I also don't feel like I am driven to take on a new career. Right now, my desires are pretty simple. I want to hike. I want to sleep when I'm tired, wake when I'm rested, eat when I'm hungry. I want to spend time with people I love, and people who love me. I want to enjoy the years I have left, whether it be forty, or twenty. Or just one.
What I'm trying to do now is to convince myself I'm okay with this. More, that it is okay to want this. That this isn't a moral failing. Because right now the thought of living my life like this makes me feel guilty. It's not what my parents or society thinks I should be doing. It's not what I think I should be doing. It's a waste. It's settling for mediocrity; and worse, sloth. Hedonism. Lots of words for it - the only one with positive connotations I can find is leisure. I want to be a man of leisure.
You are more than okay. Moral failing? Hardly! This post is excellent and filled with integrity.
You really got (to) the heart of what matters. Thanks for sharing this.
Some of us who approach FIRE fear an existence in which we "do nothing of importance". Being part of a company or an organization gives us the feeling we are contributing to something more important and lasting than we ourselves are.
After having the experience of being an employee of three companies that closed their doors and shut down, I was eventually able to see through the myth of this belief. Corporations are in many ways even more fragile and less durable than we "mere" humans are.
This knowledge leads to a realization of futility. Sometimes the person realizing this struggles with the futility, especially in the face of mistreatment or unfairness in the workplace. This is a reasonable response that, IMHO, is the subject of this thread. But this is not the end of the thought process.
All of us who hunger for FIRE must also realize that those basic, personal things can be more powerful than all the efforts of the hive. Raising children, tending a garden, making something, satisfying a human need in the local community, traveling, fellowship. These are all powerful activities that last a long time and ripple out from when and where they happen.
Having FIRE allows us to take these basic actions and amplify them in ways that change other people's lives, it all depends on your values and what you believe in. But sometimes having been part of the hive suppresses our creative individuality to the point that we can't even see the value in what we conceive and do.
Don't think I'm talking about the OP here - it's really just me holding up my own blindness for comparison. I was 45 and burying my grandparents' generation before I truly realized the meaning of what I just wrote...
