13 ms·

“The pursuit of FIRE is often a band aid for deeper problems. Chronic stress, burnout, depression and anxiety are all factors that could be triggered by work, b

“The pursuit of FIRE is often a band aid for deeper problems. Chronic stress, burnout, depression and anxiety are all factors that could be triggered by work, but work is not necessarily the root cause. It follows that quitting (or retiring) is often not the solution.” This makes no sense. Chronic stress and burnout are closely associated with working. Depression and anxiety are health issues that can often be exacerbated by working. In all of these cases ceasing to work, if you can, would be a very reasonable thing to decide to do.

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sandspar 3y ago
I had the good luck to be able to semi-retire in my early 20's. It sucked. I was constantly stressed, constantly anxious. The smaller my problems became, the larger the apparatus my mind would form to deal with them. I went back to school, got a full time job, and am now much happier. Anecdotally, I've seen men in my life go from healthy, vigorous working men to shells of their former selves in retirement. It's as if retirement aged them fifteen years in two real years. If you idle your car, it causes more damage to the engine than if you drive it.
- fragmede 3y ago
  It's super interesting to hear about the downside of your good fortune in your 20's. If I may, what were you stressed and anxious about after semi-retiring? There's little/no worry about your immediate finances, you don't need to work, so there's no stress about your boss or coworkers. So then what is an example of the kind of small problems that it sounds like your mind fixated on and made a mountain out of a molehill of? Were you just unable to un-fixate on the minutia? Or is like a big picture, being financially secure but aimless, no boss, no work, and being unstressed isn't a way to live, and that you actually need stressors on your life to be a complete human being that doesn't age 15 years in 2. I'm in the middle of FIRE-ing, but from your experience, it sounds like maybe that's not what I want. I'm willing to buy that, I've heard that getting what you want is can be a curse. I'd love to hear and learn from someone who managed to on what the traps and actual pitfalls are. Stories of lottery winners who lost it all only take me so far.
  - sandspar 3y ago
    I learned a lot about why Maslow's hierarchy is a pyramid. I had unending amounts of discretionary time, so I could spend hours and hours focusing on self-actualization. The problem was that, without work, I had no real spur to focus on competency goals (referred to as status in the pyramid). So I ended up with incredibly deep self knowledge, but knowledge of a depressing kind, knowledge of how I wasn't achieving my intellectual potential and how I wasn't repaying my luck to the world and so on. It was navel gazing, essentially, the equivalent of filling out an extended Myers Briggs test without actually doing anything with the knowledge.
- Amasuriel 3y ago
  People often seem to equate retirement, as in you no longer need to do things you don’t want to do just for money, to assume that those people are going to sit around all day. People need purpose, no doubt. And while I’m sure there are people who imagine retirement as sitting on a beech with a drink all day, for lots of people FIRE just means being able to pursue the things you want without expectation that they will be lucrative.
  - sandspar 3y ago
    I've found that early retirement tends to be bad for people who have the combination of "high need for achievement" and also akrasia (the condition of being occasionally weak willed). If you are someone who has a mismatch between "how much I want to achieve" and "how much I can force myself to do annoying things", then early retirement probably isn't for you. If you want to achieve a lot, and can force yourself to do annoying things, then you'll probably be fine in retirement. I know an ex Army guy who still wakes up at the same time as he did while he was in command at his base - he does fine in retirement. What ends up happening for lots of people is that they still want to be competent, but without the external goad of work and deadlines, they're unable to force themselves to do hard things.
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sandspar 3y ago

I had the good luck to be able to semi-retire in my early 20's. It sucked. I was constantly stressed, constantly anxious. The smaller my problems became, the larger the apparatus my mind would form to deal with them. I went back to school, got a full time job, and am now much happier. Anecdotally, I've seen men in my life go from healthy, vigorous working men to shells of their former selves in retirement. It's as if retirement aged them fifteen years in two real years. If you idle your car, it causes more damage to the engine than if you drive it.

fragmede 3y ago
It's super interesting to hear about the downside of your good fortune in your 20's. If I may, what were you stressed and anxious about after semi-retiring? There's little/no worry about your immediate finances, you don't need to work, so there's no stress about your boss or coworkers. So then what is an example of the kind of small problems that it sounds like your mind fixated on and made a mountain out of a molehill of? Were you just unable to un-fixate on the minutia? Or is like a big picture, being financially secure but aimless, no boss, no work, and being unstressed isn't a way to live, and that you actually need stressors on your life to be a complete human being that doesn't age 15 years in 2. I'm in the middle of FIRE-ing, but from your experience, it sounds like maybe that's not what I want. I'm willing to buy that, I've heard that getting what you want is can be a curse. I'd love to hear and learn from someone who managed to on what the traps and actual pitfalls are. Stories of lottery winners who lost it all only take me so far.
- sandspar 3y ago
  I learned a lot about why Maslow's hierarchy is a pyramid. I had unending amounts of discretionary time, so I could spend hours and hours focusing on self-actualization. The problem was that, without work, I had no real spur to focus on competency goals (referred to as status in the pyramid). So I ended up with incredibly deep self knowledge, but knowledge of a depressing kind, knowledge of how I wasn't achieving my intellectual potential and how I wasn't repaying my luck to the world and so on. It was navel gazing, essentially, the equivalent of filling out an extended Myers Briggs test without actually doing anything with the knowledge.
Amasuriel 3y ago
People often seem to equate retirement, as in you no longer need to do things you don’t want to do just for money, to assume that those people are going to sit around all day. People need purpose, no doubt. And while I’m sure there are people who imagine retirement as sitting on a beech with a drink all day, for lots of people FIRE just means being able to pursue the things you want without expectation that they will be lucrative.
- sandspar 3y ago
  I've found that early retirement tends to be bad for people who have the combination of "high need for achievement" and also akrasia (the condition of being occasionally weak willed). If you are someone who has a mismatch between "how much I want to achieve" and "how much I can force myself to do annoying things", then early retirement probably isn't for you. If you want to achieve a lot, and can force yourself to do annoying things, then you'll probably be fine in retirement. I know an ex Army guy who still wakes up at the same time as he did while he was in command at his base - he does fine in retirement. What ends up happening for lots of people is that they still want to be competent, but without the external goad of work and deadlines, they're unable to force themselves to do hard things.

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