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This person also posted an amazing, unvarnished update recently (about 5-6 years later): https://livingafi.com/2021/03/17/the-2021-early-retirement-update/ http

This person also posted an amazing, unvarnished update recently (about 5-6 years later): https://livingafi.com/2021/03/17/the-2021-early-retirement-update/ https://livingafi.com/2021/03/17/the-2021-early-retirement-u...

SavantIdiot 5y ago
This follow up is way more compelling because it deals with the reality. I'm jealous of the authors communication skills and their partner's: there are some very hard statements in there about feeling worthless and falling behind because of no job. I wonder of those words were spoken calmly, or shouted through tears. Here are their discussions: https://livingafi.com/post-fire-relationship-disconnect/ https://livingafi.com/post-fire-relationship-disconnect/ TL;DR: He has to go back to work due to medical issues, and his relationship didn't work out. But he's still got his chin up and it's great.
- quietbritishjim 5y ago
  > [article author, to wife] ... I thought that what you wanted was to live a life of freedom, with me. We’d talked about this. > [article author's wife] Not exactly. I wanted to have kids with you and work and be like everyone else. Live a normal life. I’m tired of being weird. And I don’t want to go back to work if you aren’t. That’s weird too. You wouldn’t even be a stay-at-home-dad. You’d be nothing. > [article author] And that was it. That the second big ticket problem, critical issue #2. She couldn’t get her head around the idea that we were different. I don't buy his analysis. I don't think she wanted to do those things because others were doing them. I think she wanted to have kids and a classic family and happened to point out, oh, by the way, other people do those things too. Maybe it's easier to think that your former partner is shallow and busy comparing herself to others, rather than admit that the desire to start a family is a normal and genetically ingrained emotion. Ironically, his new partner has told him she's interested in having kids and they're both working. I know, it's easy to claim to understand from an armchair, and I'm not saying I've necessarily got this right, but it's definitely interesting to consider.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - slumpt_ 5y ago
    Yep. Author is avoiding the hardest realizations and emotions here. I don’t necessarily blame them, but they’re gonna need to confront that to have a healthy relationship in the future.
  - AutumnCurtain 5y ago
    It is ultimately his perspective but I agree, he was one layer of abstraction away from calling her a "normie". She had goals and ambitions he didn't share; that doesn't mean she "doesn't get it", it means they're different people.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    What it tells me is that there are two really important and serious things you need to consciously commit to in order to be compatible with this lifestyle. 1. Set aside that urge to keep up with the Joneses, and 2. Stop deriving life meaning from employment. These habits can be deeply ingrained in someone's personality, like an addiction in remission, and may rear their heads even if you agree to deliberately try to fight it. I don't think this is genetic. It comes from a lifetime of social conditioning, from watching your parents and friends do it. I'd actually like to read more about the strategies people have successfully used to deprogram themselves and help their loved ones also move past these things, helping them make the jump to FIRE (or regular-retirement).
    - quietbritishjim 5y ago
      You seem to be saying exactly the same thing as the author, which is precisely what I was disagreeing with. I can think of THREE reasons to want to continue working past the point the author of the article did: 1. You derive meaning from work. 2. You want more shiny material stuff all the time for shallow "keeping up with the Joneses" reasons 3. You want to raise a family, which was not possible in the financial plan of the article's author. You and the author both focussed on 2, but to me it sounds like the wife mainly wanted 3. Reason 2 may or may not be genetically ingrained, that is besides the point; wanting children definitely is, at least in some people. (A sibling comment suggested that they may not have been able to have genetic children for other reasons, but that doesn't necessarily stop the desire.)
- throw1234651234 5y ago
  Always beautiful to see people comment on the realities of these situations.
- and0 5y ago
  Odd, I was going to comment on how poor the communication with his partner was in the updated post. I realize he'd written the 2021 update after their separation (hard to tell if these individual sections were real-time but even worse if so) but what was happening was so obvious when he first started to mention the issues, and he described her so harshly and without empathy, like she had some bug that needed to be "fixed" and he wasn't bothering to relate.
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    I think the communication was good and the understanding was lacking. Talking != understanding. And sometimes talking is really really hard when you know it might lead to a minefield.
  - CleverLikeAnOx 5y ago
    In the post-FIRE relationships disconnect post, it was jarring how he went from having what I saw as a reasonably well communicated discussion to "she couldn't get her head around us being different." Seems like the understood each other, but had different priorities. Each also seemed to have a bit of disdain for the other's way of thinking. He saw her desires as vain and felt like she didn't understand his ideal of freedom. She saw his freedom as stagnation.
soco 5y ago
The way I read his new job is also giving him a sense of purpose, which, even with all the pleasures of being independent, seems kinda important for the human social being.
choxi 5y ago
The followup is very much worth the read
babyblueblanket 5y ago
This is 10x better than the OP article. Please, anyone reading the comments, read this article in its entirety instead.
temp8964 5y ago
The conclusion came to me is that extreme working and extreme no-working are both bad in the long run. All you need is a work-family-life balance. I am also glad that the author now opens the door for getting married and even having a kid. Work, spouse, kids, the traditional way of life have been explored and chosen by human being for at least thousands of years. The psychological / economic needs for living with a family do not go away just because you "decide" you don't need them. There are people live alone, but most of them are not happy, for most of the time. When you are young, you may like to wonder why do I have to live a life like my parents? When you get older, you will slowly or quickly realize that you are just a regular human being like everybody else.
- Aperocky 5y ago
  > slowly or quickly realize that you are just a regular human being like everybody else. The earlier the better, one of the best revelation that I had is that 'nobody actually cares about me that much'. So much of the peer/social pressure are self inflicted.
  - fullshark 5y ago
    Well hopefully you surround yourself with a smallish circle of people who care about you! But yes all your high school / college classmates / coworkers are off living their lives and not thinking about you.
- p1esk 5y ago
  Work, spouse, kids, the traditional way of life have been explored and chosen by human being for at least thousands of years. Vast majority of people did not “choose” all that throughout human history. There was zero alternative. They had to work to survive. If you want to make your argument you should only look at those who were born rich enough to not have to work.
  - kebman 5y ago
    People didn't really work that hard during the Medieval period. It was pretty chill. Play some chess with your bro. Work your ass off in the field or else no food. Get hounded by people in all-metal coats of arms. Back to playing chess with your bro. Wifey did the dishes anyway. Ooops here she is, better get my ass down to the field and till some earth, or I have to sleep in the barn!
dayvid 5y ago
That post was incredible. Really rare and refreshing to find that level of honesty on the internet nowadays (even when pseudonymous), sadly. Reflected a lot of thoughts I had about potential downsides to FIRE.
- neogodless 5y ago
  The downsides like having different visions for your life from your spouse, or discovering you have a chronic health issue were not due to FIRE. In fact, FIRE gave the author tools to decide what to do about those issues. The result may not be what the author wanted (divorce, a new relationship, seeking additional income to support that new relationship) but none of the issues were caused by FIRE.
  - dayvid 5y ago
    I'm not knocking FIRE. I like the idea of it and especially the author's comment about a lot people just following what people around them are doing instead of living life by their own standards. The downsides I thought of were the inherit randomness of life (catastrophic incidents, children, relationships, health). I'm fairly certain the people working at my company past potential retirement are due to them having family and wanting the insurance perks and hedge for any potential uncertainties children and older age can throw at you. I really liked that the author elaborated on the relationship dynamic, because I think that's something that could be a common issue in FIRE relationships with a middle-class or higher partner. What if they still want to work or do more? Can your lifestyle accomodate that?
someelephant 5y ago
I'd like an update on his back issues. Back issues are often the result of people not dealing with stress in their life. Speaking from personal experience and a huge army of others who have had a similar experience (John Sarno crew).
- kerkeslager 5y ago
  While you may be correct in the general case, there's a much more obvious cause than stress in his case: Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.
  - someelephant 5y ago
    I thought some more about this. I'd like to know how many people with ED have back issues vs the general population. If the percentage is similar, then it's entirely possible his back issues are rooted in psychological stress.
    - kerkeslager 5y ago
      A summary of the research on the subject as of June 2021 can be found here[1], but I would caution you about the way you're approaching this. It seems like you're letting your hypothesis drive what you want to observe, rather than letting observations drive your hypothesis. That is to say, it seems like you're looking for a connection between stress and back pain, rather than looking at the evidence and letting that tell you what's connected. There's a pretty clear correlation between specific genes and EDS, and there's a pretty clear connection between EDS and chronic lower back pain ("cLBP" in the study). There's a connection between EDS and "psychological distress" noted, but the authors seem to indicate that EDS is causal in both the psychological distress and the cLBP, not the other way around. There's no noted correlation between psychological distress and cLBP. On the contrary, it seems like psychological distress and cLBP are actually correlated with different variants of EDS. "Is back pain in an EDS patient caused by stress?" is a valid scientific question, but it's not one that's likely to yield any interesting results if you test it, because so far I see no evidence, even anecdotal, that the two might have a causal relationship. There are higher-priority questions to investigate that are more likely to yield interesting/productive results. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8176821/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8176821/
kerkeslager 5y ago
The subtext of many of the responses to this post is a self-congratulatory "I knew all along that his plan was unrealistic". It seems like the thing people like about the follow-up post is that they think it confirms their worldview. If we actually listen to the original author instead of looking for confirmation of our own worldviews, the author tells a different story. He says, (this is a copy-paste quote): "The initial plan itself was fine." His original plan wasn't unrealistic, at least not any more unrealistic than any more traditional life plans--it simply fell prey to life events which would cause almost any plan to fail. His partner left him for another man and he was diagnosed with a serious medical issue. And critically, while the author's plan has changed, the goals still haven't. Not working is still the goal. I've seen the plan that's common on Hacker News fail too. Lots of startups fail, and even if your startup succeeds that doesn't mean you're satisfied. The best case scenario has nothing to do with economics: it's coming to peace with yourself, finding meaningful relationships, and feeling a sense of purpose and belonging. I won't write off the possibility of finding those things in a startup or a career, but in my life I've seen it far less than the self-congratulatory posts here would lead you to believe.
- adwn 5y ago
  > His partner left him for another man and he was diagnosed with a serious medical issue. Both of those events are very common – especially medical issues. Once you're getting old, developing a "serious medical issue" is more common than not! Any plan which assumes that you'll neither break up with your partner nor develop medical issues for the rest of your life is a plan destined to fail.
  - kerkeslager 5y ago
    ...in which you cherry-pick one sentence from my post, ignoring the sentence before it. That's exactly why I said, "at least not any more unrealistic than any more traditional life plans". Working a job doesn't fix either of these problems. At least in the US, many people who go bankrupt due to medical issues have health insurance, usually provided by their job. These problems are compounded if your plan was to work, but you can't work due to your medical problems. And while medical or disability insurance can theoretically account for these worst-case scenarios, they can be so costly that they may cause financial problems even if no disaster happens. Divorce is also a major cause of bankruptcy, even if you're employed. You're doing exactly what my previous post accused people of doing: gloating about how the author's plan failed, without looking at how plans that fit your worldview don't account for the same life events any better.
someelephant 5y ago
Fascinating to see somebody analyze their own life. Seeing what he's written I draw such different conclusions about the underlying causes of the events which passed over the last few years. In particular the way he analyzed his relationship and the fact he still feels somewhat responsible just blows my mind. He's far too hard on himself.
- garmaine 5y ago
  I think he lets himself off the hook… “it’s her problem, she just wanted to keep up with the Jones’s” etc…
joshuaissac 5y ago
Discussion of that post from 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26543527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26543527
eloisius 5y ago
Wow, this post is an incredible example of gut-wrenching honesty about things working out differently than expected. I'm eight months into life without work right now, and can relate to a lot of this. I didn't make a plan to retire (early or otherwise), I just wanted to move abroad and take time to learn the language and think a little about what I want out of life aside from career. I can relate to the anxiety and ennui they experienced in 2018. Something good about being in the rat race is that even during bad days you don't feel adrift or wasteful. During the first couple of months after I quit working, and after moving abroad, I hadn't yet enrolled in full-time language classes. At first it was easy to enjoy myself meeting new people, going rock climbing, traveling a bit, going on dates, etc. But after a while, I started noticing that if I woke up at 11am and didn't have "something to do," i.e. a plan, I started feeling a very strong sense of unease, something like a very mild sense of panic or alarm. Like here I am with no work to eat up my day, plenty of money, nothing but free time. If I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, or just don't feel like I'm enjoying myself, I am utterly wasting my precious time on Earth. That's a pretty dark chasm lurking just beneath the surface. If I'm having a bad day but can still pour a cup of coffee and go to work, I'm at least banking up money for some future day that I can enjoy it. I feel like he was a little unfair in how he characterized his partner's experience of that ennui, although I don't blame him for feeling bitter after an affair. I've never wanted to keep up with the Joneses or spend my life jockeying for status, but I still don't think I'd feel okay permanently quitting work this young. There's more existential dread in being immediately responsible for enjoying every single day to the fullest than I'm ready to face.
- ericjang 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experience. the term "dark chasm lurking just beneath the surface" to describe what total freedom looks like on bad days speaks to me. I also agree with your assessment of his partner. Keeping up with the Joneses sounds shallow at first, but I think it belies the true human desire to be respected by others. Maybe his partner felt like they weren't "accomplishing much" in life, which doesn't mean a 9-5 per se or an annual income $ per se, but that accomplishments were the best way to get respected by other people. We're social creatures, so I don't think it's wrong to seek social validation by others. I think when one is single and looking for a partner, what other people think does matter a lot. I think if the author was still committed to not working, finding a partner would be much harder.
sevagh 5y ago
2018: life was perfect with my perfect partner until my perfect partner left me 2021: life is perfect with a new perfect partner who's never going to leave me unlike my previous perfect partner 2023: any guesses?
- dougmwne 5y ago
  He certainly seems to have kicked his mental health can down the road. Lots of signals that he is immature in his relationships and perhaps using them as a crutch.
- CleverLikeAnOx 5y ago
  Do we need to be this reductive? He was happy in a relationship but then it got bad and fell apart. That happens, alternative lifestyle or not. I don't see why this implies that his next relationship is unlikely to work out.
  - sevagh 5y ago
    I'm certainly not hoping it goes badly for him. I just don't think it's healthy to learn about a source of volatility and then immediately go all-in on the next one.
metalex 5y ago
This article makes me really sad. I know this is just my perspective, but this person isn't living -- they're just existing. What are they striving for? Consuming media?
- bserge 5y ago
  That's a personal matter. Inside our brain we have two sides - the more primitive brain that just needs safety/food/reproduction/entertainment and the more advanced side that needs to plan and do stuff otherwise it questions it's existence. People have a different balance of either, so some are happy with just living while others need to do something, anything beyond the basics. Neither is wrong from a personal point of view - if it makes you happy/fulfilled, that's it. From a societal perspective those whose primitive brain has more control are seen as useless, however.
  - metalex 5y ago
    Maslow's hierarchy of needs :) I feel like having the food/water/shelter covered isn't enough - fortunate folks eventually hit the self-actualization point. Sounds like the author is now finding more meaning with starting a family (props to him).
- joshuaissac 5y ago
  In the article, he writes about what he is striving for: to be able to do things that he wants to do rather than what his employer wants him to do. So from his perspective, he would be living his life while others just work instead of living.
  - metalex 5y ago
    Yeah - absolutely just my selfish perspective. I feel like he needs an existential purpose or threat - everyone does. "Doing what I want" isn't a purpose, in my opinion, but rather a void that needs to be filled with something meaningful.
dougmwne 5y ago
Wow. This is amazing, and so incredibly and refreshingly honest. This helps to repair some of the damage that FIRE bloggers have done to my professional motivation. I have been feeling the isolation during COVID and his description of the isolation than comes from hitting the career off switch really hits home. I have some thinking to do.
opportune 5y ago
I really don’t like how he tries to diminish his partner’s feeling about “falling behind” as some mirage created by Instagram and classism. I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that most people don’t want to live on $30k/year for their entire life when they could maybe work and get more. Though maybe this is colored by the relevation that follows shortly thereafter. To me it shows an unwillingness to think critically about this. It sounds like his partner communicated with him changes she wanted to make (go back to work and not live like college students) and he just ignored them because he thought they were stupid.
- fossuser 5y ago
  It doesn't seem like a huge surprise: https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthlings/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthli... It can come out in different ways, but I suspect it's not that divorced from the above. It's not very attractive to be unemployed and not very ambitious. Maybe the introspection of why is missing, but I suspect that's the reason.
  - opportune 5y ago
    See this is still blaming the problem on some kind of externalized illogical other you aren’t willing to understand (just replace “partner falling for Instagram lies” with neckbeardy EvPsych) rather than empathizing with the other person’s opinion. Like if your partner directly tells you they are unhappy because of XYZ, rather than thinking it’s stupid/some part of how the woman brain works (eye roll), it seems pretty clear that not doing anything to fix XYZ - in this case working again and living more luxuriously - is being a bad partner. Doesn’t matter what the genders are or what XYZ is.
    - garmaine 5y ago
      Wife was saying “I feel like we should both work again” and his response was “OK, how about you work? I’m good.” I’m not surprised at all at what happened.
cortesoft 5y ago
Man I really dislike the way he comes across. He acts like anyone who doesn't want his lifestyle is just "keeping up with the joneses" and "peacocking" and is just trying to impress other people, whereas he is enlightened and doesn't need that external validation. That is so smug and self-important. He clearly has social needs, he just feels them differently. And also, not everyone who wants to work and have wealth is just doing it to keep up with others. I like having some wealth because it makes a lot of things easier. I like the stuff I buy, for myself, for its intrinsic value. A lot of things I spend money on I never even show anyone else. I don't post on social media or go on social media, but I still like a nice house and some toys.
- slumpt_ 5y ago
  Yep. My takeaway is he is probably a bit of a narcissist / stuck in his own head. Unable to process the real lived perspectives of others.
- cowvin 5y ago
  Yeah, he's also unwilling to admit that his early retirement failed despite having had to begin working again. The goal of retirement is to have enough that you will be able to avoid working even if some things go wrong. Otherwise you're not ready to retire.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

This follow up is way more compelling because it deals with the reality. I'm jealous of the authors communication skills and their partner's: there are some very hard statements in there about feeling worthless and falling behind because of no job. I wonder of those words were spoken calmly, or shouted through tears. Here are their discussions: https://livingafi.com/post-fire-relationship-disconnect/ https://livingafi.com/post-fire-relationship-disconnect/ TL;DR: He has to go back to work due to medical issues, and his relationship didn't work out. But he's still got his chin up and it's great.

quietbritishjim 5y ago
> [article author, to wife] ... I thought that what you wanted was to live a life of freedom, with me. We’d talked about this. > [article author's wife] Not exactly. I wanted to have kids with you and work and be like everyone else. Live a normal life. I’m tired of being weird. And I don’t want to go back to work if you aren’t. That’s weird too. You wouldn’t even be a stay-at-home-dad. You’d be nothing. > [article author] And that was it. That the second big ticket problem, critical issue #2. She couldn’t get her head around the idea that we were different. I don't buy his analysis. I don't think she wanted to do those things because others were doing them. I think she wanted to have kids and a classic family and happened to point out, oh, by the way, other people do those things too. Maybe it's easier to think that your former partner is shallow and busy comparing herself to others, rather than admit that the desire to start a family is a normal and genetically ingrained emotion. Ironically, his new partner has told him she's interested in having kids and they're both working. I know, it's easy to claim to understand from an armchair, and I'm not saying I've necessarily got this right, but it's definitely interesting to consider.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- slumpt_ 5y ago
  Yep. Author is avoiding the hardest realizations and emotions here. I don’t necessarily blame them, but they’re gonna need to confront that to have a healthy relationship in the future.
- AutumnCurtain 5y ago
  It is ultimately his perspective but I agree, he was one layer of abstraction away from calling her a "normie". She had goals and ambitions he didn't share; that doesn't mean she "doesn't get it", it means they're different people.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  What it tells me is that there are two really important and serious things you need to consciously commit to in order to be compatible with this lifestyle. 1. Set aside that urge to keep up with the Joneses, and 2. Stop deriving life meaning from employment. These habits can be deeply ingrained in someone's personality, like an addiction in remission, and may rear their heads even if you agree to deliberately try to fight it. I don't think this is genetic. It comes from a lifetime of social conditioning, from watching your parents and friends do it. I'd actually like to read more about the strategies people have successfully used to deprogram themselves and help their loved ones also move past these things, helping them make the jump to FIRE (or regular-retirement).
  - quietbritishjim 5y ago
    You seem to be saying exactly the same thing as the author, which is precisely what I was disagreeing with. I can think of THREE reasons to want to continue working past the point the author of the article did: 1. You derive meaning from work. 2. You want more shiny material stuff all the time for shallow "keeping up with the Joneses" reasons 3. You want to raise a family, which was not possible in the financial plan of the article's author. You and the author both focussed on 2, but to me it sounds like the wife mainly wanted 3. Reason 2 may or may not be genetically ingrained, that is besides the point; wanting children definitely is, at least in some people. (A sibling comment suggested that they may not have been able to have genetic children for other reasons, but that doesn't necessarily stop the desire.)
throw1234651234 5y ago
Always beautiful to see people comment on the realities of these situations.
and0 5y ago
Odd, I was going to comment on how poor the communication with his partner was in the updated post. I realize he'd written the 2021 update after their separation (hard to tell if these individual sections were real-time but even worse if so) but what was happening was so obvious when he first started to mention the issues, and he described her so harshly and without empathy, like she had some bug that needed to be "fixed" and he wasn't bothering to relate.
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  I think the communication was good and the understanding was lacking. Talking != understanding. And sometimes talking is really really hard when you know it might lead to a minefield.
- CleverLikeAnOx 5y ago
  In the post-FIRE relationships disconnect post, it was jarring how he went from having what I saw as a reasonably well communicated discussion to "she couldn't get her head around us being different." Seems like the understood each other, but had different priorities. Each also seemed to have a bit of disdain for the other's way of thinking. He saw her desires as vain and felt like she didn't understand his ideal of freedom. She saw his freedom as stagnation.

soco 5y ago

The way I read his new job is also giving him a sense of purpose, which, even with all the pleasures of being independent, seems kinda important for the human social being.

choxi 5y ago

The followup is very much worth the read

babyblueblanket 5y ago

This is 10x better than the OP article. Please, anyone reading the comments, read this article in its entirety instead.

temp8964 5y ago

The conclusion came to me is that extreme working and extreme no-working are both bad in the long run. All you need is a work-family-life balance. I am also glad that the author now opens the door for getting married and even having a kid. Work, spouse, kids, the traditional way of life have been explored and chosen by human being for at least thousands of years. The psychological / economic needs for living with a family do not go away just because you "decide" you don't need them. There are people live alone, but most of them are not happy, for most of the time. When you are young, you may like to wonder why do I have to live a life like my parents? When you get older, you will slowly or quickly realize that you are just a regular human being like everybody else.

Aperocky 5y ago
> slowly or quickly realize that you are just a regular human being like everybody else. The earlier the better, one of the best revelation that I had is that 'nobody actually cares about me that much'. So much of the peer/social pressure are self inflicted.
- fullshark 5y ago
  Well hopefully you surround yourself with a smallish circle of people who care about you! But yes all your high school / college classmates / coworkers are off living their lives and not thinking about you.
p1esk 5y ago
Work, spouse, kids, the traditional way of life have been explored and chosen by human being for at least thousands of years. Vast majority of people did not “choose” all that throughout human history. There was zero alternative. They had to work to survive. If you want to make your argument you should only look at those who were born rich enough to not have to work.
- kebman 5y ago
  People didn't really work that hard during the Medieval period. It was pretty chill. Play some chess with your bro. Work your ass off in the field or else no food. Get hounded by people in all-metal coats of arms. Back to playing chess with your bro. Wifey did the dishes anyway. Ooops here she is, better get my ass down to the field and till some earth, or I have to sleep in the barn!

dayvid 5y ago

That post was incredible. Really rare and refreshing to find that level of honesty on the internet nowadays (even when pseudonymous), sadly. Reflected a lot of thoughts I had about potential downsides to FIRE.

neogodless 5y ago
The downsides like having different visions for your life from your spouse, or discovering you have a chronic health issue were not due to FIRE. In fact, FIRE gave the author tools to decide what to do about those issues. The result may not be what the author wanted (divorce, a new relationship, seeking additional income to support that new relationship) but none of the issues were caused by FIRE.
- dayvid 5y ago
  I'm not knocking FIRE. I like the idea of it and especially the author's comment about a lot people just following what people around them are doing instead of living life by their own standards. The downsides I thought of were the inherit randomness of life (catastrophic incidents, children, relationships, health). I'm fairly certain the people working at my company past potential retirement are due to them having family and wanting the insurance perks and hedge for any potential uncertainties children and older age can throw at you. I really liked that the author elaborated on the relationship dynamic, because I think that's something that could be a common issue in FIRE relationships with a middle-class or higher partner. What if they still want to work or do more? Can your lifestyle accomodate that?

someelephant 5y ago

I'd like an update on his back issues. Back issues are often the result of people not dealing with stress in their life. Speaking from personal experience and a huge army of others who have had a similar experience (John Sarno crew).

kerkeslager 5y ago
While you may be correct in the general case, there's a much more obvious cause than stress in his case: Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.
- someelephant 5y ago
  I thought some more about this. I'd like to know how many people with ED have back issues vs the general population. If the percentage is similar, then it's entirely possible his back issues are rooted in psychological stress.
  - kerkeslager 5y ago
    A summary of the research on the subject as of June 2021 can be found here[1], but I would caution you about the way you're approaching this. It seems like you're letting your hypothesis drive what you want to observe, rather than letting observations drive your hypothesis. That is to say, it seems like you're looking for a connection between stress and back pain, rather than looking at the evidence and letting that tell you what's connected. There's a pretty clear correlation between specific genes and EDS, and there's a pretty clear connection between EDS and chronic lower back pain ("cLBP" in the study). There's a connection between EDS and "psychological distress" noted, but the authors seem to indicate that EDS is causal in both the psychological distress and the cLBP, not the other way around. There's no noted correlation between psychological distress and cLBP. On the contrary, it seems like psychological distress and cLBP are actually correlated with different variants of EDS. "Is back pain in an EDS patient caused by stress?" is a valid scientific question, but it's not one that's likely to yield any interesting results if you test it, because so far I see no evidence, even anecdotal, that the two might have a causal relationship. There are higher-priority questions to investigate that are more likely to yield interesting/productive results. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8176821/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8176821/

kerkeslager 5y ago

The subtext of many of the responses to this post is a self-congratulatory "I knew all along that his plan was unrealistic". It seems like the thing people like about the follow-up post is that they think it confirms their worldview. If we actually listen to the original author instead of looking for confirmation of our own worldviews, the author tells a different story. He says, (this is a copy-paste quote): "The initial plan itself was fine." His original plan wasn't unrealistic, at least not any more unrealistic than any more traditional life plans--it simply fell prey to life events which would cause almost any plan to fail. His partner left him for another man and he was diagnosed with a serious medical issue. And critically, while the author's plan has changed, the goals still haven't. Not working is still the goal. I've seen the plan that's common on Hacker News fail too. Lots of startups fail, and even if your startup succeeds that doesn't mean you're satisfied. The best case scenario has nothing to do with economics: it's coming to peace with yourself, finding meaningful relationships, and feeling a sense of purpose and belonging. I won't write off the possibility of finding those things in a startup or a career, but in my life I've seen it far less than the self-congratulatory posts here would lead you to believe.

adwn 5y ago
> His partner left him for another man and he was diagnosed with a serious medical issue. Both of those events are very common – especially medical issues. Once you're getting old, developing a "serious medical issue" is more common than not! Any plan which assumes that you'll neither break up with your partner nor develop medical issues for the rest of your life is a plan destined to fail.
- kerkeslager 5y ago
  ...in which you cherry-pick one sentence from my post, ignoring the sentence before it. That's exactly why I said, "at least not any more unrealistic than any more traditional life plans". Working a job doesn't fix either of these problems. At least in the US, many people who go bankrupt due to medical issues have health insurance, usually provided by their job. These problems are compounded if your plan was to work, but you can't work due to your medical problems. And while medical or disability insurance can theoretically account for these worst-case scenarios, they can be so costly that they may cause financial problems even if no disaster happens. Divorce is also a major cause of bankruptcy, even if you're employed. You're doing exactly what my previous post accused people of doing: gloating about how the author's plan failed, without looking at how plans that fit your worldview don't account for the same life events any better.

someelephant 5y ago

Fascinating to see somebody analyze their own life. Seeing what he's written I draw such different conclusions about the underlying causes of the events which passed over the last few years. In particular the way he analyzed his relationship and the fact he still feels somewhat responsible just blows my mind. He's far too hard on himself.

garmaine 5y ago
I think he lets himself off the hook… “it’s her problem, she just wanted to keep up with the Jones’s” etc…

joshuaissac 5y ago

Discussion of that post from 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26543527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26543527

eloisius 5y ago

Wow, this post is an incredible example of gut-wrenching honesty about things working out differently than expected. I'm eight months into life without work right now, and can relate to a lot of this. I didn't make a plan to retire (early or otherwise), I just wanted to move abroad and take time to learn the language and think a little about what I want out of life aside from career. I can relate to the anxiety and ennui they experienced in 2018. Something good about being in the rat race is that even during bad days you don't feel adrift or wasteful. During the first couple of months after I quit working, and after moving abroad, I hadn't yet enrolled in full-time language classes. At first it was easy to enjoy myself meeting new people, going rock climbing, traveling a bit, going on dates, etc. But after a while, I started noticing that if I woke up at 11am and didn't have "something to do," i.e. a plan, I started feeling a very strong sense of unease, something like a very mild sense of panic or alarm. Like here I am with no work to eat up my day, plenty of money, nothing but free time. If I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, or just don't feel like I'm enjoying myself, I am utterly wasting my precious time on Earth. That's a pretty dark chasm lurking just beneath the surface. If I'm having a bad day but can still pour a cup of coffee and go to work, I'm at least banking up money for some future day that I can enjoy it. I feel like he was a little unfair in how he characterized his partner's experience of that ennui, although I don't blame him for feeling bitter after an affair. I've never wanted to keep up with the Joneses or spend my life jockeying for status, but I still don't think I'd feel okay permanently quitting work this young. There's more existential dread in being immediately responsible for enjoying every single day to the fullest than I'm ready to face.

ericjang 5y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience. the term "dark chasm lurking just beneath the surface" to describe what total freedom looks like on bad days speaks to me. I also agree with your assessment of his partner. Keeping up with the Joneses sounds shallow at first, but I think it belies the true human desire to be respected by others. Maybe his partner felt like they weren't "accomplishing much" in life, which doesn't mean a 9-5 per se or an annual income $ per se, but that accomplishments were the best way to get respected by other people. We're social creatures, so I don't think it's wrong to seek social validation by others. I think when one is single and looking for a partner, what other people think does matter a lot. I think if the author was still committed to not working, finding a partner would be much harder.

sevagh 5y ago

2018: life was perfect with my perfect partner until my perfect partner left me 2021: life is perfect with a new perfect partner who's never going to leave me unlike my previous perfect partner 2023: any guesses?

dougmwne 5y ago
He certainly seems to have kicked his mental health can down the road. Lots of signals that he is immature in his relationships and perhaps using them as a crutch.
CleverLikeAnOx 5y ago
Do we need to be this reductive? He was happy in a relationship but then it got bad and fell apart. That happens, alternative lifestyle or not. I don't see why this implies that his next relationship is unlikely to work out.
- sevagh 5y ago
  I'm certainly not hoping it goes badly for him. I just don't think it's healthy to learn about a source of volatility and then immediately go all-in on the next one.

metalex 5y ago

This article makes me really sad. I know this is just my perspective, but this person isn't living -- they're just existing. What are they striving for? Consuming media?

bserge 5y ago
That's a personal matter. Inside our brain we have two sides - the more primitive brain that just needs safety/food/reproduction/entertainment and the more advanced side that needs to plan and do stuff otherwise it questions it's existence. People have a different balance of either, so some are happy with just living while others need to do something, anything beyond the basics. Neither is wrong from a personal point of view - if it makes you happy/fulfilled, that's it. From a societal perspective those whose primitive brain has more control are seen as useless, however.
- metalex 5y ago
  Maslow's hierarchy of needs :) I feel like having the food/water/shelter covered isn't enough - fortunate folks eventually hit the self-actualization point. Sounds like the author is now finding more meaning with starting a family (props to him).
joshuaissac 5y ago
In the article, he writes about what he is striving for: to be able to do things that he wants to do rather than what his employer wants him to do. So from his perspective, he would be living his life while others just work instead of living.
- metalex 5y ago
  Yeah - absolutely just my selfish perspective. I feel like he needs an existential purpose or threat - everyone does. "Doing what I want" isn't a purpose, in my opinion, but rather a void that needs to be filled with something meaningful.

dougmwne 5y ago

Wow. This is amazing, and so incredibly and refreshingly honest. This helps to repair some of the damage that FIRE bloggers have done to my professional motivation. I have been feeling the isolation during COVID and his description of the isolation than comes from hitting the career off switch really hits home. I have some thinking to do.

opportune 5y ago

I really don’t like how he tries to diminish his partner’s feeling about “falling behind” as some mirage created by Instagram and classism. I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that most people don’t want to live on $30k/year for their entire life when they could maybe work and get more. Though maybe this is colored by the relevation that follows shortly thereafter. To me it shows an unwillingness to think critically about this. It sounds like his partner communicated with him changes she wanted to make (go back to work and not live like college students) and he just ignored them because he thought they were stupid.

fossuser 5y ago
It doesn't seem like a huge surprise: https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthlings/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthli... It can come out in different ways, but I suspect it's not that divorced from the above. It's not very attractive to be unemployed and not very ambitious. Maybe the introspection of why is missing, but I suspect that's the reason.
- opportune 5y ago
  See this is still blaming the problem on some kind of externalized illogical other you aren’t willing to understand (just replace “partner falling for Instagram lies” with neckbeardy EvPsych) rather than empathizing with the other person’s opinion. Like if your partner directly tells you they are unhappy because of XYZ, rather than thinking it’s stupid/some part of how the woman brain works (eye roll), it seems pretty clear that not doing anything to fix XYZ - in this case working again and living more luxuriously - is being a bad partner. Doesn’t matter what the genders are or what XYZ is.
  - garmaine 5y ago
    Wife was saying “I feel like we should both work again” and his response was “OK, how about you work? I’m good.” I’m not surprised at all at what happened.

cortesoft 5y ago

Man I really dislike the way he comes across. He acts like anyone who doesn't want his lifestyle is just "keeping up with the joneses" and "peacocking" and is just trying to impress other people, whereas he is enlightened and doesn't need that external validation. That is so smug and self-important. He clearly has social needs, he just feels them differently. And also, not everyone who wants to work and have wealth is just doing it to keep up with others. I like having some wealth because it makes a lot of things easier. I like the stuff I buy, for myself, for its intrinsic value. A lot of things I spend money on I never even show anyone else. I don't post on social media or go on social media, but I still like a nice house and some toys.

slumpt_ 5y ago
Yep. My takeaway is he is probably a bit of a narcissist / stuck in his own head. Unable to process the real lived perspectives of others.
cowvin 5y ago
Yeah, he's also unwilling to admit that his early retirement failed despite having had to begin working again. The goal of retirement is to have enough that you will be able to avoid working even if some things go wrong. Otherwise you're not ready to retire.