what I'm finding most remarkable about the comments here is the difference between the attitude towards indulging in a degree and what I've seen for those taking 1-2 year off to travel well before hitting FIRE numbers.
Suddenly - because this is education and not travel (??) - the loss of compound interest from early investments, needs for medical insurance, eventual boredom from path chosen is something that needs to be overly dissected with OPs desires and dreams completely poopooed. OP should proceed 10-15 years in the rut to get to FIRE before pursuing this......why is that not then the standard advice for 2 years of traveling?
I would think a year or two of travel much more self-indulgent/no returns than getting a master's degree.
So a couple of things to keep in mind.
First of all, I'm not sure I agree with your initial premise. If a person wanted to take several years off before FIRE to travel at a burn rate of 30,000+/year on this forum, I don't believe they would get (or do get) consistent support. But let us put this aside because of two bigger issues:
1) I don't enjoy traveling for fun all that much, but in my personal life and reading accounts from people here on the forum, many people who actually do it seem to enjoy it. So if a person says: "I really want to travel and I think that would bring me a lot of happiness or fulfillment" I'm inclined to believe that they are probably right in that belief, regardless of whether the finances work out or not.
Contrast that with graduate school. I know lots of people both in my personal life and on the forum who went to graduate school. (I am one of these people.) Presumably they went to graduate school either because they thought they'd enjoy graduate school or they thought it would lead to a career they'd enjoy more than alternatives they could pursue without graduate school. Yet I cannot think of a single person I know who went through grad school and would now recommend the experience without reservations to others.
So if a person says: "I really want to go to grad school and I think it will be a lot of happiness or fulfillment" I'm inclined to believe that
they believe this statement to be true. But at the same time, because I know so many people who believed the same thing, and then -- once they actually lived the experience of graduate school -- changed their minds, I am also inclined to believe that this person might also be making an incorrect prediction about the future.
Now there is nothing wrong with trying things for a little while, seeing whether they bring you joy or suffering, and then reevaluating. But that brings us to the second issue.
2) If a person thinks they'd enjoy traveling the world for a year or two, they try it, and after three weeks they're miserable and just want to go home, they can (and almost certainly will) do that. A person who tries grad school, particularly in a program without funding, is stepping into a bigger sunk cost trap. After a month if they are unhappy they'll be advised to just tough it out. And after all they're already on the hook for the tuition for the first semester. After a semester, they've already invested a quarter of the time and money to get to a Masters degree, so shouldn't they really buckle down, push ahead, and finish up the degree? Once a person has invested a couple of years of their life in getting a degree, it feels bad not to use it. And the main door an MS/MA opens up in a lot of fields is to PhD programs, particularly if ones BA/BS wasn't in the right field to do so.The OP touches on this, saying one reason to pursue a masters is that it might help them get into a good PhD program later.
Throughout this whole process a graduate student is surrounded by good friends (I made some of the best friends of my life in grad school, shared suffering is a strong bonding experience) all working and pushing towards a common goal. In many programs
everyone they interact with in a work/educational context shares a common worldview that the reason you are doing all of this is to move forward and deeper into academia. And that worldview also includes the knowledge that lots of people don't make it, combined with the belief that it's primarily because those other people just didn't work hard enough. And those people might say they just changed their minds, but it's really because they couldn't hack it.
All this comes together to make it very hard to say "you know what, I thought I'd like this, but it turns out I was wrong, I'm going to go do something else."
So TL;DR:
Grad school is different than travel.
-Compared to travel it is lot more common that people think they'll enjoy grad school and discover later they don't.
-If you don't like traveling it's easy to stop. If you don't like grad school it can be emotionally, socially, and financially harder to disengage (and a two years masters can easily become a 7+ year masters + PhD).akzidenz, the above may sound way too dark, so I don't want to tell you don't try this is you really want to. Just be aware that lots of people who think they'll enjoy it end up not enjoying it, that if you are one of those people it'll be harder than you realize to admit to yourself that you're unhappy and this isn't working, and be prepared to exert a lot of willpower to get out as soon as you realize it isn't working.
Don't just put your head down and try to power through.