Somebody should do an ethnography. This subculture is a great natural experiment comparable to George Vaillant’s famous longitudinal study.
Conversation
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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The startlingly high percentage of Americans living on $30k will tell you that nobody tracks spending like the poor.
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Yeah the impedance mismatch must have been tough for him. Most people living on 30k/y (well 60 with his partner) have negative net worth, not nearly a million like him. It would be socially draining unless you’re in Thailand or something.
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Don't even have to go as far as Thailand - $30K/y is more than i made on the best years here in Russia, and is well in the "waste money and blow it up in utterly irresponsible ways" territory with our prices.
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