So wish you well, and likely this will all be awesome, so happy for you. Just still freaked out about how in one week you went from "help me get over the finish line" to "screw it, I'm just going to run off the track and not finish the race".
I suppose that this really happened in steps. The original plan was to keep on working, keep on saving, and stay in a HCOL area. We quite enjoyed our lifestyle and were not in a hurry to FIRE even though we have been talking about it for years as an idea.
Then we started to think about moving to a LCOL area, convinced ourselves that the quality of life there would actually be better, and realized that we already had enough money to FIRE. So we started to immediately put this into motion: leaving work, moving to a new place, etc. The idea was to keep working until the end of the year, because this seemed like a safe way to ensure that ll our moving costs would be covered and so on, but the truth is that we already have enough safety margin and work suddenly started feeling insufferably boring.
So we did indeed decide to take a short-cut instead of following the race to the finish line, but we were already driving on a track that we had drawn up fairly haphazardly a few months earlier.
Maybe the take-away is that we have been even more reckless and impulsive than the previous post suggested :D