A Cautionary Tale for Caring Less About Your Finances in 2023
tl;dr
“We make the mistake of assuming that joy is like cash—that if we don’t “spend” it today, it can be invested (and grow larger) for the future. We assume there must be a payoff—otherwise, why delay it? Unlike with money, investing a bunch of joy for later doesn’t compound—it just guarantees you’ll enjoy less of your limited time here.
The only way to create more joy is to spend it right now. It’s a limitless resource, which means it’s not worth saving for later. (And to the extent you have to spend some money to make it happen, remember: That’s what money is for.)”
When I was in my early twenties, I had a realization one day walking into work that changed everything.
As I’ve shared in the past, I was only a few months into working full-time—not even in the same galaxy as someone nearing retirement age—when I experienced more acute existential pangs than those I had been fending off every weekend at overpriced bars and restaurants for the last year.
For those who’re unfamiliar, I’ll recount the non-event quickly:
Teetering on high heels and balancing my lunch bag on one side and my laptop bag on the other, straps digging into my forearms and phone already dinging with emails, I paused in the parking lot.
“Holy shit,” I thought to myself. “Is this the next 40 years of my life?”
I have no idea why this particular mundane day sparked this panicky revelation, but for the first time in my adult life, I didn’t feel excited and motivated—I felt an unnerving clarity about my future on its current trajectory, and as a result, utterly trapped. My cubicle started to feel like a cage.
Visualizing the next 40 years of such mornings—roughly 10,000 more, just like this one—felt like an endless expanse punctuated only by biweekly paychecks, occasional work wins, and many, many Thursday afternoons spent lusting after the weekend.
It was around this time I found the “Financial Independence, Retire Early” movement through media like the ChooseFI Podcast and Mr. Money Mustache and The Mad Fientist. It gave me a sense of control and hope in the existential morass of, “Who am I? Does what I do every day on my shitty 4-year-old Dell laptop between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm even matter? What’s the point?” (This is, ladies and gentlemen, what we refer to in the financial world as being “down bad.”)
It’s like that Ellen Goodman quote (oft-memed by FI/RE devotees) that points out the cyclical absurdity of our lives: “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need to pay for the clothes, car, and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.”
My inner grade-grubbing “Summer” from School of Rock perfectionist gleefully glommed onto my noble FI/RE goal with the passion and commitment of a thousand exploding suns, and while I usually cite this experience as my Rich Girl villain origin story, in retrospect I can recognize it as something else:
Yes, it was my baptism by FI/RE, but it was also a quarter-life crisis.
It had all the classic trappings of your quintessential existential implosion (minus the cherry-red Corvette and affair with a younger woman):
Confusion about identity and purpose
Panicky, anxiety-filled reckoning with how precious life energy is being spent
Irrationally strong reaction that externalizes the dread (read: becoming obsessed with money)
Money, I recognized at the time, was the way out.
And in the process of acquiring enough money to regain true autonomy over my life, money became both the means and the end. Forest, meet trees.
This is where most FI/RE rhetoric stops
In the FI/RE world, “getting rich and getting off the grid” is where the story ends.
Once you reach FI, the lore goes, you’ll finally have free will again. Choice. Independence.
But rarely do we explore what all that freedom, choice, and independence actually means—and while FI/RE acolytes will insist that’s the easy part, I’m not so sure.
(I’ve been writing this blog for almost three years, so the evolution of my opinion has been fossilized for eternity. This post from the archives attempts to address this question with the same degree of “Duh, Carol!” flippancy I’m criticizing right now. So young! So naïve. You’ll have to survive some redundancy; consider yourself warned.)
To save you the time, allow me to regale you with 2020 Katie’s master plan:
Get rich, get off the W-2 grid, and do Money with Katie full-time. Sail into the sunset inside the roomy coffers of my 401(k) and “do whatever the f*** I want to!” (Sigh.)
Rereading my assessment of my situation at the time, I have to laugh:
“The savings from one job simply aren’t enough to get me to $1 million invested quickly—right now, I have four sources of income, and I spend the better part of every day working. I’m convinced this is something you get used to, and working from 6am until 8pm isn’t so bad when you mostly like your different gigs.”
Oh, honey. The absolute Stockholm syndrome of working 70+ hours a week.
“I like it!” she says, eye twitching. “It’s not even that bad!” she cries out, buttchugging a vat of Red Bull.
In my defense, though, this line still made me laugh:
“I felt like I had finally arrived at the raging party everyone told me about for the last four years, and it was just someone named Pam’s 40th birthday party with a couple of guys in button-down shirts standing around a punch bowl talking about customer acquisition.”
She ain’t wrong, but she’s also not all the way right about her conclusion that reaching a 7-figure net worth is the solution to her existential dread.
2022 Katie checking in here: Guess what, sister?! You did it! You’ve gotten “rich” (well, for a 28-year-old, at least), you do Money with Katie full-time, and for the most part, you do what you want, when you want.
I’ve reached what the cool kids call “Coast FI,” where I’ve invested enough that I can Netflix-and-chill for the foreseeable future. I can’t retire, but I also don’t have to keep saving for retirement. As a result, the fetters of income-producing labor are a lot looser than they used to be. By basically every reasonable measure, the job is done.
The freedom I so desperately wanted? I have it. Permission to exit the rat race. An invitation to exit the cubicle cage.
On one hand, that’s one hell of an endorsement for getting your shit together early and grinding it out for a few years. It’s a happy ending to the story.
It’s also a confusing beginning to another one.
An ever-expanding finish line
Slapstick humor papí Jim Carrey once said, “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.”
“Yeah,” I used to think, “maybe for most people! But I know about the 4% rule. I have hobbies! Getting rich is definitely the answer for me.”
While “rich” is subjective and I’m certainly not “famous,” now that I’ve reached financial security, I understand what he means. The peace and contentment I figured I’d feel when I (a) no longer worried about paying my bills and (b) could do Money with Katie full-time? It lasted for a couple of months.
And for those few months, wow, was I happy! Fulfilled! Proud! Content! (Feel free to read that last one as “contentment” and also like “content creator,” because holy shit, I was making a lot of content.)
Then, that became “normal.” My goal compensation was exciting for a few months, but I quickly affixed my eyes to a new summit: A seven-figure year.
2020’s goal of a seven-figure net worth? Quaint. I was ready to up the ante.
It might be human nature, but I found my own behavior to be a little unnerving. I felt like the guys in The Hangover blacking back in after a blurry, indiscriminate expanse of time in a trashed hotel room—except I wasn’t surrounded by strippers and a wild animal. I was surrounded by Post-It Notes and media plans and discarded cold brew containers, trying to understand why I was still working close to 70 hours a week next to a whiteboard that said: 2023 REVENUE GOAL: $5M.
Cages of our own making
Whether we’re consciously aware of it or not, most of us voluntarily attach our happiness to some distant point in the future.
Back then, it was, “I’ll be content when I’m worth a million bucks and can do my passion project full-time. That’s when I’ll finally relax and enjoy my awesome life.”
Now it’s, “I’ll be content when my passion project nets a million bucks a year. That’s when I’ll finally feel like my work is valuable.”
When that happens, I’ll probably decide the new mountaintop is an 8-figure revenue year, or some other ludicrous, arbitrary goal to which I’ll devote myself fully, sacrificing everything else in pursuit of it.
As in: “My life will actually begin when [x] happens. Until then, I’m just working toward that.”
We hoard our happiness—our contentment—like scarcely allocated Schrute Bucks to be saved in service of some unspecified time in the future when we check some box or surpass some goal, at which point we assume we’ll finally allow ourselves to release and enjoy all of our pent-up, exploding joy. “Ah,” we’ll say, “I’ve finally arrived.”
And money is an extraordinarily tempting manifestation of this phenomenon, because it’s a metric that so obviously lends itself to such benchmarking. (Or, by extension, some other adult rite of passage like home ownership, which obviously requires quite a bit of money to achieve.)
While some financial pundits criticize humans’ inability to delay gratification, I’d argue it’s all we do.
What else can explain the resigned willingness of the majority of the American workforce to clock in and out for 40 years to hopefully eke out a few sick golf trips in old age? We’re amazing at delaying enjoyment of our lives to some distant point in the future. It’s the fundamental premise of “retirement,” after all.
We largely criticize Gen Z for bucking the norm in favor of international travel or aspirational housewifery (the anti-girlboss, if you will!), but as I see age 30 in the distance, I realize:
The door of my cage has been open for awhile, but I still willingly climb into it every morning. In fact, the cage is where I feel most at home. To quote the great 21st century philosopher Taylor Alison Swift, “It’s me. Hi! I’m the problem. It’s me.”
I tell myself I can’t take time off because what if something slips through the cracks?
I tell myself I have to be careful about spending money on cool experiences because what if my momentum slows and our revenue dips and I lose everything and my life goes to shit?
I tell myself I might as well cozy up in the cage and keep vigil for any trouble on the horizon, and get a little bit more work done while I’m at it!
The KPIs and whiteboards and challenges to overcome are a shelter, not a cage. They protect me from having to actually face the question that sent me spinning into an alternate reality of compounding returns and net worth goals just a few short years ago in the first place: What’s the point?
You can’t save joy for later
One of my favorite books about writing, Bird by Bird, offers some poignant wisdom: Anne Lamott talks about how this striving keeps our lives small.
“[It’s] based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”
Is this the part where I declare that obsessing over your financial or business goals is merely a distraction from your ultimate mortality? Yes. Yes it is.
If you think you’ll be happy once you attain a certain amount of money (whether it be salary or net worth), career success, or achievement-related prestige in your life, I humbly invite you to think again. Hell, allow me to be your cautionary tale. This revelation is not new: Consciously, you probably realize this is wobbly scaffolding around which to build your life. But subconsciously, you may be doing it more than you realize. For most of us, adulthood is saying, “I just need to make it through this week, and then things will calm down,” over and over again for 40 years.
Almost five years have passed since that fateful Tuesday morning. I have a hell of a lot more money and free time than I did back then (thanks to my assumption that these things would fix the gnawing feeling), but I’m just now starting to chip away at the answer to my question, “What’s the point?”
“Deservingness” is a myth
If you’re saving your enjoyment of life for some distant point in the future when you decide you’ve worked hard enough or made enough money to deserve it, I’ll remind you that nobody “deserves” anything in this life. “Deservingness” would imply that some Pareto-optimal “fairness” governs our outcomes on this rock hurtling through space, and unfortunately, that’s not the case. Life is far more cruel and random and complicated than that.
In fact, there probably is someone who works far less hard than you do and earns way less money, who’s having a way fucking better time. If you’re a workaholic by choice, you don’t have to “deserve” your rest and enjoyment—you just have to decide you want it. It’s yours for the taking at any time for any reason.
We make the mistake of assuming that joy is like cash—that if we don’t “spend” it today, it can be invested (and grow larger) for the future. We assume there must be a payoff—otherwise, why delay it?
But what if you’re already living a life worth enjoying right now?
What if—when you reach whatever flavor-of-the-year goal you’re focused on—it’s still just…you?
In Bird by Bird, Lamott relays a story of her little brother procrastinating on a school project to create a bunch of birds (what in the Common Core?) until the last minute. Overwhelmed, he expressed panic at his self-inflicted pickle. Her parents’ advice? Just take it “bird by bird.”
In other words: Don’t focus on the end product, focus on the process.
Unlike with money, investing a bunch of joy for later doesn’t compound—it just guarantees you’ll enjoy less of your limited time here.
The only way to create more joy is to spend it right now. It’s a limitless resource, which means it’s not worth saving for later. (And to the extent you have to spend some money to make it happen, remember: That’s what money is for.)
You shouldn’t rest or have fun or enjoy your life because it’s “productive” to do so—you should do it because enjoying the journey is the whole point.
