“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>Gen Z would be better served by building a sustainable career and life they enjoy.
Okay..
>Millennials inherited a job market offering unstable employment
>Chronic stress, burnout, depression and anxiety are all factors that could be triggered by work
>However, there are many who “retire” from one job just to pivot into another line of work that perhaps better aligns with creative passions, interests, or doesn’t pay well. Or one person retires and their spouse works, which makes the argument of retirement complicated.
Somewhere along the line, the author forgot to mention how one can even get to that 'sustainable career and life' reliably, and only mentioned several reasons why it won't happen.
More and more and more the United States's problems are summarized as "mass cognitive dissonance" because there are a lot of people whose entire world view would collapse and leave them with very little, were they to stop dunking their heads in the kool-aid every day. Even worse if you're part of an older generation and deep down part of you knows that you're equivocating and rationalizing a dying dream.
Maybe throw in a dose of American exceptionalism too, for the folks in the thread implying that, well, I shouldn't quote that phrase, that's tacky, but we'll just glorifying, justifying and seemingly promoting the soul-suckingness of work because their own soul is devoid of any individual or social pursuits outside of work.
>More and more and more the United States's problems are summarized as "mass cognitive dissonance" because there are a lot of people whose entire world view would collapse and leave them with very little, were they to stop dunking their heads in the kool-aid every day.
Brilliant comment! Would give you 1000+ points if I could!
I'm Gen-X, but I think Z is making the right call in thinking about FIRE. If the older generations have built a economic structure that the younger generations want to opt of, then that is the old generation's fault. It isn't on the younger people to just deal with it.
The older generations will experience (if not learn) the consequences of voting selfishly all the time, and that price will be paid, sooner or later.
"The older generations will experience (if not learn) the consequences of voting selfishly all the time, and that price will be paid, sooner or later."
I agree, the price will be paid. But, not by the older generation...
I don't know whether the majority of these Gen Z folks will reach their FIRE goal, but I think the fact that they're thinking of FIRE is a good thing in and of itself. It's a welcome change from the insane hustle culture of the last 15 years, and that they want to live simply and pursue higher meaning and purpose in their lives is great. How many enterprise SaaS apps does the world need? Having lived and worked in Silicon Valley for 20+ years, I think I have seen them all.
> It's a welcome change from the insane hustle culture of the last 15 years, and that they want to live simply and pursue higher meaning and purpose in their lives is great.
"Pursue higher meaning and purpose" is still striving, basically a different face of the hustle culture you speak of. I'm already FIRE, but I basically putter around most days. I don't think there's any particular higher meaning or purpose that makes sense for me to chase.
The first few things that pop in my head, are not nice, probably violate rules, though I'd argue they further the discussion more than Erin has here.
Anyway, back to enjoying life [outside the United States] where this sort of delusional stockholm-syndrome self-convincing projectory nonsense is far less common. I'm sure the author would be so disappointed with how little of my life is driven my anxiety over my status, or the fact that I'm comfortable living within modest means. Oh nooo!
I'm not doing FIRE but this is horrible financial advice, and some things here are simply incorrect.
> Even with that consideration, the notion that 37% of people who want to retire early haven’t started the process
37% of gen Z. I have to imagine there was some miscommunication between the author and editor since this paragraph and the one above contradict each other.
> After the newness of freedom wears off, you’re once again left with the same mental health issues that were pervasive in your previous life.
The problems of not having enough money are not just mental health issues in disguise. It's all well and good to live for today until your job is made redundant and, the rent's due.
> Retirement isn’t typically seen as a career transition, but a point after which you no longer exchange your time and labor for a paycheck.
There's a difference between working because you want to and working because you have to. It's upsetting when I go to McDonald's and there's an elderly person at the window. They're not happy. But plenty of people open restaurants when they retire and are happy.
> The only way to have joy and contentment in retirement, at any age, is to truly live your life en route.
You have to plan significantly far ahead to enjoy retirement. Not that you need to know what you'll be doing when retired, but you need to build up the resources.
I think this bewilderment at fire comes from (1) a blindness to the difficulties the financially-poor elderly face -- go to Walmart or fast food sometime you'll see what I mean (2) a lack of appreciation for the security a pension, which can't be relied upon anymore, used to provide (3) an underestimation of how volatile the jobs market will be over the next 50 years
> It's upsetting when I go to McDonald's and there's an elderly person at the window. They're not happy.
I would agree that most of the time, this is true.
Every now and then, though, there's an elderly person doing it because all their friends have passed away and they're still healthy and it's the only way to interact with people on a regular basis.
Gen Z has it right. Labor is not a stable way to earn income. Companies ask you to invest your life towards making the execs rich. But the same execs will throw you away as soon as the share price is at risk.
They use techniques such as forced stack ranking to keep you on your toes. You could have done the best thing for the company but if your direct manager doesn't like it, you are screwed.
What kind of a life is this? Fuck it. Just save, invest and FIRE. Let these execs and managers do the real work themselves to earn money.
Same old arguments in the article and in comments. I am therefore obligated to remind people that the boredom and existential angst of retirement or being homebound is just as likely to lead to depression and anxiety. I think the flaw in most depression/anxiety discussion is the attempt to find secular, empirical solutions to spiritual problems. The thoroughly incomplete solution in modern medicine is to tranquilize ourselves. Not good.
Ah, this again. Much like the people who insist return-to-office is good because they can socialize again, I can assure you that plenty of us are still capable of answering "what makes me happy" and that answer, virtually always, being "not work", much like plenty of us are capable of having social lives outside of work.
Also, great, good point, so what. "Yes, I advocate for the soul-crushing status quo because my life would be nothing without work". Sounds like a you problem. Meanwhile, younger generations that, oh I don't know, have their own pursuits, don't really jive with that.
I honestly don't really know why you take issue with that, but I'm pretty sure our world views are quite different, so I'm just gonna wish you well on your journey.
They can't be as lazy, sacamy and entitled as the elite else the pyramid scheme collapses. We just can't have that, like we can not have home offices. And then we could and they couldn't..
I'm now old enough to have experienced being around a lot of retired boomers.
You really need to understand the distinction between the state of being retired and the lifestyle that being retired enables. This lifestyle was previously only available to non-retirees if they were independently wealthy or self-employed in a small subset of industries.
I know many retirees that are now busier and happier than they were when they were working!
Some people will pursue FIRE and be unsuccessful (or it will take a really long time). And they will be miserable during that time.
Some other people will quickly succeed, scratch that traveling itch, and then find themselves bored with no idea what to do next.
The article merely points out that building a lifestyle in which you are happy and fulfilled without retirement is now possible for a larger group of people. It's excellent advice. Go spend some time around retirees - you will definitely find that a LOT of them are unhappy, even if they have plenty of money.
> you will definitely find that a LOT of them are unhappy, even if they have plenty of money.
I definitely know one of those. She complains about being bored.
And I just...don't know how. I think many of them just never got into anything. No hobbies. No activities outside the home aside from the occasional vacation. They spend their weekends passively watching TV, but not really interested in what they're watching.
Me, I have a Steam game backlog pages long. I have an RC car that I'd like more time to play with. I want to become a better drone pilot. I'd like to have a better kept house.
Most importantly, I want to live without needing an alarm clock 5 days/week.
But with limited free time, I feel like I need to min/max my time spent not working. Like...I don't want to do the dishes, I've only got 3 hours until I need to go to bed if I want to get 8 hours of sleep!
And? This is the second time I've seen this sentiment. Are you really trying to imply that because some people escape the American Rat Race with virtually no concept of self, or no social life, or no hobbies, that we should... what? Just accept that? Embrace it?
Ahh the classic "Gen (insert generation younger) is doing (thing) wrong" article...
Most _people_ don't like their jobs. This isn't generational, this is just how it is. When people have to work to survive and there are limited jobs out there, it's natural that people will complain about working and want to retire early.
Gen Z is coming into the working world in an era very different and in many measures worse off than the working worlds Boomers or Millennials did. Housing is more expensive than ever, healthcare costs are continuously ballooning too. And the US minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Companies are proud when they offer $15 an hour, which is now a starvation wage in most areas. Meanwhile, a lot of Gen Z is deciding if they're going to college and if so, how much debt they are willing to take on. 17 and 18-year-olds are deciding if they will take out potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to go to school, another sector that has ballooned significantly over time.
Maybe let's not blame the literal children here, and instead push for changes in our government. We need price caps for medicine and healthcare yesterday, we need more affordable housing, we need to increase the minimum wage, and we need to slow the ever-increasing costs of education.
Finally, we need to consider that the 40-hour work week is arbitrary and has only existed since the '40s. Many companies have tried 4 day works weeks to much success and maybe, just maybe, as technology develops at increasingly faster rates around us people will start to realize that not everyone needs to work 40 hours a week to get their job done (this is already exceedingly common in office jobs) and then maybe it won't be so common for younger people to want to retire so early. A lot of jobs aren't really that bad, it's the amount of time per week that gets to people.
I'm Gen Z at 26 so yes, but Gen Z also accounts for people born up until 2013 per the US census (10 years old). Taking the middle age between those (18 years old) I think you can see my point
Yes, follow the lead of the hippies. Every generation's deadbeats get a rude awakening that Social Security is prorated based on number of quarters you worked over your life, usually coming up short once it's too late to go back and earn them.
You can't just couch-surf to 65 and collect a free paycheck unless you're also playing SSDI fraud (which has its own earned-income credit system too, IIRC).
I mean, pre-agricultural hunter/gatherers never had to change the oil on their cars, if that's what you're going for?
But I do oil changes (and otherwise maintain my car) because I like being able to travel dozens of miles each day. So I gain a responsibility to take care of my car to be able to continue to live like this.
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Do you like hot showers in the morning? Well, you better build, and maintain, a home with pipes, drain, and water heater.
Do you like computers? Electricity? Etc. etc.
Each luxury device we own today is not strictly necessary. But the bulk of work today is maintaining our luxuries.
Automation and technology should be reducing the need for most people to work. Capitalism warps the role of technology: instead of technology freeing you up, it risks destroying your livelihood. Just look at the economic anxiety surrounding AI. AI should be embraced. It should not jeopardize anyone's livelihood.
> Automation and technology should be reducing the need for most people to work.
I think it does. Many people working office jobs are barely doing anything, esp. compared to manual labor in hellish factories just 100 years ago. And, for that puny amount of office work, we live so much better than people 100 years ago.
Also, it's currently possible to work less by just not buying top of the line consumer option. It's perhaps harder in the US, where such options does not exist, but other parts of the world have e.g. specific brands of cheap, crappy cars you could buy and work less in consequence.
> I think it does. Many people working office jobs are barely doing anything, esp. compared to manual labor in hellish factories just 100 years ago. And, for that puny amount of office work, we live so much better than people 100 years ago.
We have those busy work office jobs because capitalism demands us to make capital. Ideally, as our basic needs are met (housing, plumbing, food, etc...) we wouldn't need busy work jobs. Even if we do need busy work jobs, then consider this: when I worked as a programmer I did so 5 days a week as a web developer. Given modern web frameworks and the abundance of open source packages, I could easily accomplish in a day what would have taken a web developer a week or more to accomplish ~20 years ago. So the question is, if I'm 5x more productive, then why am I working 5 days a week? Why not 1 day a week for the same pay? Ideally, we would not classify the work week in terms of hours worked, but rather by productivity.
> Ideally, we would not classify the work week in terms of hours worked, but rather by productivity.
This is exactly what is happening, but on a slower and more noisy timescale that you'd expect. That's why we work less than people 100 years ago, and yet make so much more money.
I know a plumber who keeps his phone ringer on all night so he can wake up and go on calls. He's in his 30's and his knees are as damaged as an 80 year old man's. Try telling him that automation and technology should be reducing his need to work. Those of us in the Silicon Valley bubble should remember that 99% of the world's population has harder jobs than we do .
And note that plumbing is simply automation of water.
Instead of us walking down to the stream to drink like our hunter/gatherer forefathers did before us, we create pipes that send water anywhere we wish to settle.
The creation of automated pipes / automated water movement has created an entire industry (plumbing), as people move further and further away from streams. And into deserts even, requiring more and more plumbing to even live.
That's the story of technology. We continuously are depending on more-and-more of it. Be it a modern technology stack like a computer, or a 2500-year-old technology like plumbing / aqueducts.
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The bulk of all jobs today is in the maintenance of this automation. HVAC to automate our air conditions. Plumbing to automate our water. Cookware to automate food preparation (fast foods, chefs, etc. etc.). We don't grind grain ourselves anymore, we use flour that's been processed ahead of time in mass.
And we all specialize upon our particular niche. And around Hacker News, we focus on the most abstract of automations: automation of communications, computers, mathematics. We write programs that send messages faster, simpler, easier through various social networks.
You know, instead of running those messages by hand, or by horse. We have wires that talk to a computer router that talks to a network that... eventually delivers the message.
The more free time I have, the more I'm convinced that "idle hands are the devil's plaything" is one of our more accurate aphorisms. Considered in total, I'm far less ethical when I have time to myself than when I'm working.
Sure, but you could never escape the work that was needed, no matter what you did. Not saying it’s a worse setup than capitalism, just that the escape part is novel and simply wasn’t an option in other setups.
The point is that "escape" in this case means not having to work to American Capitalism levels, not escaping working entirely. Retirement in the FIRE sense does not imply in all cases spending every day by the pool doing nothing, and even in the AmCap sense, most who retire and tend to live longer and (self-reportedly) happier, have some work that they are doing, but more along the lines of what even a medieval serf would have enjoyed to the tune of like 15 hours a week.
ETA: often this work is volunteerism, which does not have a capital incentive in the individual case here.
I am thinking of escape as “not having to do things you don’t want to do”.
No one wants to work in the style of American capitalism, so this is one thing that people stop doing, for sure. In prior systems, no matter what you did, you always had to keep doing things you didn’t want to do (assuming one isn’t in love with perpetual farm labor).
If we are talking about Garden of Eden levels of natural abundance hunter gathering, then that is surely peak human lifestyle, but I don’t know of any scalable system that remotely compares to that.
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.