Forged in the FI/RE
I read an essay the other day from a guy who really, really hates the Financial Independence/Retire Early (FI/RE) movement. Jared, who writes the We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards newsletter, did not mince words: “This is the f***ing stupidest thing I have ever heard of in my life.”
As a personal finance writer and semi-loyal FI/RE believer, I felt like I was eavesdropping on a conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear. Fortunately, I’m always ready to indulge in some good old-fashioned shit-talking—regardless of the subject!—so I rolled up my sleeves and prepared to be titillated by his unfettered hot takes.
His argument boiled down to this: Decades upon decades of unstructured free time to stress over the stock market’s every move is not an aspirational existence. And as a chiefly “anti-consumption” movement, FI/RE pledges a life of less: less work, less money, and less stuff. What it provides in spades—see: time—isn’t a good thing, he argues, because without those other things to fill it with (work, money, stuff), you end up “agonizing and obsessing” over every dollar.
“I don’t want to consume nothing and produce nothing,” he writes, noting that the movement is full of “white people in Colorado” (the snort I snart!) who are “predominantly liberal” because “no self-respecting conservative” would ever quit their job to “cover Hey Soul Sister on ukulele.” Like I said: a rich text.
“This recounting of the goal—the vision of 50 years of blank space—struck me as existentially fraught.”
Generally, these colorful points weren’t new to me. He even mentioned a theoretical snag I’ve covered before—that it doesn’t scale—and that someone needs to keep clocking in and out for 40 years so the underlying companies fueling stock market returns will rise in value and produce that blessed 9%-per-year-before-inflation juice. Won’t someone think of the shareholders?!
What did unsettle my spirit, though, was his seemingly harmless description of the typical FI/RE devotee:
“Joe Millennial graduates from college and gets a job in the cube farm for $80,000 a year. He gets the cheapest apartment possible, rides a bike instead of driving, and eats ramen noodles. He does this for ten years, saving up to 70% of his income, and investing it in low-cost index funds. At the end of ten years, he has a million or so saved up, more if he is lucky. At that point, he retires to play the guitar or paint happy little trees, and gradually draws down his savings over time. If the stock market keeps going up as planned, he can stay retired for 50 more years, and get really good at guitar.”
This was, of course, the promise that initially drew me in like a moth to an open flame—you’re telling me I can compress my working life into one-quarter of the time then sail into the sunset, never to labor again? Where do I sign?!
But for some reason, this recounting of the goal—the vision of 50 years of blank space—struck me as existentially fraught.
FI/RE lives somewhere in a tangle of Venn diagrams with hustle culture, productivity and business advice, and other maxims about creating a life of financial abundance. There are different sects: Some emphasize anti-consumption, as Jared noted, while others are more concerned with creating as much “passive income” as possible.
One thing is true of all: In an effort to accelerate the path to not working at all, many adherents work a lot.
Somewhere in my mainlining of these philosophies, my wires got crossed. I conflated being busy with being responsible; productive with being profitable. A sense of ambient hustle urged me forward toward an imaginary (or rather, quantified) finish line. I filled every spare moment with a podcast, newsfeed, or task, reflexively stuffing my day until it suffocated, removing any capacity for broader reflection.
And with good reason! In school, this methodology worked: At the beginning of every semester, there was a syllabus prescribing a finite number of assignments, tests, and exams that, once finished, marked an endpoint that meant one to three months of uninterrupted downtime. One could get ahead, and the year was punctuated with long windows of respite between sprints.
But in the working world, “getting ahead” is an illusion. There is no point at which the semester ends, no natural stopping point. Instead, it’s week after week of that amnesiac delusion that “if I can just work extra this weekend and clear this to-do list, I’ll reach a point where I’m ahead and can take a breather.” Unfortunately, working “faster” usually just means working more.
“In this context, FI/RE was an irresistible dangling carrot. ”
In this context, FI/RE—the promise of a career finish line you can sprint past, into the land of compounding returns and endless summer vacation—was an irresistible dangling carrot.
It’s important to recall, of course, that most people who “retire” early end up doing some other job or filling their time with something productive (otherwise, as Jared put it, your “visions of going to the beach, traveling, or visiting the grandkids” turn into spending your days “in the living room with the brown carpet with Fox News turned up to 11”).
The point is, life is long, and if you’re just going to get another job—or otherwise devote your time and effort to something productive—in retirement, the thinking goes, What’s the rush? Why not just make money doing something you like, so you don’t have to rely on the fickle mistress of the public markets for 40+ years?
I was reminded of a conversation I had with a friend a few years ago who was self-employed working part-time. She only worked in the afternoons, took random days off, and approached work at a leisurely pace. As I worked four jobs simultaneously to produce as much margin as possible, I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t more interested in maximizing her income. When she asked me why I was working so hard, I scoffed at how silly the question was: “So I can get to the point where I can work however I want,” I explained. Duh!
She didn’t seem to understand. “Oh,” she replied, “Well…I already work however I want.” Mic = dropped.
I’ve spent the better part of the last four years on a six- or seven-days-per-week schedule, putting in between eight and 10 bonus hours every weekend for maximum output. It began during the pandemic when I started working from home, and my personal and professional lives blurred inextricably together. Seeing my desk from the couch felt like an ever-present invitation; a reproach against my Sunday morning lazing.
While at first I enjoyed the edge working all weekend gave me, somewhere along the line, it stopped providing an edge and became a necessity: In order to keep up with the pace I had set for myself (and the expectations that created!), I had to work every day. FI/RE, I figured, was the reward.
But this past weekend, I did an experiment: I avoided my laptop and phone entirely, knowing how even my purest attempts at good, old-fashioned doom scrolling had a tendency to drift mindlessly into Slack or my inbox, blacking back in two hours later and three folders deep in Google Drive.
Hungry for the artificial sugar rush of infinite feeds and stimulation, my brain started flipping through a Rolodex of fragmented memories and ideas, not unlike the way I compulsively scroll my own Photos app when there’s no wi-fi on long flights.
“After my weekend of nothingness, I felt a magical polarity I had long forgotten.”
But eventually, I read. I napped. I walked. I cooked and ate. After about 36 hours, I felt my nervous system beginning to unclench. Is this how people lived in the eighties?! I wondered, basking in the anachronistic glow of only having Large Screen, as Small and Medium Screens were safely shelved away. What a strange feeling to be so alone with your thoughts, I reflected, grasping at whatever memory floated to the surface and luxuriating in the sense of space.
With so much time on my hands, I thought a lot about what Jared wrote—how he prefers the 80-hour work week and his favorite time is Sunday night, because he’s always so excited to get up on Monday morning. After my weekend of nothingness, I felt a magical polarity I had long forgotten.
Paradoxically, I realized, FI/RE represented anti-hustle to Jared: a movement that suggested doing less. My interpretation was the opposite—that in order to ever do less, you must first do far more.
But I wondered: Rather than resolving to live the life you actually want once you’ve surpassed a magic number, what if you tried living that way now?
Whether that means more frequent vacations, a schedule with less pressure, or simply approaching day-to-day life differently, it’ll almost definitely mean it’ll take a lot longer to hit “the number”—but you’ll no longer be in any hurry to get there.
