I had to quit reading any FIRE (financial independence, early retirement) blogs because they were full of people headed down this same path: Extreme frugality, bare minimum savings, assuming their lifestyle would never change and nothing would ever go wrong.
Retiring at 30 sounds great, but no one's life goes exactly to plan for next the 30-40 years until traditional retirement age. People change, expectations evolve, possessions wear out and need to be replaced. Living frugally may be fun when you're in your 20s, but it's not so fun when as you get older and your friends want to do things that require money (vacations, hobbies, dining out). Even worse when your romantic partner has different goals in life, as happened here.
Many of the leanFIRE stories have their roots in people who hate their jobs so much that the only thing that motivates them is early retirement. They grind through the job the hate, counting days on their leanFIRE countdown until they can quit working and never look back.
Most of these people would be much happier if they simply invested time and energy into finding a job they enjoy, or at least one that doesn't make them miserable. Even if it requires a pay cut and a later retirement date, it's much better to spend your time doing something you don't hate than it is to grind out a bad job in misery just to reach dreams of early retirement sooner.
I've had friends with trust funds, who just seem to dither around in life. "Making music" they never release. Picking up little "pass the time" jobs. And these are people that aren't living "leanFIRE"
It seems like such a nihilistic way to live. You're just floating along the stream of life. Things worked out for you, but you have no further passion or inclination to improve the world? No problems you could set yourself to solving?
As much criticism as Elon Musk gets (he's certainly not perfect), the path he took is the only thing that makes sense to me in that position. He didn't take his wealth and begin doing angel investing in new CRUD app startups, he wanted to solve real problems humanity faces.
Not everybody has that amount of money or skill, but it's surprising to me how many people's alternative to having a day job they're forced to do is just complete leisure time 100% of the time or picking up arbitrary hobbies.
In this guy's post, like with writing, it sounds like he wasn't actually passionate about it. There are plenty of places to post serialized fiction as you write in online and get feedback (Royal Road, Substack) but it sounded like the measuring stick he was judging himself was becoming a very popular/famous author, not actually writing great stories. It seems just like a different version of the treadmill he was talking about with other people.
Not just FIRE people, but 99% of all retirees at any age end up doing nothing of note with their time. But, and I think you aren't saying otherwise, this is also true of everyone who still has to work, while they are working. Your job is just the thing you have to do (if you are lucky you actually enjoy it). Bottom line, most people don't actually have a purpose or strong passions in their lives. Being retired young doesn't make that more or less true but at least you have more space to confront that void and just maybe find some purpose or passion. If you are totally time strapped with career, family, and other responsibilities, then you really really have no chance.
OTOH maybe our outside judgement that these people are wasting their lives is misguided. Subjective reported happiness for retirees is much higher compared to the working world.
> Not just FIRE people, but 99% of all retirees at any age end up doing nothing of note with their time.
If you spend some years just chilling and and are actually happy, then sure, why not. But there are so many retired people who do nothing, and are not happy.
For example, my mother, my mother and father in law, my other father in law, my grandmother - all retired, and all do absolutely nothing but watch TV and moan about other people all day. And they are all very obviously not happy, yet suggestions for things to do or get involved in always fall in deaf ears - they'd apparently rather sit and do nothing until they die.
It makes perfect sense. It's very popular now to see everything as genetic. That is all our focus. We neglect how decades of being in the same environment with the same incentives wires the brain a certain way.
When you spend all that time disciplining yourself to work (against your own will) and having little time to develop your own interests, you become hard wired to do what is necessary.
When that necessity ceases to exist you no longer have the machinery to move yourself. A career and kids and church and a house and big yard to maintain can leave nothing left of you. It can erase your very identity as your brain is rewritten to subdue the self and pursue work, chores and favors over all else.
I think this is an unappreciated explanation, and is the biggest reason why I want to work towards some level of financial independence. I have no real desire to retire early, so I could take or leave that part. But being able to make decisions about how I spend my time without having to worry about my next paycheck seems like the obvious path towards long-term happiness. If a working environment becomes toxic I have the option to leave. If I feel like hiking the Appalachian trail I can go do it before I'm old and frail. If I'm tired of the field I'm working in I can take time off to study and do something else. If a loved one needs assistance I can go to their side.
Being compulsively tied to income generating work, and then all of a sudden being cut off from that seems like a surefire path towards unhappiness, since someone who has done that their whole life likely hasn't explored the mental space of what else they could be doing with their life.
On the other hand, being totally free from any restraints seems like it could be an almost worse curse. No pressure to complete any projects, to help anybody, to do something useful for the world. That also wires your brain in a particular fashion, and could be it's own version of hell. Perhaps this is sour grapes though :)
I'd like only to add that, what many artists (and in general people who pursue their artistic passions) had, compared to the agerage workin-joe, is TIME.
The only way to understand your passions is by having time to observe your world, to reflect on people's actions, to contemplate nature. If you have to work (because you're the bread-winner and have 2 children already and an house to pay), your only glimmer of hope is to have already found your passion during your younger years.
Finally, your energy levels going on are never gonna be your current ones. Keep that in mind.
And I say that as a man who had a fair number of interests, never had time to really pursue them, and now has to to a work I hate and have no remaining passion at all.
I’ll add on to the other responses and tell you that for a lot of people getting old sucks and the thing that sucks worse than getting old is being old. Constant pain. Lipoma pressing against your spine means no matter how you sit or lay you feel uncomfortable. It hurts to take a shit, it’s hard to get all the piss out and even when you so you have to clean up the floor and toilet because it dribbled everywhere. You can’t remember the last time you jerked off and don’t care to try because it started hurting every time you ejaculate more than a decade ago. You can’t stand for more than an hour before your back is on fire forcing you back down to your sitting position which is “only” uncomfortable.
If you are reading this do yourself a favor and take your body’s health seriously right now before it’s too late. Exercise every day, get that 30 pounds of fat you jokingly call your dad bod off before it’s too late, go to the doctor and fucking do what they say instead of nodding and convincing yourself you know better and don’t really need to do that. Oh and brush and floss your damn teeth. The above story doesn’t have to be your story but if you sit at your computer all day everyday and don’t take care of yourself it very much can become your story.
I think it depends on who you are. I can't fathom not doing something. I want to retire, asap, though not FIRE-levels, but i know what i want to do. I want to do exactly what i do in my current off hours, which looks a lot like work. Because it is work. I want to work, when i retire. I just want to work on whatever i want to work on.
Which is the rub. Passionate people will be busy, all the time. Without it.. well, i can't even envision how to live.
I think parents need to help their children find hobbies. Find passions. Develop passions. You don't _have_ to be excellent at piano or whatever. I don't care what it is, be it games, wood working, farming, etc - but i feel like it is essential to the human experience.
This isn't an isolated view, but in my view, it does miss a lot.
Most people have an idea of what they would ideally do if given unlimited amounts of time. The reality is, in my experience, that most people cannot put the same level of work, focus, and dedication into their own projects that they can into the projects an employer pays them to work on.
For whatever reason, most people need the structure, constraint, judgment, or whatever that an external authority imposes on them. Having the skill and motivation is not enough to bring your highest work to your own purposes. There is a second discipline that involves self-accountability, which runs orthogonal to capacity for the work.
Who is advocating that most people should FIRE? It's an individual choice and we shouldn't be telling someone they can't do it because, well, "averages".
Nobody is saying "you can't do it." But "averages" is 100% a valid reason to consider why you shouldn't do something, particularly something unknown to most humans.
> I just want to work on whatever i want to work on.
This is exactly why I'm pursuing leanFIRE. Even if I hit the jackpot, I would still be toodling on personal software projects for the rest of my life. Not saying I'm any Michelangelo, but I would have to be trained not to write software. I'm just aiming to set my own priorities instead of working on things I'm not passionate about because I simply need the money.
I keep wondering if I shouldn't quit the day job and start a software shop, but even that sounds an awful lot like work where you trade one relentless taskmaster for another. I sure as shit don't want to have to worry about market share, I just want to make cool (to me) software.
I used to work for a company that had a newsletter. In the newsletter they listed deaths. There was a common theme that people would generally either die shortly after retiring or a long time after. Talking with some of the folks near retirement I learned that people who didn't find things to do generally died shortly after retirement.
Basically, we live for work and when many people retire they loose the thing to live for and die. It's sad.
Long ago I learned to not live to work. I work but I have so much more to life... retirement is just a point in time where I don't need to earn income to live any longer and I can have more choice in what I do.
I have often heard this. And even witnessed it some. But i wonder if the phenomenon is actually due to the fact that people who are in good health and well when they retire are more likely to stay active and those who are not in good health or don't feel well, tend to not stay very busy after they no longer are required to.
My father noticed the same thing and feared it would happen to him, so he kept working part time after retirement. When he finally retired completely, he died within a few years at a healthy (other than sudden cancer) age of 74. I’ve suspected there is something about the pressure of work that “holds” us together, though I can’t put my finger on it.
In one of Dan Gilbert’s talks he cited some research around activities and how they correlate with happiness. Unsurprisingly people like sex and socializing. But “doing nothing” turned out to be about as enjoyable as work at the bottom.
It's all explained by one simple fact: the average IQ is 100. In today's society, how many activities are there for 100 IQ people to engage in?
Are there animals to take care of? Is there land? Is there community to partake in? Are there things that need to be done by 100 IQ people?
When you build society optimizing for young people to work 8 hour days or giant factories and supply chains doing everything else, what is there for somebody at 65 to do but watch tv and wait until they die?
Young people barely even have children anymore and when they do, chances are their parents are still working, so by the time they retire, the children are 5-10 years old and playing on their own.
It's easy to blame the individuals for not joining a knitting club or whatever, but people are not built to do pointless activities, they are built to do activities that have purpose and those are not available in modern society unless you have high IQ or a talent in a specific domain.
Also one last point: moaning about other people is what people have always done, especially when you're older and you're almost certainly experiencing chronic pain of some sort. Younger people moan just as much, they just have youth and belief that things will be looking up on their side - old people have neither.
Nitpick: Average IQ cannot increase by definition. The median IQ value is defined to be 100 IQ points and one standard deviation in either direction is defined to be 15 IQ points. It's normally distributed so median==average as well. People overall can become more intelligent and the average IQ value will still be 100.
I believe the comment you are replying to is referring to the Flynn effect [1] which shows a ~3 point rise in IQ per decade in absolute terms. That is, someone who is 100 IQ in 1950 would only be 97 IQ measured by 1960 standards.
Aging is as big problem or probably even bigger, than having a job. I'm sure your grandmother wouldn't just watch TV if she looked and felt like a 20 year old girl. She would probably go party, hang out, get drunk, travel and socialize all the time.
Chronic illnesses at any age suck as much as having aging as a chronic illness.
> go party, hang out, get drunk, travel and socialize all the time
This is the 20-something version of being idle. Minus the travel, which isn't a given.
Being 20 doesn't mean you want to do something productive or meaningful with your life. There's plenty 20 yo that party, socialise, get drunk and never amount to anything. The reason it's just a phase is that it's not all trust fund kids and most need money (a job) to live.
>but at least you have more space to confront that void and just maybe find some purpose or passion
This is what I'm talking about. It's likely much harder to do this when you retire at a normal age after having lived most of your life. But if you retire in your 30s or 40s? Or your 20s!? Good lord.
Think of all the great companies that get started and then snapped up by the big boys because the founders want to become millionaires. Imagine if there was zero pressure to take an exit when offered. I believe our world would be in a better place. I don't want to just highlight companies, but companies can scale and affect change in a way that just volunteering or simple philanthropy cannot in our society.
That's why I think so called "Lean FIRE" is such a bad trap. You're giving yourself very little margin to explore new purposes and passions. It's a much bigger bet that you're going to be satisfied watching TV and going for day trips to Niagara Falls the rest of your life.
> but 99% of all retirees at any age end up doing nothing of note with their time.
Define "of note"
In my experience most retired people do productive things until their bodies confine them to home or an assisted living.
Most retired people I know of keep doing the things they were doing as hobbies before. Gardening, teaching kids piano, racing cars, etc. Most retired people I know are more active on the things they love in retirement. Sure they're not doing Elon Musk things but they don't have that budget either.
> Not just FIRE people, but 99% of all retirees at any age end up doing nothing of note with their time.
This is exactly why I think FIRE is a great thought exercise even if you don't actually care to do it. Given enough money to live for the rest of your life without the need for a job, what would you do with your time?
I don't see FIRE as literal retirement but as 'taking the bull by the horns' in terms of doing what you really are passionate about without having to worry you'd end up old and destitute. If I could FIRE I'd still do software development but I wouldn't do boring digital plumbing work and go through corporate cringe culture. And no, right now I could not do that because I have responsibilities that need me to slave away at a corporate job. It's sad when I think about it but I think I adapted and just go forward with it. FIRE seems like a liberation from all that.
This is mostly nitpicking: What you describe is the idea of FI (financial independence), no RE (retire early). In my impression, this is actually what by far the most FIRE-achievers turn into sooner or later (well-known examples: chooseFI, mad fientist, MMM). Or maybe the retired ones don't talk about it on the internet...
They generally have better things to do than blog about financial strategies, yes.
I’m 37, nearly five years out of the game, and I’m busy, every single day. My time is fully absorbed in building up a homestead, and my list of projects is many, many years long yet, and as diverse as shredded encyclopaedia.
I can’t see myself running out of things to do before I myself run out. I occasionally tell people snippets of what I’m up to here or on Twitter, and people ask if I have a YouTube or a blog. I don’t have time. Or inclination, to be honest. I do this for me.
> "Making music" they never release. Picking up little "pass the time" jobs. And these are people that aren't living "leanFIRE"
> It seems like such a nihilistic way to live. You're just floating along the stream of life. Things worked out for you, but you have no further passion or inclination to improve the world? No problems you could set yourself to solving?
You seem to assume or take for granted that releasing music for an external purpose, improving the world, solving problems, etc have inherent value. I would 100% disagree with that. I don't think there's any greater objective value to raising orphans than there is to playing video games for the rest of your life. If somebody wants to make music and never release it, then they should have the freedom to do so. Your comment is on par with criticizing people for living meaninglessly just for not having children, when not everybody values or enjoys having children.
> complete leisure time 100% of the time or picking up arbitrary hobbies.
I'm at the opposite end: I'm surprised how many people care about solving problems or things like that. I couldn't care less. If I were to win the lottery or something, I'd immediately erase my identity and go live in a castle/farm in a forest somewhere, making music I'll never release etc until I die, etc
I think it's important to separate out the moral and psychological components here.
I agree with you that if your bills are paid and you're harming no one, then you have no moral obligation to do anything more than sit on your butt and play videogames. It's your life.
At the same time, humans are a social species. We have evolved brains and intrinsic motivation reward systems that only give us the real deep kinds of life-satisfaction emotions if we are putting real effort into something that we find to be meaningful in ways that help our perceived family or tribe.
There are of course outliers who can spend indefinite days just binge-watching TV happy as a clam. But most of us are wired like border collies. If we don't have a herd to take care of some real reason to get out of bed in the morning, we go crazy.
oddly, I somewhat agree with your position but in a reversed way.
> There are of course outliers who can spend indefinite days just binge-watching TV happy as a clam. But most of us are wired like border collies. If we don't have a herd to take care of some real reason to get out of bed in the morning, we go crazy.
I don't think these are outliers, I think these are a surprising majority. It's the classic bread and circuses or Soma concept: as long as people are fed a steady supply of moderate entertainment and material enjoyment, they are content to idle. And I would go further and say that you somewhat contradict your earlier position, which to me came across as being interested in solving problems and improving the world, not just your family/tribe.
I would also point out that binge-watching TV is different from creating music, never to produce it. Kafka created amazing works that he specifically wanted destroyed. So from my perspective it's unclear if you look down on anything that isn't sacrifice for someone else's gain (external reward), created for sharing with others (external reward), or engaging with others (external reward). I'm not sure where you get your data that most humans are like border collies, but at least based on your comments it seems like you really value socially-based activities, so you may be overlooking the many others who don't need social interaction or external reward/response to find meaning and fulfillment.
> I don't think these are outliers, I think these are a surprising majority. It's the classic bread and circuses or Soma concept: as long as people are fed a steady supply of moderate entertainment and material enjoyment, they are content to idle.
This is a typical cynical take, but not borne out by reality at all. Yes, people enjoy leisure, but look at how they really live and you'll observe that they enjoy it in the context of a larger meaningful framework. While there are many bullshit jobs, most people still work surprisingly hard at them in large part because they have at least some coworkers they care about and want to support. Even the most jaded employee does so to earn a paycheck that most use to take care of their families and loved ones.
You're right that given the opportunity, many people will just idle and consume media. But if you notice, most of them aren't actually enjoying it much. It's a way to survive, but not to thrive.
> And I would go further and say that you somewhat contradict your earlier position, which to me came across as being interested in solving problems and improving the world, not just your family/tribe.
I said "perceived tribe", which for some includes the entire world.
> it's unclear if you look down on anything
Again, I'm making no moral claims. I'm not looking up or down at anyone. I'm just saying that if you observe humans as a species it is clear that most of them need meaningful social connections and effortful tasks that support those connections in order to thrive.
Imagine you were an alien species building a human zoo. If you gave each person their own cell with unlimited videogames and movies, they would wither and die. Give them community and something meaningful to struggle for to benefit that community and they won't even know they're in a zoo.
> so you may be overlooking the many others who don't need social interaction or external reward/response to find meaning and fulfillment.
I am fairly introverted and as a software engineer, I obviously know lots and lots of other introverts. I many think the emotional experience of introverts in today's society is "I want more solitude". But that doesn't mean their optimal state is hermitage. (True hermits are vanishingly rare in the human species, less common than many severe mental illnesses.) That emotional response needs to be understood in the context of their lives.
Everyone needs solitude to process their experiences, autonomous time to feel that they are the agents of their life, and time away from the draining experience of being surrounded by people we think of as "others" and need to raise some level of defenses of wear masks around.
If you live in an urban area as a lowly employee of a giant corporation and spend all your down time consuming media instead of actually just sitting with your thoughts, then you get little of those. But that doesn't mean most people want an unbounded quantity of solitude anymore that wearing a cast for the rest of your life is somehow healthier than taking it off once the bone has knitted.
What we need is balance, and while everyone has a different prefered quantity of solitude, there are very very few whose ideal is "no social interaction at all".
So, castle or farm? You can't just handwave this question away so easily! Would you hire people to take care of the castle or farm for you? I hear both are quite a lot of work! How exactly would you be spending your time, apart from making music?
excellent question, by f-you money I mean serious f-you money (we're daydreaming, after all), so my vision is a literal stone castle as well as a nice farm. ideally these would be maintainable just by myself so maybe a modest fort-like castle and tiny homestead farm. not necessarily a disney castle and hundreds of acres of corn.
aside from the farm likely taking up all my time (for however long i'm able to sustain that), pursue all my interests: exercise, language, reading, writing, watching movies/tv, taking photos, making films, lifting weights, kayaking, hiking, rock climbing, cooking/baking, biking, playing video games, drawing, spending time with loved ones, studying, the list is endless.
I have no problem cleaning my toilet; in fact, I quite enjoy cleaning. And with f-you money I'll make sure my castle has a modern toilet, or in the very worst case some kind of septic tank, rather than the medieval cesspit style toilet.
I'm not that commenter, but if I won the lottery, like the big one, I'd buy a castle, gild one toilet, and Instagram the shit out of it, pun intended. Then I will never have to work again because I'll become an Influencer.
I don't know. I'd love to have a basic level of income and then be able to dither around with random jobs. I'd love to be a bartender for 6 months, work in a bookstore for 6 months, become a carpenter for a year or two. I'd probably feel differently if I actually had a trust fund since my upbringing would be different but it does feel stifling that in order to have a financially rewarding career one has to stay on a relatively narrow path.
And I say this as someone who has made a major career change during their life.
Huh. Interesting way of looking at it. I don't associate wanting to work at a bar with spending more quality times with friends. I think it would be interesting to be in a customer service role and working in a fast paced environment where I have to make drinks/pour beers.
I like the little bookstore near me. They play classical music during the day and the lady who runs it seems nice. I'd like to work there for a while and see what that is like.
Carpentry (or being a cook which would also be on my list) is about doing something with my hands professionally. Can I make my living by creating something with my hands? What would that feel like? I know I can make a living using my voice. I know I can make a living with my fingers on a keyboard.
What would it look like to make a living building something physical? For me it's more about things that seem like they would be interesting life experiences.
This discussion point reminds me of a Sir Ken Robinson talk (not sure which one, but he has many). After a friend's musical performance on stage, he comments to his friend that he'd love to do what he's doing, being on stage, playing guitar. His friend quickly remarks that no, he actually wouldn't. If he really wanted to be a musician, he would've done it by now. He would've put in the work and toil to get there. Instead, he just likes the idea of being able to perform at a high level in front of other people.
I think so many of our fantasies are like that. We think of the end result and want that, but don't think about all the work needed to get there and whether we're up for that.
Yeah I agree to a certain extent. But I wouldnt LOVE to be a bartender. I think it would be interesting to try it for 6 months. Actually I'm quite certain at the end of the 6th months I'd be perfectly happy to never work behind a bar again. I might even dread the job by the 3rd month.
But it would be interesting to try. I was a life guard in college. I am probably the worst lifeguard of all time but it was fun for a summer. Same with being a basketball referee. I don't really know the rules well enough to officiate a game. But it was a fun job for a year.
It's things like that which I was able to afford to do in college or early adulthood that seem like they are not possible now. Not without significant financial sacrifice and a large detour of a career in motion.
I think this is a nice way to console yourself, but ultimately not true.
The reason people want to open a bar when they work in IT or whatever, is because most people don't want to do the same shit over and over again for 40 years.
That's just human nature, we are not robots, but society has been structured to commodify us and make us predictable producers of 'moar money' for people who already have money :)
It's called wage slavery for a reason, and no, a slave doesn't simply want more friend time or whatever, humans want to be free.
I regret that I never worked as a waiter in a cafe, and now it looks as if I can't afford it anymore. Or if I could afford it, I would be taking away the job from people who have a more urgent need for it than me.
Yeah this does exist/happen to some extent. My partners father retired young (40's) and spent a bunch of years kicking around doing odd little jobs. The issue for many employers is that people in these situations don't really NEED the jobs so they are less likely to stick around late or put up with any bullshit which many jobs contain plenty of.
This is just antidotal evidence of seeing my partners dad say yeah fuck that job after 6 months.
NHK US is filled with shows of retirees still doing their old jobs as hobbies. Several episodes involve repairing and running trains/tracks/stations on weekends for tourists.
Well, that's the trick. I mean there are obviously a lot of details and varying conditions and possibilities.
But that doesn't mean they are all useless and should be in an old folks home.
To more directly answer your question.
Old people don't have to take care of even older people. I mean the whole point is to NOT cut them off from the rest of society.
It needs a social component and simplicity.
However, simpler tasks are often more easily automated and people generally avoid social interaction it seems.
I get the feeling that people would rather a hot coffee vending machine than talking to ol' Carol or Bob at the mom & pop cafe.
Some random ideas:
- Working the coffee shop on the ground floor of the corporate building.
- corporate internal mail
- storytime Reader at the local library
- non-profit business pushbike/skateboard/scooter store
- campus bus service
Elon Musk's life is at the opposite extremum of "floating through life." The man works 90+ hours per week, gambled his entire fortune on two risky hardware companies, serves as a prominent public figure, and destroyed many of his close personal relationships (e.g. remarried numerous times). He's having tremendous impact; I respect him like crazy & would happily back his endeavors... But I wouldn't wish for his lifestyle, let alone choose it.
I rather doubt that you would choose Elon's life either -- especially if you were in his financial position.
(Happy to stand corrected, since I don't know you.)
I’d be very surprised if Elon consistently works more than 60 hours a week, and pretty surprised if it was more than 50. It’d be a waste of his position and talent if he did. He has the capital and influence to have others do almost all other tasks, his main focus is likely to be on longer term strategy and thinking. He’s also a dad of 5 or so kids. His health is far more valuable than working 2 typical work weeks every week.
He plays up the uberworker shtick for the same reason Warren Buffet in his 80s tells everyone he has a coke and Dairy Queen everyday: because it’s part of his brand and very conducive to moving forward his pursuits. Warren buffet definitely doesn’t have coke and Dairy Queen everyday either.
Elon’s days of working to the bone everyday are likely long behind him, by decades.
The book about him[1] explains how he is a workaholic . Not just by the worked hours, but the intensity of those, context switching between projects and attention to detail, pressure teams, etc...
I understand your point about "waste of his position" and that he could have a more balanced life, but as the books depicts him that's not the case. Nor it was when he was at PayPal or Zip2.
Cars and rockets are basically his hobby projects. I wouldn't be surprised if he put in 90hr from time to time because he wants to. He has the free time to do that. The dude is rich enough to afford help. It's not like his kids are missing meals because he's at work or he has to use the extra daylight savings day light to trim his own hedges and mow his own lawn. I'm sure he doesn't do it every week but he probably gets carried away and books himself for a 90hr week just often enough to remember why he doesn't do that every week.
I have a friend who works for Tesla as a factory automation engineer, and just a few years ago he told me a story of Elon working with him 1-1 keeping him up in the middling of the night editing car welds. I very much get the impression Elon is a workaholic.
>Things worked out for you, but you have no further passion or inclination to improve the world? No problems you could set yourself to solving?
And why should they? I'm no fan of trust fund babies who coast by on life, but really, why does anyone have to justify their lives by doing something to improve the world? What are you and I accomplishing right now?
Maybe it's just the severe burnout talking, but I for one would love to just stop everything and exist for a while with no tangible goals or requirements of me. Besides that, what good is a person who did the leanFIRE thing really supposed to do? The whole idea is to live cheaply, they don't have a lot of money to invest in making the world better. They have all the time in the world, sure, but if you're putting 40+ hours into "making the world better" (Whatever that means to you) then are you really retired? Or are you just doing the same thing as everyone else but living a much more meager life for the sake of it.
>why does anyone have to justify their lives by doing something to improve the world?
There have been a few replies in this vein, and I see where you're coming from based on the way I phrased what I was saying.
I'm not arguing that anybody should be forced by some external entity to do anything. I am advocating for a person in this situation to attempt to cultivate a passion/greater purpose because I believe it's something we need to be fulfilled. The man in this article designed a life for himself that was free from labor, but ultimately unfulfilling in many ways.
And if you need to find that passion, looking to improve society in some way is a great place to start. I can think of a few things in that vein that I would consider focusing on if I was in such a situation, and none of them are as far reaching as "make humanity multi-planetary."
The definition of 'retirement' is a common debate in the FIRE space. Often (not always!) it boils down to fights over definitions. Would you call daily volunteering at a soup kitchen (or church, or whatever) 'retired'?
By the way, "making the world better" doesn't need to be large or expensive, at least in my opinion: If I talk to the lone, probably widowed neighbour on my way home, I count that as "making the world better".
That's a good point about the scale of the "making the world better". It doesn't have to be huge.
I think at the end of the day, it's really about finding meaning in your own existence, and such a large part of that for a lot of us is feeling like we are giving back to society or helping our fellow humans somehow. I think this is where I can see the author's goal of just writing being hollow. He writes about his fears that maybe his writing won't ever be discovered. It makes me wonder if he's writing because he enjoys the craft or he wants the status of being known as a writer.
If he really enjoyed the craft, maybe he would've enjoyed writing more. The status thing would be nice, but maybe he would enjoy having other people read his stories and connecting with them. That could've been something to keep him going and give him some short-term goals, direction, and connection with other people.
I figure that by definition, not everyone can be the 0.1% world changing person. Founder of Google/FB/Ikea or a Nobel Prize winner.
I want to leave the world better than when I came into it. It doesn't have to be gobsmackingly better, just fractionally better is fine. I try to apply this day by day.
> you have no further passion or inclination to improve the world? No problems you could set yourself to solving?
Nope! I know who I am and what I’m capable of.
If I could, I would do literally nothing besides wake up, go to the gym, go to the coffee shop, read, watch TV, and surf the internet until I die. I know this because I took several years off and did exactly this until I ran out of money.
I didn't know you could post fiction on Substack, also never heard of Royal Road. Could you recommend anything to get started with those? Specifically with writing serialized fiction. Or some example authors that have used it with success that I can check out?
Substack is just a place to post writing and let people subscribe for money so it can be used to post chapters of fiction just as well as an article. I only know of one person who was posting a novel on there, and not sure if they were making a lot of money from it.
There's also tons of subreddits like r/WritingPrompts to practice or r/NoSleep to post short horror fiction. There are huge audiences on both of those. A post from NoSleep is getting made into a Steven Speilberg movie: https://variety.com/2019/film/news/spire-in-the-woods-steven...
RoyalRoad is huge though. Here's the top story from it: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/21220/mother-of-learning authors usually get a following on RoyalRoad and then they can start a Patreon where people who donate get early chapters. Other authors go the Kindle Unlimited route where they self publish their novel on Kindle Unlimited after they've got a fanbase and plenty of people make a decent living from it.
This is all the modern version of how older authors got started: by submitting short stories to be published in anthology magazines. You have to love writing and be willing to do it for a long time before you pop off though. The way he was describing it didn't resemble that to me.
It's not nihilistic, it's more absurdist. I think, for myself, it is in fact a better way to live life. Sure, I admire people with a life-long drive be it Musk or Michael Jordan (or even some ancient conquerors who clearly did it for lulz and not ideology), but I personally only feel driven for short, narrow projects at most. And the impression that I get is that this is already above median ;)
I'm going to start blogging about FIRE from the other extreme end. I'm a principal engineer making serious dollars, and I'm writing down my playbook.
I intend to "Fat-FIRE", and the only reason I don't retire now is to see how much I can leverage my position to do crazy shit at massive scale. Paradoxically, this sets me up for larger windfalls because I can take risks that my peers do not take.
I am an early retiree, who sometimes thinks it would be nice to get back into the industry just to steer or at least nudge the projects I still care about very much into the direction I'd like to seem them to go. And because they are corporate-driven (hello, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google!) it is just too hard to do from the outside.
One thing that I see is that people complain about politics rather than recognizing the natural force it is and how to bend and master it towards your will.
You might try contacting them, indicating that you are passionate about their project, and would they be interested in hiring you as a 1099 for six months (or 20 hrs/week or whatever) to implement {feature}. I'm beginning to realize that while everyone (workers, businesses) have a fairly one-track assumption of what employment/work would look like, a lot of times businesses are open to non-traditional ideas. A lot of places are fine with part-time if they know they can count on you to get stuff done. PMs seem to value predictability over throughput. Also I think the trend to remote work will help the process of being able work on just a piece of a project.
Anyway, you might as well give it a try, see what happens.
I'm not sure what you are interested in, but there is an open source project needing your help to do that. But if you were really serious you would be there several hours a day doing it already. Instead it is just an idea.
+1. I get to be aggressive and do a 100% stocks allocation. Heck, I can even do sensible (I'm talking 1.25x-1.33x) levels of leverage. I get to invest in crypto. I get to borrow a fairly expensive mortgage. Etc.
I noticed even with myself over the years I've flip flopped.
At first I thought I can do lean FIRE, because I was never a big spender in the first place. As I get older I started to gradually spend more on things and frankly enjoy the ability to do so as I earned more. For example, not having to take the crappiest flight to get some where. Recently as I get older, I question if I want to even retire early at all. Now I'm shifting more towards "I want to be financially independent so I'm not reliant on a job, but I still want to work".
So things change, and things change more and faster than we anticipate. And this isn't even accounting for externalities outside of our control.
Were you reading FIRE blogs or extreme frugality blogs? Or maybe I can just ask "how do you define extreme frugality?" (I think of myself as kind of frugal, and planning to have the choice to avoid compulsory paid work before I'm 50, but I also live in one of the most expensive areas of the United States outside of big cities / California, with somewhat regular trips to Disney World and other countries.) But a blog like earlyretirementextreme.com isn't focused on high earners cutting down on consumption and retiring early (that's MrMoneyMustache.com) - it's a version of extreme frugality and self-reliance (and adaptability regardless of changing life circumstances.)
> bare minimum savings
I assume by this you mean "leanFIRE" as in "just enough of a nest egg to retire with 25x your annual expenses and everything goes perfectly?!" Of course, that sounds like a recipe for disaster, and I think in some cases it's a bit of a "oh I can quit my stupid job at the exact moment I hit this magic number" mentality, but a misunderstanding of putting a real plan in place for a future that is filled with variables. Depending on the blogs you frequented, they could be "copycat" blogs that just took the juicy headlines from more in-depth blogs and throwing up quick articles so they can get some ad revenue.
Any idea, handled poorly, is going to either come off unappealing or be riddled with shortcomings. That doesn't mean the original idea can't work (and it does for some - some by luck, others by proper strategy.)
Well someone spending 30k in Massachusetts living in a rental is got to be living extremely frugally.
Then the woman had enough of the pennypinching. I see this so often in my circle - all the missed eating out and having fun is ultimately spent on marriage counseling and divorce lawyers.
My understanding was that they had separate finances, and 30k/year was just his spending. My spouse and I spend less than $60k/year in a comparable cost-of-living area (COLA), including flights/hotels/entertainment and other nice things to have (home, some land, modern cars, monthly massage, etc.). It's really not "extreme frugality" in my point of view, but I suppose some might see it that way.
There's a big difference between spending $60K/year on average, and having a firm upper limit of $60K/year that can never be exceeded for the entire rest of your life (inflation adjusted), lest your entire financial plan collapses.
If you had an unlucky year and had to spend an extra $10K on various things (car breaks down, medical expenses, moving for a job) it's probably not a big deal for you. If a leanFIRE person had an unexpected extra $10K expense, they'd have to cut $10K out of the rest of their budget for the entire year.
If you're already squeezing by on $30K/year like this author, somewhere between 1/2 and 2/3 of that might go to basic living expenses (rent, utilities, food). If the other 1/3 of your budget gets wiped out by an unexpected $10K expense, it's going to be a very lean year.
This is the problem with most leanFIRE plans: They only work if nothing ever goes wrong, no unexpected expenses occur (for 4 or more decades straight), and a person's lifestyle never expands at all.
This isn't really accurate, though. In most cases there is a large margin of error built into the 4% "safe withdrawal rate" - and that is that the investments "on average" do much better than 4% (easily 5-7% after inflation, in many cases much higher) and that you end up with much more than what you need to withdraw 4%.
The notable exception is called a "sequence of returns risk" (SORR) where either something bad happens in the first few years draining a really large portion of your original savings (more than $10k) and/or the market undergoes a recession during the first few years, and if you withdrew the full 4% from your investments while their value was markedly depressed, you would never recover (without additional income). In my opinion, a proper retirement strategy should account for SORR; some padding (i.e. the wants portion of your budget you can reduce during a lean year), reverse-glide strategy where you can draw from cash/bonds instead of equities in case of depressed value equities, etc. In many cases, this scenario happens so early in retirement that anyone retiring at a younger age has relatively good prospects of rejoining the work force to get to the other side, and then will likely be very well prepared for a second retirement with a decreased likelihood of yet another bad sequence of returns occurring before their nest egg has grown well beyond 25 times annual expenses.
And all retirement plans should be flexible - some years where you might spend a bit less than the target, but have room to change that, particularly if your invested assets grow beyond the original necessary funds.
> In most cases there is a large margin of error built into the 4% "safe withdrawal rate"
I don't think that's the case if you're retiring early. The 4% withdrawal rate was based on a 30 year retirement. You need to go a bit lower if you want to have minimal risk of running out of money for a much longer horizon.
Certainly, but with their example of retiring at 40, you have an 8.5% chance of going broke before you die and a 3.4% chance of going broke before you even reach a normal retirement age.
That's a much higher level of risk than I would accept.
I think this was covered in the article. His assets have grown 20% (inflation adjusted) since retiring and that's with a number of years having higher than average expenditures due to unplanned medical issues. His financial plan didn't really collapse per se.
The median household income in Massachusetts is $80k so between them they weren’t far off. Especially when you consider your costs tend to be lower when you aren’t working. I wouldn’t call that extreme frugality.
> Most of these people would be much happier if they simply invested time and energy into finding a job they enjoy, or at least one that doesn't make them miserable.
I don't think there is such a job, not at 8 hours * 5 days a week. Even if it's unfair towards people who have to work longer and harder - I find it grueling. And I believe it's not due to job (I'm a software developer) - I'm pretty sure if I did my favorite hobby full time for a year I'd start resenting it. It's not for lack of vacation either - 5 weeks/year is just enough to get me to baseline where I'm ready to enjoy proper vacation.
3 days a week * 4 hours + 2 months completely off each year could work nicely, but that's not available in a regular job. It'd mean switching to consulting and my selling skills are non-existent. So I'll probably grind for 2-3 years then take 1-2 years off. I did that once already and the main takeaway was that I could easily and gladly not work ever again, if I could afford it.
> I'm pretty sure if I did my favorite hobby full time for a year I'd start resenting it.
There are some ways around it:
- Have several hobbies and just do whichever depending on your mood and desire at the time. They are hobbies, not jobs; you don't HAVE to do them if you currently don't want to. It's OK to abandon some of your hobbies for years. (There is a good amount of stories about book authors who start seriously writing -- and become famous and financially successful -- at 50+ years old).
- Don't do anything "meaningful" for a while. I have found huge inner peace and improved mental health by just being completely useless for 3 months between contracts. Ironically, during these "useless" times of mine I've progressed hugely on numerous personal interests (some of which overlap with me being a programmer but are relating to things that aren't popular there).
- [Re-]Discover true leisure time: walks in nature and admiring the scenery, boat trips, lying on the beach, traveling to exotic locations (OK, this one is almost impossible at the moment), and many others. We don't live to only work.
> Even worse when your romantic partner has different goals in life, as happened here.
What stings (as I can't help but empathize with the author's feelings) in reading this blog is that it sounds like they were very aligned five years ago, but she discovered a gradual growing miscontent only once they tried the early-retiree life.
Not sure if there's a possible fix there, other than trying to compromise (only one of them working, which would probably just lead to more growing apart)
As many people learned last year, it's easy to gloss over the parts of someone you don't like when you're both actively working towards a goal. When you start spending too much time together, it's easy to have the relationship die from a thousand cuts.
You take exception to their generalizing and then generalize yourself which I'm taking exception to. I love my wife deeply, but work time apart makes our time together better. It takes all sorts.
Not at all, I said what I don't subscribe under and cited my anecdotal evidence. My "generalization" is actually putting people in groups, which by itself admits that a generalization is impossible.
But it could possibly be offensive to some people that I call their couples "good roommates" which is a fair reaction -- I still have the right to my opinion however.
I said it was an easy thing to have happen, not that it would happen. I'd argue that you took my statement in bad faith, looking for a flaw in it, and generalized more aggressively than I did.
Some people change, most don't, and when one person changes, the other might be comfortable and not want any changes.
Sadly these things can and do happen. But we the people usually make it much worse by holding on to relationships that are past their date, for much longer than it's healthy.
> this same path: Extreme frugality, bare minimum savings
The author is a literal millionaire living (when not working in a well-paid job) on what is roughly the median income for their state. This is neither extremely frugal nor bare minimum savings.
They downgraded from "upper-class lifestyle with upper-class work" to "middle-class lifestyle without work". Not exactly going poor.
> assuming their lifestyle would never change and nothing would ever go wrong.
They bet that nothing would go several-hundreds-of-thousands-dollars wrong. Sounds like a fairly safe bet. If it's likely that you'll get into a situation that costs you that much, having a job doesn't guarantee much either.
I think most people would agree with you. Often called "build the life you want, then save for it"[0]. It's not as sexy, though, probably why the extreme outliers are more written about (or vocal).
Furthermore leanFIRE is at least somewhat irreversible. Not literally, but if you retire at say 35 with a bare minimum nest egg and you decide 10 years later that this isn't how you want to spend the rest of your life, it will be at least more difficult to insert yourself back into whatever career track you were on.
>Most of these people would be much happier if they simply invested time and energy into finding a job they enjoy
Many people reach FIRE without much energy, it's an incredibly easy "set and forget" style of life. Many use its concepts to get in a position where they can find a job they enjoy.
This skips over the part where the individual might want to be entrepreneurial and needs the funds to be in a position to take such a risk. Or the job they love is inherently in a shitty position (passion industries teeming with bad conditions), so it's a "pick your poison situation" until they have leverage, and in many cases, both poisons make them feel miserable anyway.
The idea that there's a job out there for every person they'll enjoy doing as long as they put in the energy, is an incredibly idealistic and even privileged mindset we should be getting rid of.
It's interesting to me that so many people think the path to riches is paved with pinched pennies.
If some of my friends spent half as much time learning new skills as they do saving pennies - I think they'd be much better off. And especially because they don't even enjoy most of the ways they're saving money! Long commutes, cooking all their meals, doing all their dishes. Especially being overworked by a dead-end job they hate!
> ...bare minimum savings, assuming their lifestyle would never change and nothing would ever go wrong.
Isn't the status quo of working a 9-5 and saving ~10% (aka spending 90%) of your salary exactly this? Having ~25x living expenses saved up seems like a significantly less fragile position than you're suggesting. Even this "failure" case, the author ended his 6 years of not earning a penny with more money than he started. And he was able to get a job when he decided he wanted one.
> Most of these people would be much happier if they simply invested time and energy into finding a job they enjoy
Lots of people don't enjoy things that are necessarily financially viable. Putting in a finite amount of time to free yourself to pursue interests without concern for the financials makes a lot of sense.
I think what 99% of people need is a 1 year break from their jobs. If you can't find something meaningful in that 1 year, you'll never find happiness in FIRE. You need to find something that you'd be very happy doing, which also incidentally brings you enough money to supplement your FIRE.
> I had to quit reading any FIRE (financial independence, early retirement) blogs because they were full of people headed down this same path: Extreme frugality, bare minimum savings, assuming their lifestyle would never change and nothing would ever go wrong.
Well said. I'd also add that frugality does not work very well when you have kids. You would want to buy time if you don't want to spend all your time with kids. That means baby sitters, nannies, coaches, and classes for extracurricular activities. Besides, not every parent is good at coaching or tutoring their kids. Given the education quality of the US, you'd have to pay for additional education unless you're the lucky few who have self-driven kids. And what if your kids get sick? The cost just adds up.
Not going to argue about having to spend money to get some time away from the kids. But education? If you retire then you have the time to unschool your children and while your family and friends will think you are crazy your children will get a much better education than anything that involves money.
Via homeschool groups or via your own? I don't know much about homeschool group, so I'll comment only educating kids alone: parents tend to underestimate the skills required for quality education. You need empathy to understand that your kids may not get some seemingly simple concepts. You need skills to explain to kids complex concepts in simple terms -- and this is not about merely applying Feynman's technique, but about knowing what language is more accessible to kids. You need to know a subject well to teach your kids effectively. The list can go on. In a word, education is a profession, and it takes years of experience to become a quality educator. Why do parents think that they can magically give "a much better education than anything that involves money"?
By the way, I recognize that there are always exceptions, especially that smart and driven kids probably need just parents' guidance and advice instead of full-fledged "education". I mainly have ordinary kids in mind, though, as they are the majority to whom education makes a huge difference. Case in point, I didn't get physics, especially free-body diagram and optics when I started learning physics in junior high. It was a retired teacher who removed my conceptual blocks by giving me very targeted exercises. I got stuck again in high school when studying electromagnetism, and it was another teacher who opened my eyes by prescribing inspiring problems like how to accelerate a static electron without a push. I was also lucky to get a math teacher who somehow could find incredibly challenging yet accessible problems that kept me in the discomfort zone. I have similar stories for writing class, for history class, and for chemistry class. Oh yeah, chemistry. A teacher in my senior year was so passionate about chemistry that I didn't realize that he taught us how to reason about organic synthesis at college level, to the point that we could solve some of the IChO problems. And the truth is that my parents could never do what those teachers did. I'm not sure how many kids were lucky enough to have responsible and capable teachers around. And if they don't, finding tutors is not a bad choice.
I don’t disagree with you, especially if you are trying to follow the same curriculum as the schools and expect the kids to grok everything during the “correct” school year.
We are finding that concepts that the kids are ready for come super easily — Like, there’s nothing special that an educator is going to provide — And concepts that the kids aren’t ready for can still be taught but it’s takes much more time and effort. I think this is one of the reasons why school (and teaching) can seem difficult and overwhelming. We expect all ten-year-olds to be at the same level and for a single teacher to get these kids to all learn the same stuff at the same time. It’s Sisyphean!
If you decide to go-all-in with homeschooling you can tailor your child’s education to each child and go with the flow. The difficulty is if you want to be able to go back to regular school because they are going to all over the map, they might be 4 grades ahead in math and 4 grades behind in history.
You also get to choose what you want your children to learn. It’s a double-edged sword. My kids are getting a very science-heavy and pragmatic education while some bible-banger down the street might be teaching frickin’ creationism. For society, I don’t have a good solution to this problem. But as a parent I’m excited that I can ditch the memorization bullshit and focus on providing my children an educational and intellectual framework that will keep them growing intellectually for the rest of their lives, if they so choose.
The gist of my approach is: Know what subjects exist and what problems they can solve and know how to teach yourself those subjects when they are needed. That’s basically it. Teaching is helping them find ways to help themselves and talking through philosophical problems with them.
My FIRE goal is to simply be at a point where my job is optional. I'm no longer sure I want to retire early, but I like the option and flexibility that FIRE gives (and possibly reducing to part-time if it works out that way).
Either I convinced myself of, or I realized quite early on, that I would not be happy if I just retired early. I need to be doing something, so I may as well be working.
Retiring at 30 sounds great, but no one's life goes exactly to plan for next the 30-40 years until traditional retirement age. People change, expectations evolve, possessions wear out and need to be replaced. Living frugally may be fun when you're in your 20s, but it's not so fun when as you get older and your friends want to do things that require money (vacations, hobbies, dining out). Even worse when your romantic partner has different goals in life, as happened here.
Many of the leanFIRE stories have their roots in people who hate their jobs so much that the only thing that motivates them is early retirement. They grind through the job the hate, counting days on their leanFIRE countdown until they can quit working and never look back.
Most of these people would be much happier if they simply invested time and energy into finding a job they enjoy, or at least one that doesn't make them miserable. Even if it requires a pay cut and a later retirement date, it's much better to spend your time doing something you don't hate than it is to grind out a bad job in misery just to reach dreams of early retirement sooner.