their former job helped define their sense of self worth and they didn't know who they would be without it. I never thought of myself as one of those people, in part because I sometimes had conflicts with my agency and was eager to get away from that office, but I now realize that outside of the confines of my agency and my immediate coworkers, working there did confer a certain kind of social status with people in the outside world. Like people usually respect doctors even when they are not at work, so what is a doctor after he has retired and isn't a doctor anymore? Being a government scientist isn't quite the same, but it's not worth nothing. Before I got married, it still helped me pick up chicks.
So I'm happy to report that my retirement volunteer gigs, which do not pay me any dollars, have more than compensated for any perceived loss of social status in my retirement. I still get to feel useful and "important", whatever that means, and I get to work on things that I really believe in. My experiment with "un-retiring" by taking this part time gig in exchange for a 35% raise over my former federal pay grade, however, has turned out to be a failure. I see that the work is useful, but I don't really believe in it the same way and the money isn't motivating me at all.
MMM's blog posts back me up on this one. He used to write about how people kept trying to pay him for work he wanted to do anyway, like helping out friends with construction projects or welding or whatever, and the forum discussed those opportunities as examples of how it's easy to make a little money in retirement without really trying. I blew it, though. I didn't find a way to get paid for the work I wanted to do anyways, I let money tempt me into doing work I wasn't really interested in. MMM's blog wasn't clear enough that I got the message: don't work for money, work because you want to do the work and if they pay you for it then that's fine, but don't let that be the reason you're doing it.
If I wanted to work for money, I should have stayed at my old job. I walked away from that desk for a reason, and then five months later I sort of forgot about that reason. Oops. If there's a lesson here it's that once you hit FI, money should no longer be a factor in your decision making. It just interferes with finding the right answers.