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The Nothingness of Money
- imtringued 5y agoThe biggest irony of FIRE is that to stop being obsessed with money you have to be extremely obsessed with it. The general idea is that you earn more than you spend so you can later spend more than you earn. However, yields are going down. So you won't be earning much from interest and even in the stock market people might be using stocks like Tesla as a Schelling point. Ultimately there is a huge problem with this strategy. You are accumulating assets that are other people's liabilities. That means you are dependent on a young workforce that takes care of you. Humans have a clear bias that they want to do "all the work" at the beginning of their life and "all the leisure" at the end of their life. Saving for retirement is obviously necessary because you can't work when you're too old, but early retirement can be implemented by simply working less. After all, if productivity rises but we don't consume more, it simply means we have to work fewer hours for the same output.