My biggest insight has been a mindset change. Previously my underlying approach to life looked like: "I will do X which will enable me to do Y so that I can finally do Z." I now approach my days with "What will make me happy?" This is an experiment I'm performing. A structured life feels safe and orderly - but what if living life and letting things unfold more 'organically' is better?

It is a weird/uncomfortable shift because I can't predict what is coming. As an example, turns out I really enjoy building dams. A couple months ago I would not have been able to tell you that I'd be building a dam.

I have no idea what it is that drives my own interests or affinities, but now instead of attempting to manipulate them for whatever X, Y, or Z goal... I just roll with wherever they take me. And they always seem ready to take me somewhere.

My point is: In a life without work (in my experience) stuff will come up. Follow what arises, see where it goes. It certainly feels better.

Great insight that is worth repeating.

One of my biggest problems with FIRE discussions is how much they reinforce the idea that retirement is a prerequisite for achieving happiness. This leads a lot of FIRE-minded people to double down on jobs they hate that consume too much of their time and energy, only because they think it will better enable them to be happy later.

For the lucky few who can be early employees at unicorn startups, that might be true. For the average FIRE person working a $100-200K/year job, they might be better off scaling back to a sustainable 40hr/week job and making a point of taking vacations and doing activities in their off time. Even if that means taking a paycut and delaying their target retirement date.

You don't have to wait until FIRE to start taking vacations, doing hobbies, or working on projects. If a job is consuming so much of your life that you feel you don't have time to do anything else, it's time to reevaluate the job.

On the FIRE subreddit, anyway, they're very clear that:

1. It's the FI part that really matters. RE is just one possible choice of what to do with it.

2. It's silly to make yourself miserable until you're FI.

3. FI is not magic. It will not meet your expectations unless you've carefully thought through what it is you want to do with that freedom.

Another way of looking at that situation is to ask why this cohort of some of the most driven, value-sensitive people in the labor force are so miserable with their leadership that they will voluntarily subject themselves to such a regime for the rest of their life, not for sipping mai tais on the beach but just to implement "...but without that leadership". It is nearly a truism people leave managers (doesn't even have to be direct managers) and not companies.

And if you do not accept that truism, the question still stands, just in a different area. Why are our workplaces so systemically dysfunctional that it gives rise to this behavior in a cohort that arguably should be highly coveted and aggressively retained by their employers?

There are a lot of posts in FI subreddits/forums where people have retired early and are totally lost, asking what they should do to find meaning or enjoyment out of life now that they're not working. They've spent so much of their time and energy of their prime years on working and saving that they haven't had anything left over to discover what sorts of things really bring them fulfillment, and it's incredibly disheartening to see.

The buried lede on those stories is they will not spend out of their FIRE budget on activities to bring that fulfillment, leaving them with somewhat limited choices depending upon their personalities and proclivities (see below), and many have not even planned for how much that will cost.

There are very few personality types that would be happy as a clam spending a hundred years puttering around the stacks of libraries researching a particular scholarly pursuit, then spend another hundred on another specific area, for example. The list of what we do not know is practically infinite, and were I immortal, I could burn a few thousand years researching subjects I find fascinating. Cheap for someone on even lean-FIRE.

There are still quite a few areas of the world that are very sparsely-mapped and their microbiomes sparsely-cataloged to help preserve their bio-diversity. I could spend quite a few centuries just doing that, while hiking and camping. Relatively cheap as pursuits go.

Refurbishing and repairing old artifacts would require some spending on tooling and supplies, but still cheaper than say, learning to fly. I could spend a few thousand years just learning different trades to master craftsman skill levels.

I find the RE experiences others relate that they feel aimless baffling, but only due to my personality. So it is not surprising to me that different personalities cannot conceive satisfaction within the same pursuits. Pursuits that could cost far more than they realized they needed to budget for. FIRE is more about knowing your self than hitting an appropriate total that survives a 2% SWR.

I used to think this way, now I severely disagree, I think nowwhat you want in life cant be anticipated with thought, it can only be hewn out of a rough stone through trial, error, success, and reflection. Atleast thats been my arc over the last 16 years working towards happiness and freedom.

For example, have you ever had a long term regret that you finally faced only to come away thinking, "Now that Im in this position, I should have never regretted not being here." The regret disappears and you feel much more confident in your ability to steer yourself.

You only gain true perspective through actions, not thought, how could you, your thoughts are siloed from reality.

As an analogy, I'm a big believer in caloric intake determining weight for most people. Consume more calories than you use and you will tend to gain weight. Consume less and you will tend to lose weight. So to get a caloric deficit you can exercise more or eat less. But... it's 90-95% diet.

Bringing this back to FIRE, the key lesson I think is that what matters in having financial freedom is controlling costs not maximizing income. Expenses can (and often do) _easily_ rise to your level of income. People fall in these traps of thinking they need a $5m house instead of a $2m house, or a bigger boat or a third vacation home.

But if you control your expenses AND can be happy then you doubly benefit: you increase your savings (and thus the time required until you have financial independence) AND you decrease how much money you need in retirement because you're accustomed to lower costs.

So the point of FIRE is (IMHO) not to seek satisfaction through material things but rather through your approach to life and your experiences.

I've seen this with coworkers who convince themselves they need $50,000pa/child for private school, $500k+ plus to pay for each child's Ivy League education and so forth and kill themselves to achieve that. Worse, they can become bitter and unhappy as they realize how long that will take them to achieve even as the top 1% of earners.

So not only are they working super-hard for longer they're seeing their families less and bringing home this negativity and entitlement. All of that is a prison of your own making.

FIRE philosophically is about really examining what you need and what's really important.

In software right now, I think it’s not difficult to have a sustainable low-six-figure job where you take vacations and have activities and off time to enjoy them.

These jobs have things like accrued PTO, limited perks, and relatively inflexible time-off tolerance that is highly dependent on the manager's whim.

"Not difficult" is relative, really.

40hr/week is the unsustainable part.

I think 20h/week is a more reasonable target if you want to enjoy things beside work.

Of course it's okay to work 40h/week if you really want to, or even more, if you enjoy it, but you should really think hard about whether that's really what you want, or if it's just what your employer wants you to do.

That's what I have an issue with.

When I'm working on a problem, I cannot simply forget about it at 3pm and head to the beach to enjoy life. The problem will be in my head 24/7 until one of us gives up.

But now I'm the age that he was back then, and I find I can compartmentalize or turn off work thinking easily. I'm not suggesting it's a factor of age, exactly, but perhaps some other change that occurs over time? Not really sure, but something in my head definitely changed.

This is also something you can learn through techniques that fall under what HR might call mindfulness. After a while, you have a mental git stash that you can just pop. It's not entirely lossless, but the benefits to life are immense.

https://walletburst.com/tools/coast-fire-calc

It's significantly more than 50% of the time that's available to me, by the time you factor in the things that i do because of work it's getting to around 70%.

Not that many people have done it their entire lives in the way we do today. Now we have the majority of millennials with 2 people trying to do a 40 hour week along with all of the other things that need to be done. I would argue a 40 hour work week + extras is great if i'm not cooking, cleaning, doing much childcare etc.

If we look back at pre-industrial humans we'll see that the striking thing is quite how much time they spend not doing anything productive.

Terrible at math (heh) but its something like multiply 24% by 2/3. Aka 24/3=8

Any suggestions?

Might only take a few years to save the required amount.

20k? did you miss a digit? That's less than my rent for the year...

for 3 days anything that pays more than $18 an hour and allows for flexible scheduling

you don't need a degree for this.

Medical transcription, coding and billing, working as a PA, Truck driving, nursing the list goes on.

This is not at all "average" in countries outside of the US. Here in India, for example, a $100K job is kinda like winning the lottery.

For reference, going by the exchange rate it equals somewhat close to 7.5M in local currency. Handymen and people in other labour-heavy jobs don't earn this much in their entire life, considering a 30 years of active work life. Only the top 0.01% (yes, we are an extremely populous country) people have that kind of jobs.

Going by the PPP ratio[0] of 21.99, you still need to be earning upwards of 2.2M annual, which is hardly 1% of the population, and majority of them have taken upwards of 8-10 years of work to reach there (which means 1/3rd of work life is gone).

The argument could also be made that buying stuff is cheaper in countries like ours, but that doesn't stand for _good_ quality items. As an example, the laptop you can buy for $1k in the US is far superior to what you can buy for 22k and slightly comparable but still better than what you can buy for 75k. If you are lucky enough with means to import, good luck with ~78% import taxes and duties. You don't make these purchases often, but when you do it breaks you. Things like dishwasher, vacuum cleaners, etc are so much more common in the US and almost considered a basic necessity whereas owing to cheap labour (and traditional lifestyle) we subscribe to househelp, which isn't really "cheap" or scalable and the cost of these items is high too.

All of this, to say that

> they might be better off scaling back to a sustainable 40hr/week job

is neither practical nor helps in a poor country where an "average" person is working more than half their lives just to make ends meet.

[0]: https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...

But seriously it can also get tiresome when people constantly have to call out others for failing to formulate every observation in globally inclusive terms that cover all humans rich and poor.

- Salaries are decided monthly and unless you are an hourly billed consultant, you cannot negotiate your working hours to be lesser. - Part-time jobs do exist, but only low paying labour intensive jobs which won't leave enough energy for you to be working 2 jobs. - Shifts are again meant only for such jobs as described above. - Employment agreements explicitly prohibit you from "working" to earn in any other way. Getting a passive income is okay, but you cannot work / render services elsewhere to earn.

From junior to senior level employees, almost everyone in all sorts of jobs is overworked. Average workday last close to 10 hours, excl commute et al. Pandemic and WFH have worsened this if anything.

Be mindful. Informed. Increase your knowledge, consider alternatives, and make decisions given an expanded list of options. (Don't just go with the default, common, mainstream way of thinking that leads to people retiring at age 65 after decades of hating their job.)

I'm a proponent of many of the concepts of FIRE, but in some ways, the attitude started way before I started reading Get Rich Slowly, and Mr. Money Mustache. I'm all about putting effort into things I really care about, while being efficient and judicious with effort being put into things I don't care about. Work is usually not at the top of my list on things I care about. So I have changed jobs frequently to find ones that pay better than the last, and are also a better fit for me. Shorter commute. Better team. More engaging work.

Along the way, spending below my means and ensuring money I do spend actually provides the result I expect (i.e. lasting happiness that a lot of spending doesn't really provide) has been instrumental in making thoughtful decisions while also accumulating that cushion that can eventually wean me off paid work as a necessity.

In other words, I don't choose jobs that suck because they pay well, so I can get to a "finish line" faster. I put all the variables into play, and make sure I'm enjoying life now while also expanding the flexibility I'll have in the future.

While we agree on a lot of things, maybe we read different "FIRE discussions" because many of them factor these things in. Compulsory work limits your options, and even more so, spending all your money or beyond your means limits your options indefinitely. That doesn't mean retirement creates happiness, or is a prerequisite for a good life, but getting beyond that work requirement can certainly give you a lot more freedom in how you choose to use your time.

Often, happiness is simply "what addresses the imbalances in my life right now?"

Today, you're probably busy working a 9-5 (or longer). You spend much of your time overwhelmed by the complexity of your job, delaying gratification and doing things you don't want to do. You're stuck inside all day and working through the nicest months of the year.

In that context, of course all you want to do is sit outside at a beach, play some leisurely videogames, and eat good meals. But that's because your life right now has a distinct absence of downtime, nature, and leisure.

When you are retired, the entire context is different and thus what makes you happy will shift too. Once you no longer have a job, you'll likely find videogames boring and understimulating. When you start taking a walk every day in the woods, you might not crave moving to Hawaii quite as much. And when you have the time to cook and savor meals every evening, eating out loses some of its lustre.

Whenever the situation of your life changes, expect your happiness goals to shift too.

I think that's dangerous. Maybe in a world without work the incentives would change and these platforms might not exist in the same way. But as it stands now >50% of the people I know with too much time on their hands end up self-admittedly pissing most days away. A few of them have already decided to return to work even though they don't need to.

But that's not how our emotions work at all. Thanks to the hedonic treadmill, it's not possible to experience long-term joy over any consistent period. Active joyful enthusiasm is by nature an ephemeral experience.

Instead of happiness, what we want long term is something more akin to peace, satisfaction, or tranquility. A sense that all is right with where we are in the world.

And the model for that is much more like hunger and satiety. No one thinks that if eating one steak is good then eating a hundred steaks is great and a million is amazing. Hunger exists to address an imbalance. The goal of it is to get you back to a comfortable neutral point where you are satieted but not unpleasantly stuffed.

Unhappiness works in a similar fashion. It tells us something is off balance in our emotional life. So when you find yourself craving some experience or activity and thinking "this will make me happy", it means "this will fix a thing making me unhappy". It doesn't mean that scaling that craving up will make you extra super happy.

It doesn't take very long at all for the honeymoon to be over.

So what exactly was making you happy there, when you could only eat that meal occasionally in that restaurant? Was it really the food?

It doesn't have to be a very high one though.

I quit my job and spent 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina. I poked lava with a stick, paddled with icebergs, climbed a 20,000ft active volcano, surfed, etc. etc.

It cost $1,200 per month for absolutely every expense [1]

Before the trip I was earning $48k CAD (about $38k USD).. I just didn't spend much.

Later on I quit my job and spent three years driving all the way around Africa (35 countries around the perimeter, 54,000miles). I rode a camel and camped in the Sahara, I carried Chimpanzees, saw gorillas, petted a cheetah, saw tens of thousands of elephants in the wild, heard to lions roaring while sitting around the campfire, surfed, hiked, ate street food with friendly locals, etc. etc.

That trip cost about $1,650 per month for absolutely all expenses. [2]

Before that trip I was earning $72k CAD (about $57k USD). Again, I just tried hard to save and not spend much money while going to work for years)

I've met plenty of people that have driven their own vehicle to 100+ countries over a ~decade for about $1,500 a month. It doesn't have to be expensive.

Now I do this "for a living". I keep my expenses low and have adventures around the world. I just flew to Australia, and I'm preparing now to spend about 18 months driving all over to all the wild and remote corners I've heard about but have never seen.

[1] http://theroadchoseme.com/the-price-of-adventure

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeR3SncZkv0

I bumped into this family driving the length West Africa, one of the toughest routes in the world! They had an amazing time, and last we chatting they're busy saving money to go on another massive adventure!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc61AxCQQR4

I have kids now and when they are old enough to move out, I’ll quit my job (programmer, and I love it) and get back out there because “The mountains are calling and I must go”

Private bathrooms I gave up on when I realized those attract many bugs I did not want to share my room with. Actually I could say you end up sharing the bathroom one way or the other. Common ones are fine as long as they can be locked and are cleaned regularly. Before I checked in at any place, I’d check the common bathrooms to make sure if I should…

I would pretty quickly get adjusted to the local way of avoiding heat, which is to get up really early in the morning, rest in the afternoon and then go back out during the evening.

Another pro tip that requires some planning ahead and available time is to go to the “south” during winter and to the “north” or the mountains during the hot summers.

I don't mind 'common' bathrooms, but I despise public restrooms with stalls. I want a clean, lockable bathroom / shower.

Lately I'm finding joy in all sorts of pursuits that I had never thought about. A willingness to try new things was necessary.

So yeah. I'm just sitting at home, playing video games and ordering takeouts. Pricetag is not that high.

And that's the current best answer to "What makes me happy?"

There was a Catch-22 for me, in that "working" at any organization for any normal sized paycheck just seemed ridiculous if it didn't 100% hit on all the "passion" buttons. And honestly, no organization will be free of BS that makes work work. So making that tradeoff became REALLY hard.

So I decided that if I was going to work, I should just make a ton of money. At least the bank account fills while I search for the next thing.

Probably not in the grand scheme of things.

But it's fun to push yourself to your limits with other smart people.

There is a pile of merge requests I need to review when I get time. And the reason I want to review X, Y, and Z is because I personally desire to see improvements X, Y, and Z to the niche FOSS software I maintain.

Funny thing is, we are on a forum named "Hacker News" and I'd speculate that I'm the outlier and yours is the common case.

The most absurd part of it all is how little happiness I got from all that money. Meaning and purpose are things you have to make up. If you can find happiness in a day job, in some ways you're better off than the aimless millionaire.

I'm lucky that I have a huge passion in music and have been focusing more on that lately. It's definitely weird for me to work on something without a direct financial incentive. Yet there are many people in the world, rich or poor, living for purposes outside money.

I haven't really had too many people to talk about this with. But it feels good to share a bit. DMs open to those in similar boats

It was almost as if I didn’t know myself, and in retrospect I suppose that was true.

After several years I’ve started working again but in my own way (roci.dev). I’m a lot better at predicting what activities will feel good, and managing my time so that end of day/week I feel deeply good about how it was spent.

Strongly recommend ^ approach of “rolling with it” for several years and trying not to pass judgement with you conscious mind on where your unconscious is taking you.

Best of luck getting to know yourself.

In my working life, I've only ever taken about a month off at a time, but every time I've taken a longer break like that, I end up ultimately feeling dissatisfied with myself. I go into it with what a I think is a reasonable list of chores/projects that I want to make progress on, but ended up just puttering around— paradoxically, I get a lot more done when I have short bursts of time and have to force myself to bite off a manageable chunk and actually see it through.

I've heard people argue that a few weeks just isn't long enough to trigger productive restlessness, and that's why a sabbatical is more like 6-12 months. But this is what I worry about for myself if I were ever in a position to retire young.

In your second paragraph you mention trying to be as productive as possible during your time off. Seems like you'd be setting yourself up for disappointment there. If you instead approach that time off with 'whatever happens, happens' approach you'll be more forgiving of yourself and may actually be able to relax so you can be more productive later.

The theory I'm exploring is that happiness is healthy. By living happily, perhaps I am repairing whatever damage I did when I was so intensely on the career grind (it was rewarding but, ultimately unhealthy in a burnout way). And, by doing that repair, perhaps I'll be better suited to be even more productive.

Or by more productive, are you referring more to building more dams rather than working more?

If you’re a software developer (or a plumber or a CPA etc) you can always get back into the workforce after some amount of time. If it takes you 1 year to leetcode and find a new job, you just need to keep 1 year of expenses as cash on hand.

Tail risk is a different story, but you can spend your whole life working and not save enough to handle all tail end scenarios

I just... yeah, don't find it satisfying when I've had small tastes of that life. I like to be able to look back at the journey and see how it led to growth in my skills and achievements I'm proud of showing off.

You can then pick up new hobbies, or just return to old hobbies with renewed enthusiasm. You can do things that matter even if they're of no economic interest. You can hone skills that aren't career-related.

I think that it also requires a shift in values.

That freedom is truly priceless.

I only wish I too were 2nd at a unicorn startup ;)

I've been retired 4 years now. I wrote one novel ("Inventing the Future", on sale at Amazon!) and finished the first draft of another. But I didn't have any plan for this when I retired. I just started doing it and it felt right.

For most people that really isn't a viable option currently.

I end up doing a bit of everything. I garden, cook, play in the garage, ride my motorcycle, go camping etc. Every once in a while, something grabs me and I'm free to pursue it.

A few years ago, I joked that the American dream sucks, and that the Victorian dream is where it's at. I want to have enough free time to be a gentleman scientist, join societies and make art. Now I realise it's not that silly.

Personally, I reduced my target to a mere fraction of the $5 million you mentioned.

Finally, I completely agree that this is privilege, but without any negative judgement therein. Privilege is a thing we should be trying to give to more and more people.

Ah, of course. Poor unfortunate Americans. How could you possibly feed your children on just $40k a year. No doubt that explains the emaciated appearance of the average American child.

> A comment like this is privilege in a nutshell.

Copy that out on the blackboard 100 times until the lesson sinks in.

Things are expensive. Happiness of your wife and kids are even more expensive.

Sorry to go off on a tangent, but this really has me wondering. How big of a dam are we talking here? Is it actually legal to build a private dam?

Touching anything on it required permits from multiple agencies at each of the above.

Be careful doing ANYTHING with water, as that is regulated by feds, states, and ofen localities. Wetland regulations are extremely restrictive. And wetlands are often not wet! (Depending on where you live, state and local often try to "out green" each other by layering on even more restrictive regulations.)

Not likely. Unless it is a very small stream.

They're rich.

The Amish are extremely business savvy, shrewd negotiators, and have no issues being active members in the economy. They also own vast tracts of very valuable land (especially in Lancaster, PA). Combine that with being frugal and austere, and it's a recipe for wealth.

For childcare, their community focus let's them share the burden amongst the larger group. Additionally, children are not nearly as coddled and are expected to contribute to the family's work, and help co-parent their siblings.

Compare this to the average nuclear family: underpaid, barely any savings, most likely rents, and lucky if they have even one family member nearby that can share the childcare burden.

Since childcare is mentioned, I would be remiss if I did not point out that the Amish have a disproportionate rate of child sex abuse. Offenders often get off because the Amish community pressures victims not to testify. Victims are sent to re-education centers. It is pretty gross what goes on in plain (pardon the pun) sight. But they bring in tourist dollars. Most Amish are lovely of course, but their lifestyle has a very dark side.

There's no guarantee that buying a house will leave you richer than if you'd rented during the same time. Check out this calculator to explore your personal situation more closely, and examine the assumptions you make about growing wealth.

I know from personal experience, owning my first home, that I almost certainly would've been better off renting over that time period and investing the down payment and higher monthly payments than I ended up with having that house and equity. Sometimes you get lucky - and house prices go up and you sell at the right time (assuming you switch back to rent OR manage to then buy in a market where prices are lower than average.)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-cal...

> Of course, some lucky people already know exactly what they’re retiring to, answers firmly in hand.

> Examples:

> It’s been a lifelong dream of mine to quit my current career and take something lower paying and more meaningful: teaching or contributing to a non-profit.

> I’m going to do a lot of parenting. My kids can easily eat 14 hours a day, every day.

The _second_ example here already calls out that it's going to be common to do parenting 14 hours a day if people retire early. For someone who has kids, it's pretty unlikely to be able to roll with life and see what comes up. It just isn't possible, with or without a job, being financially independent or not. And whether we like it or not, a large percentage of the population above 40 do have kids.

This is purely my opinion, but I'm actually not sure that, for a child past 2 years old or so, if it's a good idea for a parent to be with their child 24/7. I think there's a lot of value in learning social interactions with other children in a daycare or preschool. I did this exact thing for 3 years and am transitioning the child to preschool at 3 years old, and it has been difficult.

On top of it all, let's say your kids are school age, somewhere between 3 to 16. Let's say they go to school during the day, and you have free time during the day. There is another discussion to be had about your kids' mentality if they grow up with parents who don't need to work. Sure, maybe in the near future, in this next generation, we'll enter a society where work is unnecessary and everyone lives off of UBI, and maybe the discussion is moot. But assuming that won't be the case, would you want your children to grow up with the impression that when they grow up into adults there's no need to do any productive work, or have parents as role models who contribute meaningfully to society?

Maybe I haven't thought it through, maybe I'm just not smart enough. I'm at a point in life where I could feasibly "lean FIRE" if I really want to, but for the sake of my child I'd rather continue to work. Which then leads to answering this post, my FI and retirement almost isn't about me, it's about my child/children. Or maybe that just means I'm that guy who said "I'm going to do a lot of parenting" then.

I think people who misunderstand the FIRE movement think that early retirees don't want to do meaningful work, like volunteering, painting, making music, etc. I think that is the point of FIRE - to be able to do the most meaningful things you can think of.

I took a 3-year early retirement and didn't do anything for anyone but myself and loved every minute of it. I watched TV, went to the movies, read books, went to the gym, rode my bicycle, and that was it. Had no need for anything else.

If I could do that without having a job, I'd happily do it for the rest of my life with no problems.

The article showed how unsatisfied his wife was when she felt as "not going anywhere", I think she was trying to say that she does not feel any sort of progress or growth on any level.

As it is torture to keep someone in a room with no stimulation, it is the same with repetition and no change or progress.

“Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character.” - Calvin Coolidge

We need this aspect for personal development.

Metaphor: https://m-g-h.medium.com/disneys-strategy-against-netflix-4d...

I think the flip side of this is that many people are so focused on progress and looking forward to the next goal line that they become unable to appreciate the moment and, ironically, happiness is always one more goal away. Recently, I’ve been reading books on Buddhism (specifically how it differs from many Western value systems) and it sheds some light on this. The same goes for the inability to be happy sans constant stimulation.

"Confession of a Buddhist Atheist" by Stephon Batchelor. Useful to me for understanding the cultural context of Buddhism.

Insight Meditation by Joseph Goldstein. I just find Goldstein's style the easiest to comprehend in a field that often comes across as frustratingly esoteric

Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I thought this book is interesting because it draws parallels to Western authors, particularly Thoreau.

Sam Harris's "Waking Up" app may also be worth a listen. Besides the actual mindfulness practice, there are a lot of discussions on theory and he has conversations with a variety of people that come to the topic from different perspectives.

In some cases "working for the man" isn't bad and it does give people purpose, but in (imo)the majority of cases, it is bad because it prevents you from using your time to do something you actually find meaningful.

I think the few people who are able to find meaning in their jobs are either extremely lucky to have found what they want to do, had the opportunity to pursue it and succeed, and make a decent enough living doing it without the money aspect killing their joy - or they're the type of people who have just 'over-assimilated' to modern life and found a way to extract meaning from their work, but these people would probably be able to find at least as much meaning and happiness in something else if they grew up in a world where working wasn't expected to be almost your entire life.

I don't think it is necessarily bad, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other paths to fulfillment. They may not be for you, but they exist.

> it is the same with repetition and no change or progress.

If someone chooses to retire and immediately enter a vegetative state, that's really their fault.

For example, I really want to open my own cidery. But doing so would be such a massive paycut that it wouldn't be worth pursuing right now, even though it's ultimately what I want to do.

So, I'm software engineering until I make enough to FIRE, after which I can pursue that dream.

See, your life philosophy isn't universal.

Only if you take the narrowest view of what FIRE is. There's a reason the largest subreddit for it is called r/financialindependence. It's not about retiring as early as possible. It's not having to work to survive. It's choosing to work on things which are intrinsically meaningful, as much or as little as you like. I don't think anyone in the FIRE movement would tell you it's wise to retire to a beach and sip mojitos all day.

The "freedom" and "F the man" movements (crypto, 4HWW, FIRE, MLM, Kiyosaki, etc.) all seem to share a similar narrative: Spend your most productive years in retirement while feeding off from other's labor - a somehow irresponsible worldview.

The beauty is that one human can spend 70 years meditating and find purpose in that and another human can build a rocket ship and go to space and find purpose in that...and then you have everything in between and outside!

Meaningful WORK? Not necessarily.

I am also glad that the author now opens the door for getting married and even having a kid.

Work, spouse, kids, the traditional way of life have been explored and chosen by human being for at least thousands of years. The psychological / economic needs for living with a family do not go away just because you "decide" you don't need them. There are people live alone, but most of them are not happy, for most of the time.

When you are young, you may like to wonder why do I have to live a life like my parents? When you get older, you will slowly or quickly realize that you are just a regular human being like everybody else.

It used to be that you worked just as much as you needed to, to sustain yourself. So much so that raising wages would immediately result in people working less, as they could earn the same amount of money with less work.

Then at some point work became a "calling" and working as hard as possible viewed as respectable, desirable and commendable.

I still think this is insane. There are so many things to do, so many things to think/dream about. So many moments to just do nothing and stare at nature. I don't have time for work.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is called a theory. In its nature, it's a framework of psychological conceptions based on observations. It's not like Maslow tells people what they need and the human beings on this planet start to pursue their needs based on Maslow's demand.

Yes. People want to work less, but people can't just wonder around without purpose for a long time. When you find your purpose, and start to spend your time on it, you are "working" on that purpose. Nobody says work = work for a boss.

Everything in life is work, however. Building dams, building robots, creating music, raising kids, even playing games.

If you had enough finances to do anything (including nothing at all), I'm quite sure you'd quickly find yourself working anyway. I know I would.

I don't think it's some modern concept, it's just that life has no real purpose beyond survival and reproduction and we (as in our consciousness) need one otherwise the dread of existence will set in sooner or later.

You'd expect this to crowd out many part-time jobs, jobs that aren't autonomous and low-context. That is, fast food cook, delivery driver, cleaning jobs etc. can be done part-time, but it's much harder to find shorter hours for white-collar work.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fordlandia/

Vast majority of people did not “choose” all that throughout human history. There was zero alternative. They had to work to survive. If you want to make your argument you should only look at those who were born rich enough to not have to work.

There are people born rich enough to not have to work, but do they live a happy life by not working all the way?

You're doing that thing where you claim there's freedom of choice because you're ignoring the punishment inflicted on one choice.

The choice not to commit to a long-term relationship has had severe financial implications for centuries, especially if you are female. Until the invention of effective birth control, the choice to not have children meant giving up much of heterosexual sex.

While there are still problems, the ability to have healthy heterosexual sexual relationships without children is largely solved by modern birth control. But I would argue that the choice to not marry is still financially punished pretty severely, though perhaps not as much as in centuries past.

> There are people born rich enough to not have to work, but do they live a happy life by not working all the way?

You're asking this as if it's a rhetorical question, but it's not.

Being a rock climber, I've met plenty of Trustafarians who haven't done a lick of work in their lives, and are quite happy being skiing, surfing, or rock climbing bums.

The flipside, is when I've met people who tried not working and said they didn't like it, that has always been coupled with a profound lack of imagination or self-awareness. I distinctly remember a post on HN where someone took a week off and just played World of Warcraft for the entire week, and when he found this unfulfilling he concluded that not working wasn't for him. It should be no surprise that a lifestyle with no physical activity or direct human interaction is dissatisfying--this isn't proof that work is a necessary part of human happiness, it's just proof that giving up work without replacing it with something better doesn't succeed.

I understood that was your point. The problem is that your point simply isn't true, and you've provided absolutely no evidence of your belief beyond your patronizing "some people realize this earlier than others".

I do think that intimacy is a necessary part of happiness for most people, but there are many ways to find intimacy besides a spouse. As for kids: people who don't ever want kids and end up happy are common enough that I'd consider it common knowledge. There are all sorts of families out there, and many of them don't involve marriages or children.

A bit personal maybe, but my wife has never been on birth control, we don't use protection, and have never had an "oops" baby. We had kids when we wanted kids, and haven't had kids when we didn't want kids.

It's really just... not that hard...

You're taking a risk, in the context of a committed relationship where you've already had kids (so the stakes are lower than for a lot of people). So far that risk has worked out for you. That doesn't mean that is the right risk for everyone. It also doesn't mean that what you're doing is reliable for everyone. And it certainly doesn't mean that you're somehow more intelligent or competent than the people for whom similar methods of family planning have failed.

I personally think it is a sign of modern hubris to assume that effective family planning didn't exist prior to 1960s and the advent of birth control.

All forms of family planning can fail. I don't think that's contentious.

Personally, the bigger issue I see among my peers is inability to conceive at all. They squandered their fertile years and are now going to enormous expense to start a family.

Effective toward what end?

Having kids when and only when you want them? Sure. "Only have sex when you want a kid" has always been an option.

Having kids when and only when you want them, and fulfilling your biological urges? Not so much.

I'm glad for you that your family planning worked for you and fulfilled your needs, but if you're going to extrapolate your experience to literally all humans throughout history, you aren't really in a position to be talking about other people's hubris.

> Having kids when and only when you want them, and fulfilling your biological urges? Not so much.

Unsure if you're being obstinate or ignorant, but we've been married a decade and I assure you we have had sex several orders of magnitude more than the three times we conceived.

Baby = Egg + sperm. Keep those two apart and no baby. Not exactly rocket science.

If pulling out, having sex while not ovulating, or whatever you did, is satisfying for you, great! I applaud your satisfaction.

However, as I said not everyone is satisfied by that kind of sex. To say that the limitations imposed by a lack of birth control don't exist, or aren't important, fails to capture the depth, breadth, and variety of human sexuality.

No, that's absolutely not all you did. You said:

> A bit personal maybe, but my wife has never been on birth control, we don't use protection, and have never had an "oops" baby. We had kids when we wanted kids, and haven't had kids when we didn't want kids.

> It's really just... not that hard...

Do you see the part where you went from "Hey, we did this and it worked for us" to "Therefore everyone else for whom this doesn't work is stupid/incompetent?"

And then you doubled down by accusing everyone who doesn't think what you do of ignorance and hubris:

> I personally think it is a sign of modern hubris to assume that effective family planning didn't exist prior to 1960s and the advent of birth control.

So if you'd like to admit you crossed the line and adjust what you said to, "Hey, we did this and it worked for us", great, that's a much more reasonable thing to say than what you actually said. But everyone reading this exchange can see that's not what you actually originally said.

And I was entirely justified in comparing what you actually said to faith healing, because at a societal level teaching people non-contraceptive means of birth control has historically been about as useful as faith healing.

I'm emphasizing at a societal level because you left that out when you quoted me. Please at the very least when you quote me, quote full sentences: you're only quoting me out of context to try to twist what I said.

You don't get to rewrite history so you can play the victim here.

> It's really just... not that hard...

..and:

> I personally think it is a sign of modern hubris to assume that effective family planning didn't exist prior to 1960s and the advent of birth control.

If I am misinterpreting what you said, the problem is your communication skills, not my interpretation.

When someone says, "You're wrong", perhaps you should consider that you were wrong.

If you don't want to admit that what you said was wrong like an adult, fine. But if you're going to continue to try to paint me as if I'm bullying you, you can't be surprised if I step in to defend myself.

If a woman has sex without some kind of fertility awareness, she gets pregnant. If she knows when she ovulates and avoids sex during that time and 5 days prior, she might not get pregnant.

Thing is: female libido is highest when the fertility in a cycle is the highest. So biologically speaking, women have to actively fight their hormones if they want to avoid pregnancy.

I really think you are all just intentionally misunderstanding me.

I am not saying "You can only get pregnant if you want to get pregnant"

I am saying "A couple in a committed relationship can fairly easily and reliably avoid having kids without the use of contraceptives if they don't want them."

For most of the human history, for vast majority of the people, choosing not to have spouse and kids would mean choosing not to have sex, e.g. to become a monk. Also, the societal pressure to choose a traditional way of life if you were poor was a lot higher.

It's worth noting that these people are by definition going to be outliers in the population, as they don't reproduce, so there will always be a selection bias the other way.

The earlier the better, one of the best revelation that I had is that 'nobody actually cares about me that much'. So much of the peer/social pressure are self inflicted.

the focus of former for most everyone was just to survive; you worked (probably sustenance farming) to survive, you married for resources, you had children to help with work, etc.

modern work and family is vastly different because work isn't solely motivated by the need for survival, many people today are privileged enough to think about other motivating factors like meaning, prestige, and satisfaction. only now do people had the ability to question things like how they structure relations and relationships, and find what works for them

I think trying to extrapolate in the way you are is flawed

There might be less people work for survival, and more for higher needs, but it does not change the basic structure of human needs (see Maslow's hierarchy of needs).

I don't see how this point out what flaw I may have.

Find something I can do remotely part-time throughout the year and I'd honestly be set. Plus student loan forgiveness means I might actually get to own a house by the time I'm 35ish.

Here are their discussions: https://livingafi.com/post-fire-relationship-disconnect/

TL;DR: He has to go back to work due to medical issues, and his relationship didn't work out. But he's still got his chin up and it's great.

> [article author's wife] Not exactly. I wanted to have kids with you and work and be like everyone else. Live a normal life. I’m tired of being weird. And I don’t want to go back to work if you aren’t. That’s weird too. You wouldn’t even be a stay-at-home-dad. You’d be nothing.

> [article author] And that was it. That the second big ticket problem, critical issue #2. She couldn’t get her head around the idea that we were different.

I don't buy his analysis. I don't think she wanted to do those things because others were doing them. I think she wanted to have kids and a classic family and happened to point out, oh, by the way, other people do those things too. Maybe it's easier to think that your former partner is shallow and busy comparing herself to others, rather than admit that the desire to start a family is a normal and genetically ingrained emotion.

Ironically, his new partner has told him she's interested in having kids and they're both working. I know, it's easy to claim to understand from an armchair, and I'm not saying I've necessarily got this right, but it's definitely interesting to consider.

this part is confusing. it seems like she's saying she wanted to be working and have kids the whole time? hard to understand how you could get that far along the path without realizing it's the exact opposite of what you want. a more reasonable way to understand the quote is that she simply changed her mind after realizing the implications of their life path.

which leads to a more reasonable way of interpreting this line:

> [article author] And that was it. That the second big ticket problem, critical issue #2. She couldn’t get her head around the idea that we were different.

I think (or at least hope) the author isn't saying they are special people with some kind of special destiny to FIRE. if I read it as "she couldn't accept our being different [from our friends]", it makes a lot more sense. I think the author is painfully aware that working and starting a family is the "normal" thing to do.

1. You derive meaning from work.

2. You want more shiny material stuff all the time for shallow "keeping up with the Joneses" reasons

3. You want to raise a family, which was not possible in the financial plan of the article's author.

You and the author both focussed on 2, but to me it sounds like the wife mainly wanted 3. Reason 2 may or may not be genetically ingrained, that is besides the point; wanting children definitely is, at least in some people. (A sibling comment suggested that they may not have been able to have genetic children for other reasons, but that doesn't necessarily stop the desire.)

I also really question the whole living on 30k thing with 950k in the bank. That could be invested into some monthly paying income ETFs that would easily pay double if not more what he was taking out. Without even touching the principal.

He saw her desires as vain and felt like she didn't understand his ideal of freedom. She saw his freedom as stagnation.

I can relate to the anxiety and ennui they experienced in 2018. Something good about being in the rat race is that even during bad days you don't feel adrift or wasteful. During the first couple of months after I quit working, and after moving abroad, I hadn't yet enrolled in full-time language classes. At first it was easy to enjoy myself meeting new people, going rock climbing, traveling a bit, going on dates, etc. But after a while, I started noticing that if I woke up at 11am and didn't have "something to do," i.e. a plan, I started feeling a very strong sense of unease, something like a very mild sense of panic or alarm. Like here I am with no work to eat up my day, plenty of money, nothing but free time. If I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, or just don't feel like I'm enjoying myself, I am utterly wasting my precious time on Earth. That's a pretty dark chasm lurking just beneath the surface. If I'm having a bad day but can still pour a cup of coffee and go to work, I'm at least banking up money for some future day that I can enjoy it.

I feel like he was a little unfair in how he characterized his partner's experience of that ennui, although I don't blame him for feeling bitter after an affair. I've never wanted to keep up with the Joneses or spend my life jockeying for status, but I still don't think I'd feel okay permanently quitting work this young. There's more existential dread in being immediately responsible for enjoying every single day to the fullest than I'm ready to face.

Work serves as a default purpose for lots of people. Family and children are a pretty good built-in biological one.

Learning things, building a company, making things can all serve that need. Working on big unsolved problems can too.

I think most people feel uneasy and unhappy if they're not part of a community doing something they think is valuable. A lot of religion serves this purpose for people (though I personally find religion to be a net negative).

Finding different things that motivate you and are worth dedicating your life (or some subset of your life) to work on is hard, but I think knowing that it's worth trying to find something is the first step.

True financial independence is a way to make the search more possible without anxiety of financial ruin, but it doesn't remove the non-money related anxieties and it doesn't fix all the other sexual selection incentives that remain.

I also agree with your assessment of his partner. Keeping up with the Joneses sounds shallow at first, but I think it belies the true human desire to be respected by others. Maybe his partner felt like they weren't "accomplishing much" in life, which doesn't mean a 9-5 per se or an annual income $ per se, but that accomplishments were the best way to get respected by other people.

We're social creatures, so I don't think it's wrong to seek social validation by others. I think when one is single and looking for a partner, what other people think does matter a lot. I think if the author was still committed to not working, finding a partner would be much harder.

But if there is only painting and music and cooking, it becomes kinda pointless, especially if most people you know don't have time during the day. You're doing this all alone.

I've been thinking about this all day, and I realized another experience it gives me similar feelings to. at 15 I absolutely hated public high school. I had been alt-schooled (home schooled, unschooled, something like that) up until 9th grade. After one year in regular school, learning at a mind numbing pace, I knew with conviction that I just wanted to finish school and get on with life, so I withdrew and enrolled in the local night school. I blew through classes and would have graduated in no time, but something started gnawing at me. I could finish school for the day at my own pace and then leave, but to do what? After leaving regular high school, my classmates were mostly troubled kids, or people trying to get their life back on track by getting a diploma. I fairly quickly realized that I was going to miss out on being in the rat race of high school for 4 years, and went back to regular school halfway through the school year.

If we actually listen to the original author instead of looking for confirmation of our own worldviews, the author tells a different story. He says, (this is a copy-paste quote): "The initial plan itself was fine." His original plan wasn't unrealistic, at least not any more unrealistic than any more traditional life plans--it simply fell prey to life events which would cause almost any plan to fail. His partner left him for another man and he was diagnosed with a serious medical issue.

And critically, while the author's plan has changed, the goals still haven't. Not working is still the goal.

I've seen the plan that's common on Hacker News fail too. Lots of startups fail, and even if your startup succeeds that doesn't mean you're satisfied. The best case scenario has nothing to do with economics: it's coming to peace with yourself, finding meaningful relationships, and feeling a sense of purpose and belonging. I won't write off the possibility of finding those things in a startup or a career, but in my life I've seen it far less than the self-congratulatory posts here would lead you to believe.

Both of those events are very common – especially medical issues. Once you're getting old, developing a "serious medical issue" is more common than not! Any plan which assumes that you'll neither break up with your partner nor develop medical issues for the rest of your life is a plan destined to fail.

Working a job doesn't fix either of these problems. At least in the US, many people who go bankrupt due to medical issues have health insurance, usually provided by their job. These problems are compounded if your plan was to work, but you can't work due to your medical problems. And while medical or disability insurance can theoretically account for these worst-case scenarios, they can be so costly that they may cause financial problems even if no disaster happens.

Divorce is also a major cause of bankruptcy, even if you're employed.

You're doing exactly what my previous post accused people of doing: gloating about how the author's plan failed, without looking at how plans that fit your worldview don't account for the same life events any better.

And you're still wrong. Retiring early renders your financial situation much more fragile and susceptible to disruptive events. Sure, you can go bankrupt due to divorce or illness even when employed, but it's much more probable when you don't have an income stream and when your financial planning depends on not breaking up or not getting ill.

> gloating about how the author's plan failed, without looking at how plans that fit your worldview don't account for the same life events any better.

You're making a lot of unwarranted assumptions about my "worldview" and about how I'm "gloating" over the author's misfortune. Don't.

This is exactly missing my point:

Just because you retire early, doesn't mean your financial planning depends on you not breaking up or not getting ill.

Just because you work out the rest of your existence, doesn't mean you've successfully accounted for breakups or illness.

> Retiring early renders your financial situation much more fragile and susceptible to disruptive events.

Why is that, exactly?

> You're making a lot of unwarranted assumptions about my "worldview" and about how I'm "gloating" over the author's misfortune.

What assumptions? Am I correct in saying that you believe "Retiring early renders your financial situation much more fragile and susceptible to disruptive events" is part of your worldview, and that you're taking the author's failure as a confirmation of that worldview?

Though maybe this is colored by the relevation that follows shortly thereafter. To me it shows an unwillingness to think critically about this. It sounds like his partner communicated with him changes she wanted to make (go back to work and not live like college students) and he just ignored them because he thought they were stupid.

My take away from the post is that they fundamentally felt 2 different ways about it. The author did not feel the stuff his SO felt. But she was on board with retiring on “lean fire” so I doubt she predicted this about herself either.

I read this post a few weeks ago, so maybe I’m remembering wrong, but I thought the author was perfectly open to SO returning to work, but she wasn’t sure in the middle of all this if she really wanted to do that? I don’t think it’s the author’s responsibility, and I don’t think he thought it was his responsibility, to decide for his spouse if she worked or not, that was up to her to decide.

The sense I got was that it was status related and he was pretty close to right. She didn't like being with someone who wasn't working, didn't like telling her friends her SO didn't work, didn't like not having things to talk about, etc. He was low status compared to her friends.

Eventually she cheated on him - I think that's wrong, but the motivation behind it is not unpredictable or uncommon: https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthli...

The new relationship is different in part because his SO is a librarian with a small income, there isn't as much of a status divide and he is high status in that match given his high net worth.

There's a lot of evidence that women tend to select people at their level or higher for mates: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/216-being-a-transhumani...

A lot of this feels like a narrative on top of that core issue without recognizing the underlying problem.

Obviously things are more complex than this at the individual level, but it feels like a lot of talking around the core issue without recognizing it.

I'm not making morality judgements on any of this (except perhaps the cheating), but it's good to recognize the pragmatic reality of the world you're in when making these kinds of decisions. If you decide to retire early, it'll likely affect your relationship opportunities in some ways you may not understand.

One thing that I missed the first time this article got posted is that he and his (ex)wife had separate finances.

He had an income of 30k/year, she presumably had a similar income.

Living on 60k/year seems like a whole different ballgame than 30k/year.

I can relate to his outlook. I hope he was more diplomatic during their discussions about this, but now that it's after the fact, we are reading his blunt opinions on the matter. It's hard to know if he is "right" and she really was influenced by status-driven thinking via Instagram, or if he was just being hard-headed. Either or both are plausible to me.

> And she wasn’t trying that hard anyway, because she had acquired, somehow, New Life Dreams, which had to do with Conspicuous Consumption and Keeping Up and being Visibly Awesome — dreams which are at odds with my own.

The desire to be seen and take part in society is fundamentally human. Yes, you can overdo it, but you can also underdo it. There is nothing wrong with going to nice restaurants, posting about it, discussing it with your friends, etc.

My guess is that they simply stopped having a social life with their peers (he hinted at such). That sounds horrible to me.

There is a reason that retirement communities exist. Just because you retire, that doesn't mean you exit from community.

Different things make different people happy. Some people enjoy having the biggest TV on the block. Other people take pride in NOT having a TV.

My take is that what his wife wanted was not “conspicuous consumption” but rather just a healthy social life.

Granted that is just what i gleaned from his statements.

It can come out in different ways, but I suspect it's not that divorced from the above. It's not very attractive to be unemployed and not very ambitious. Maybe the introspection of why is missing, but I suspect that's the reason.

Like if your partner directly tells you they are unhappy because of XYZ, rather than thinking it’s stupid/some part of how the woman brain works (eye roll), it seems pretty clear that not doing anything to fix XYZ - in this case working again and living more luxuriously - is being a bad partner. Doesn’t matter what the genders are or what XYZ is.

> "it seems pretty clear that not doing anything to fix XYZ - in this case working again and living more luxuriously - is being a bad partner."

Yeah - and the why is the bit I was getting at. They have a core value disagreement here, it's likely to be a common one given sexual selective incentives and behavior. I'm not making a moral judgement, but that's likely the truth.

It also sounded like she didn't want to work again - it's unclear if she wanted them both to work, or just for him to work. The podcast I linked is pretty good, men and women often cheat for different reasons, but her motivation here is a pretty textbook example.

His comments are also in the context of her cheating on him and a breakup, so unsurprisingly skew negative.

I’m not surprised at all at what happened.

The author's outlook on life is completely valid, so is his partner's, so is yours. Your outlooks has nothing to do with social media, but maybe his partner's really did. We only have the author's words to go by for this story.

It's a dialog he is creating as a summary of many discussions. In his version of the story they both communicate well and seem to hear each other, but not agree on life. Then his takeaway is that she didn't hear him, which was an odd take.

That is so smug and self-important. He clearly has social needs, he just feels them differently. And also, not everyone who wants to work and have wealth is just doing it to keep up with others.

I like having some wealth because it makes a lot of things easier. I like the stuff I buy, for myself, for its intrinsic value. A lot of things I spend money on I never even show anyone else. I don't post on social media or go on social media, but I still like a nice house and some toys.

The goal of retirement is to have enough that you will be able to avoid working even if some things go wrong. Otherwise you're not ready to retire.

The downsides I thought of were the inherit randomness of life (catastrophic incidents, children, relationships, health). I'm fairly certain the people working at my company past potential retirement are due to them having family and wanting the insurance perks and hedge for any potential uncertainties children and older age can throw at you.

I really liked that the author elaborated on the relationship dynamic, because I think that's something that could be a common issue in FIRE relationships with a middle-class or higher partner. What if they still want to work or do more? Can your lifestyle accomodate that?

2021: life is perfect with a new perfect partner who's never going to leave me unlike my previous perfect partner

2023: any guesses?