How do you define FIRE? There are plenty of very successful people who could live off their assets but choose to continue working - at the high end, see every billionaire. I think it might have been a quote of Marissa Meyer who was discussing starting a new company and said something like "well, I have to do something with my time". Plenty of folks have the assets to be FI but prefer to continue pursuing their careers.
MMM himself quit his software engineering job to be a part time carpenter - a second career that more than covered his spending.
Plenty of FIRE blogs had authors getting post-FIRE jobs. Others have written extensively about the loss of purpose, meaning, and connection to the world in their post-RE lives. There's certainly something about enjoying work more when you're got autonomy and don't feel beholden to your boss.
Personally I am very conflicted with the goal of not working. I worry that it's an unfulfilling attitude that will end up being suboptimal for many people - it's too easy to tell yourself that you can't do [things you want to do] until you're FI. Then fifteen years later you realize that you neglected relationships, or hobbies, or exercise, or a potentially fulfilling career, or whatever. I worry that FIRE is a relatively toxic goal. Ideally financial independence is a byproduct of a life well lived, a successful career, and a joyful and efficient embrace of your passions.
Of course I've been completely obsessed with this stuff for the last ten years and it's paid off in spades. Having resources makes life less stressful.
I also see the potential downfall of focusing on work only during the accumulation phase and missing out on other values of life until a number is reached.
It took me several years of reading MMM and developing frugality muscles before I came to the realization that FIRE wasn’t my goal because it meant focusing on increasing income and I was already at the point in my life where I wanted to focus on kids. The saving discipline we had on the way to this realization has given us a sort of Coast FI mentality.
I find I am mostly drawn to an anti consumerist perspective and am turned off by a lot of the FIRE media I see, which tends to Fat FIRE fantasy.
It's funny because Pete makes this point so absurdly clearly, and yet so many people focus on the accumulation part and not the quality of life part.
I have never been interested in retiring, and I discovered MMM very shortly after graduating from over a decade of school, so I was at the very beginning of a career I absolutely loved.
But I was coming from 80-100 hour work weeks, I was exhausted, obese, drinking too much, in debt up to my eyeballs, my spouse was also in debt up to their eyeballs thanks to a nasty divorce and some terrible decisions, and suddenly making a lot of money and having no idea how to use it to actually be happy and healthy.
And here's this guy saying "spend less and you will be happier, healthier, less stressed, fitter, and richer," and I was like "well fuck, that sounds pretty fucking great!"
For me it's never been about saving more. I barely care about my NW, it's always been about using the framework of frugality to live my best, most thriving life.
By looking at every spending choice through a frugality lens, it's trained both of us to assess everything from a thriving framework, which not only benefits our bottom line, but has forged a decade-long systematic process of critically analyzing every choice we feel compelled to make.
Choices are not actually made consciously, they're made subconsciously and then the conscious mind comes up with a "logical" rationale for why we feel compelled to do certain things.
This is literally my job now, uncovering the unconscious nonsense that
actually motivated people's decisions and allowing them to develop new, more appropriate frameworks for decisions.
We are ALL walking around with gibberish rationales and frameworks from childhood driving a lot of what we do and why we do it, and it feels totally rational to do so because we are rationalizing creatures.
Spending a decade examining every impulse and decision
actively through a frugality framework forced us to openly discuss and deconstruct "but
why do I feel like this is what I need to be happy?" and "where does that belief come from?" and "what would the alternative actually feel like?"
DH and I were just discussing this the other day as a couple we know have made shockingly suboptimal financial choices driven by beliefs about what will make them happy, only to make choices that could so predictably make them both unhappy, down to their choice of dog breed.
But these choices feel like things they
need to do in order to feel satisfied with their lives. Why? A whole pile of history, childlike frameworks of understanding, and parental messaging.
Frugality provides us a systematic filter through which to challenge all of our pre-existing assumptions about spending and happiness.
This is by far the more beneficial part of Mustachianism.
