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.
Conversation
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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Replying to
The idea is for Chad to blow his money and end up learning something in the end.
The tragedy is that learning something is what he set up to avoid to begin with.

