Case study of a retire-early story that didn’t go as planned. He attributes it to anomie, a breakup, and a health crisis. But it reads like he had just a little too much imagination to run the script as robotically as it seems to call for. ht
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About a decade ago, the early retirement crowd used to read/link to me but then seemed to decide I was too invested in the normie world. On my part I decided they were all acting dead and attempting to live in ways that a normally imaginative psyche would not allow.
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It’s not the financial narrative that’s implausible. It’s the accompanying psychological one. This guy did pretty well despite the breakup and health issues. He could have stayed retired at a pinch. It was the psychological plausibility that unraveled. He’s not dead enough.
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This crowd is kinda fascinating. There is significant overlap with the rationalists, except that they actually set up falsifiable life scripts (“if I retire early I will be happy and fulfilled”) and usually don’t theologize (“be less wrong and prepared for the rise of AGI”)
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Somebody should do an ethnography. This subculture is a great natural experiment comparable to George Vaillant’s famous longitudinal study.
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They’re not as cartoon as their writings make them seem. The couple I’ve met seem to have this idea that if they can solve money for once and for all, interesting freedoms and new dimensions will open up. Retirement as portal rather than flag, a consciousness elevating threshold.
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I think the script fails because money isn’t actually the active meaning-blocker constraint people think. If your best idea for a meaningful life purpose before early retirement is to write a bad sci-fi novel, retirement won’t magically elevate that purpose to a more sublime one.
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The great tragedy is not that life disruptions transform you, but that they don’t. If you want to transform, you kinda have to choose to transform as a conscious project.
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Big life changes, planned or unplanned, fortunate or unfortunate, only give you the option to change. They don’t automatically trigger change. This dude still seems a bit in denial that it wasn’t just his partner who didn’t change. He didn’t either.
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Conversely when something snaps and you decide to transform, you can do so without an external enabling change, though it’s harder. And you’ll trigger an external change as effect. Usually inner change forces outer change, but outer change rarely forces inner change.
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This idea basically never held the slightest appeal for me. A different FIRE does though: Financial Irresponsibility and Ridiculous Extremes. If we’re talking mansion with my own space program I’m interested. If it’s disciplined and stoic spending and portfolio rebalancing, yawn.
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The transformative option I’m interested in is being able to waste money and blow it up in utterly irresponsible ways.
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I mean the kind of careful drawdown he’s talking... 30k/year basically means you give up working for others in order to work as your own CPA.
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Anyhow I’m rooting for this guy. Many such stories trigger pure schadenfreude for me. This one... I think he deserves a genuine inner transformation and proper win in the next chapter. Hope he weans off the FIRE script and orients around something more interesting.
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