On duty, freedom, and the problem of being unneeded
As with every year aside from the sole exception of the 2020 covid pandemic, I returned to the UK over Christmas and spent time with my family. Sadly, I messed up my flights and ended up spending a month there, which by my count is about three and a half weeks too long.
Despite never being much of a football fan, for lack of anything better to do I decided to attend a game by my local team who were playing at home. It was a cold, cold, day. The stand was kitted out with a pie shop and bar and whilst I had a couple of pints and a sausage roll, I couldn’t bring myself to have a cup of mushy peas or some hot bovril.
Milling around before the kick off I walked into the hospitality tent for a beer and a look around. The only stall in the tent other than the bar was an Army Careers recruitment stall.
Of course it was. I pulled out my phone and took a photo to share with my friends the cliche of it all. Of course the army recruiters are at the football ground in this crumbling post-industrial coal mining town. The lyrics of “Oliver’s Army” ran through my head.
The lads manning the stall saw me taking a photo and engaged me in a chat.
It wasn’t a pitch. There was no pressure. It was a normal, forgettable conversation in cold air, surrounded by people more interested in the score than the stalls around the ground.
I asked wasn’t I too old now to join, at 38? To my surprise, and to be honest to some degree my disappointment, I am not. Had I been, that would have made this a very short blog post.
As I stood there in hat and gloves, holding my plastic cup of beer something in me shifted.
Not excitement. Not nostalgia. Recognition.
I listened as the recruiters told me with my background, experience, languages, I’d be a prime candidate for Military Intelligence. Fast tracked into intelligence and liaison roles, working from embassies and with diplomats and dignitaries.
I should be clear upfront. I never served in the Army. I was a police officer. This is not a story about regret, or stolen valour, or romanticising a life I never lived. But policing and soldiering sit under the same moral category. Both are service to the Crown. Both require you to accept hierarchy, discipline, and risk. Both involve putting yourself in harm’s way on behalf of people who will never know your name. Both ask you to subordinate your own preferences to something larger than yourself.
That is the common thread. And it matters.
The pull I felt that day wasn’t about the Army.
It was about structure, legitimacy, and being needed in a life that no longer demands anything from me.
I have thought a lot about service since leaving the police. Not in a sentimental way, but in a practical one. Service gives you a role that exists outside markets and outside ego. You are not there because you optimised well, or networked effectively, or built leverage. You are there because the institution needs bodies willing to carry responsibility and accept consequences.
There is something deeply clarifying about that.
The motto beneath the Prince of Wales’ coronet has always stuck with me. “Ich dien.” I serve.
It is an unfashionable idea. It implies obligation before freedom, duty before self expression. It assumes that meaning comes not from choice, but from commitment. That you do not start with freedom and decide what matters. You start with what matters and accept the constraints that come with it.
That way of thinking feels increasingly foreign.
The life I have built is deliberately unconstrained. I do not live in the UK. I do not answer to a boss. I do not have a fixed schedule, a fixed geography, or a fixed institutional role. Financial independence removed the economic necessity to submit. Geographic mobility removed the social pressure to conform. Optionality became the organising principle.
None of this happened by accident. It was earned. It required tradeoffs, discipline, and more than a little risk tolerance. I do not regret it.
But freedom has side effects that are rarely discussed.
Returning to the UK, and returning to service, would mean accepting constraints I worked very hard to escape. Financially, it would be damaging. The portfolio I built outside the UK would be materially impaired by taxation. Geographically, I would be tied to a place I no longer want to live full time. Autonomy would be replaced with obligation.
There is also the political reality. While the Crown remains the symbolic head, operational authority flows from politicians. I stand fully behind the Crown. I do not stand behind the current political regime that would command that service.
In theory, those are distinct. In practice, they are inseparable.
Serving would mean executing policies I actively disagree with, while wearing symbols I still respect. That is not a contradiction you can resolve with good intentions.
But none of this fully explains the pull.
The deeper issue is simpler and more uncomfortable.
There is nothing wrong with my life.
That may be the problem.
When freedom stops asking anything of you, you are forced to invent your own demands. There is no external structure to lean on. No one needs you at a specific place, at a specific time, for a specific purpose. Days blur. Stakes flatten. You can do almost anything, which quietly turns into nothing you must do. This frequently turns into doing nothing and a growing sense of being unneeded.
Money solves many problems. It does not solve this one.
Service is seductive because it offers something FIRE never does. Non negotiable purpose. A reason to show up that cannot be deferred, optimised away, or replaced with something more comfortable. It answers the question “why am I needed?” without consulting your mood.
I am not lost. I am not depressed. I am not searching for identity.
I am unrequired.
That is a rarer condition, and a harder one to speak about honestly.
I weighed the idea seriously. Not impulsively, not emotionally. I sat in my car one day and punched in the address of the closest Army Careers office. It was closed down and had been for years. The next closest was a 40 minute drive away. I ate a sausage roll in my car, then drove home and watched back-to-back episodes of “The Chase” with Bradley Walsh.
Duty versus autonomy. Meaning versus optionality. Service versus sovereignty. None of the columns were empty.
In the end, I did not join.
But I did not dismiss the instinct either.
The call to serve and to purpose is far from extinguished within me. As I sit around this week in late January, in a lovely villa in Bali, the world lies before me open. I can go scuba diving, I can ride my motorbike, I can go play padel. I could jump on another business class flight to any corner of the world and just stay there as long as I wanted doing whatever I wanted without concern.
I walked away not because the call was weak, but because the life I built no longer has a place for it.
And I am still not sure whether that is success or failure.
Apparently I “won” at life. But with this empty yearning inside of me for purpose and service, I find myself constantly questioning.
Is this what winning looks like?