This person also posted an amazing, unvarnished update recently (about 5-6 years later): https://livingafi.com/2021/03/17/the-2021-early-retirement-u...
I am also glad that the author now opens the door for getting married and even having a kid.
Work, spouse, kids, the traditional way of life have been explored and chosen by human being for at least thousands of years. The psychological / economic needs for living with a family do not go away just because you "decide" you don't need them. There are people live alone, but most of them are not happy, for most of the time.
When you are young, you may like to wonder why do I have to live a life like my parents? When you get older, you will slowly or quickly realize that you are just a regular human being like everybody else.
The earlier the better, one of the best revelation that I had is that 'nobody actually cares about me that much'. So much of the peer/social pressure are self inflicted.
Vast majority of people did not “choose” all that throughout human history. There was zero alternative. They had to work to survive. If you want to make your argument you should only look at those who were born rich enough to not have to work.
There are people born rich enough to not have to work, but do they live a happy life by not working all the way?
For most of the human history, for vast majority of the people, choosing not to have spouse and kids would mean choosing not to have sex, e.g. to become a monk. Also, the societal pressure to choose a traditional way of life if you were poor was a lot higher.
You're doing that thing where you claim there's freedom of choice because you're ignoring the punishment inflicted on one choice.
The choice not to commit to a long-term relationship has had severe financial implications for centuries, especially if you are female. Until the invention of effective birth control, the choice to not have children meant giving up much of heterosexual sex.
While there are still problems, the ability to have healthy heterosexual sexual relationships without children is largely solved by modern birth control. But I would argue that the choice to not marry is still financially punished pretty severely, though perhaps not as much as in centuries past.
> There are people born rich enough to not have to work, but do they live a happy life by not working all the way?
You're asking this as if it's a rhetorical question, but it's not.
Being a rock climber, I've met plenty of Trustafarians who haven't done a lick of work in their lives, and are quite happy being skiing, surfing, or rock climbing bums.
The flipside, is when I've met people who tried not working and said they didn't like it, that has always been coupled with a profound lack of imagination or self-awareness. I distinctly remember a post on HN where someone took a week off and just played World of Warcraft for the entire week, and when he found this unfulfilling he concluded that not working wasn't for him. It should be no surprise that a lifestyle with no physical activity or direct human interaction is dissatisfying--this isn't proof that work is a necessary part of human happiness, it's just proof that giving up work without replacing it with something better doesn't succeed.
Yes, modern technology and economy makes it easier for you to live alone but it does not change the basic human needs. Eventually you will need a spouse (same or opposite sex), not just for the money, not for the sex, but for the intimacy. And you will want to have kids when you get older. And as other comments pointed out, you want to live with people who really cares about you and you care about them, i.e. your family.
There is nothing magic about this. Just some people realize this earlier than others.
I understood that was your point. The problem is that your point simply isn't true, and you've provided absolutely no evidence of your belief beyond your patronizing "some people realize this earlier than others".
I do think that intimacy is a necessary part of happiness for most people, but there are many ways to find intimacy besides a spouse. As for kids: people who don't ever want kids and end up happy are common enough that I'd consider it common knowledge. There are all sorts of families out there, and many of them don't involve marriages or children.
A bit personal maybe, but my wife has never been on birth control, we don't use protection, and have never had an "oops" baby. We had kids when we wanted kids, and haven't had kids when we didn't want kids.
It's really just... not that hard...
You're taking a risk, in the context of a committed relationship where you've already had kids (so the stakes are lower than for a lot of people). So far that risk has worked out for you. That doesn't mean that is the right risk for everyone. It also doesn't mean that what you're doing is reliable for everyone. And it certainly doesn't mean that you're somehow more intelligent or competent than the people for whom similar methods of family planning have failed.
I personally think it is a sign of modern hubris to assume that effective family planning didn't exist prior to 1960s and the advent of birth control.
All forms of family planning can fail. I don't think that's contentious.
Personally, the bigger issue I see among my peers is inability to conceive at all. They squandered their fertile years and are now going to enormous expense to start a family.
Effective toward what end?
Having kids when and only when you want them? Sure. "Only have sex when you want a kid" has always been an option.
Having kids when and only when you want them, and fulfilling your biological urges? Not so much.
I'm glad for you that your family planning worked for you and fulfilled your needs, but if you're going to extrapolate your experience to literally all humans throughout history, you aren't really in a position to be talking about other people's hubris.
> Having kids when and only when you want them, and fulfilling your biological urges? Not so much.
Unsure if you're being obstinate or ignorant, but we've been married a decade and I assure you we have had sex several orders of magnitude more than the three times we conceived.
Baby = Egg + sperm. Keep those two apart and no baby. Not exactly rocket science.
If a woman has sex without some kind of fertility awareness, she gets pregnant. If she knows when she ovulates and avoids sex during that time and 5 days prior, she might not get pregnant.
Thing is: female libido is highest when the fertility in a cycle is the highest. So biologically speaking, women have to actively fight their hormones if they want to avoid pregnancy.
I really think you are all just intentionally misunderstanding me.
I am not saying "You can only get pregnant if you want to get pregnant"
I am saying "A couple in a committed relationship can fairly easily and reliably avoid having kids without the use of contraceptives if they don't want them."
If pulling out, having sex while not ovulating, or whatever you did, is satisfying for you, great! I applaud your satisfaction.
However, as I said not everyone is satisfied by that kind of sex. To say that the limitations imposed by a lack of birth control don't exist, or aren't important, fails to capture the depth, breadth, and variety of human sexuality.
> that's about as useful as a story of how someone prayed and their mom's cancer went away.
All I did was comment and say, "Hey, we did this and it worked for us" and you replied with the equivalent of "Go fuck yourself, I don't want to hear it"
Of course modern birth control opens many doors, I don't think that was ever in question. It's a highly personal choice and I don't think there is anything wrong with that.
Anyway, cheers. Hope you're having a good day.
No, that's absolutely not all you did. You said:
> A bit personal maybe, but my wife has never been on birth control, we don't use protection, and have never had an "oops" baby. We had kids when we wanted kids, and haven't had kids when we didn't want kids.
> It's really just... not that hard...
Do you see the part where you went from "Hey, we did this and it worked for us" to "Therefore everyone else for whom this doesn't work is stupid/incompetent?"
And then you doubled down by accusing everyone who doesn't think what you do of ignorance and hubris:
> I personally think it is a sign of modern hubris to assume that effective family planning didn't exist prior to 1960s and the advent of birth control.
So if you'd like to admit you crossed the line and adjust what you said to, "Hey, we did this and it worked for us", great, that's a much more reasonable thing to say than what you actually said. But everyone reading this exchange can see that's not what you actually originally said.
And I was entirely justified in comparing what you actually said to faith healing, because at a societal level teaching people non-contraceptive means of birth control has historically been about as useful as faith healing.
I'm emphasizing at a societal level because you left that out when you quoted me. Please at the very least when you quote me, quote full sentences: you're only quoting me out of context to try to twist what I said.
You don't get to rewrite history so you can play the victim here.
When someone says "you are misinterpreting what I said" perhaps you should consider that you are misinterpreting what they said.
> It's really just... not that hard...
..and:
> I personally think it is a sign of modern hubris to assume that effective family planning didn't exist prior to 1960s and the advent of birth control.
If I am misinterpreting what you said, the problem is your communication skills, not my interpretation.
When someone says, "You're wrong", perhaps you should consider that you were wrong.
If you don't want to admit that what you said was wrong like an adult, fine. But if you're going to continue to try to paint me as if I'm bullying you, you can't be surprised if I step in to defend myself.
It's worth noting that these people are by definition going to be outliers in the population, as they don't reproduce, so there will always be a selection bias the other way.
Find something I can do remotely part-time throughout the year and I'd honestly be set. Plus student loan forgiveness means I might actually get to own a house by the time I'm 35ish.
It used to be that you worked just as much as you needed to, to sustain yourself. So much so that raising wages would immediately result in people working less, as they could earn the same amount of money with less work.
Then at some point work became a "calling" and working as hard as possible viewed as respectable, desirable and commendable.
I still think this is insane. There are so many things to do, so many things to think/dream about. So many moments to just do nothing and stare at nature. I don't have time for work.
You'd expect this to crowd out many part-time jobs, jobs that aren't autonomous and low-context. That is, fast food cook, delivery driver, cleaning jobs etc. can be done part-time, but it's much harder to find shorter hours for white-collar work.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is called a theory. In its nature, it's a framework of psychological conceptions based on observations. It's not like Maslow tells people what they need and the human beings on this planet start to pursue their needs based on Maslow's demand.
Yes. People want to work less, but people can't just wonder around without purpose for a long time. When you find your purpose, and start to spend your time on it, you are "working" on that purpose. Nobody says work = work for a boss.
Everything in life is work, however. Building dams, building robots, creating music, raising kids, even playing games.
If you had enough finances to do anything (including nothing at all), I'm quite sure you'd quickly find yourself working anyway. I know I would.
I don't think it's some modern concept, it's just that life has no real purpose beyond survival and reproduction and we (as in our consciousness) need one otherwise the dread of existence will set in sooner or later.
the focus of former for most everyone was just to survive; you worked (probably sustenance farming) to survive, you married for resources, you had children to help with work, etc.
modern work and family is vastly different because work isn't solely motivated by the need for survival, many people today are privileged enough to think about other motivating factors like meaning, prestige, and satisfaction. only now do people had the ability to question things like how they structure relations and relationships, and find what works for them
I think trying to extrapolate in the way you are is flawed
There might be less people work for survival, and more for higher needs, but it does not change the basic structure of human needs (see Maslow's hierarchy of needs).
I don't see how this point out what flaw I may have.
Here are their discussions: https://livingafi.com/post-fire-relationship-disconnect/
TL;DR: He has to go back to work due to medical issues, and his relationship didn't work out. But he's still got his chin up and it's great.
> [article author's wife] Not exactly. I wanted to have kids with you and work and be like everyone else. Live a normal life. I’m tired of being weird. And I don’t want to go back to work if you aren’t. That’s weird too. You wouldn’t even be a stay-at-home-dad. You’d be nothing.
> [article author] And that was it. That the second big ticket problem, critical issue #2. She couldn’t get her head around the idea that we were different.
I don't buy his analysis. I don't think she wanted to do those things because others were doing them. I think she wanted to have kids and a classic family and happened to point out, oh, by the way, other people do those things too. Maybe it's easier to think that your former partner is shallow and busy comparing herself to others, rather than admit that the desire to start a family is a normal and genetically ingrained emotion.
Ironically, his new partner has told him she's interested in having kids and they're both working. I know, it's easy to claim to understand from an armchair, and I'm not saying I've necessarily got this right, but it's definitely interesting to consider.
1. You derive meaning from work.
2. You want more shiny material stuff all the time for shallow "keeping up with the Joneses" reasons
3. You want to raise a family, which was not possible in the financial plan of the article's author.
You and the author both focussed on 2, but to me it sounds like the wife mainly wanted 3. Reason 2 may or may not be genetically ingrained, that is besides the point; wanting children definitely is, at least in some people. (A sibling comment suggested that they may not have been able to have genetic children for other reasons, but that doesn't necessarily stop the desire.)
I also really question the whole living on 30k thing with 950k in the bank. That could be invested into some monthly paying income ETFs that would easily pay double if not more what he was taking out. Without even touching the principal.
this part is confusing. it seems like she's saying she wanted to be working and have kids the whole time? hard to understand how you could get that far along the path without realizing it's the exact opposite of what you want. a more reasonable way to understand the quote is that she simply changed her mind after realizing the implications of their life path.
which leads to a more reasonable way of interpreting this line:
> [article author] And that was it. That the second big ticket problem, critical issue #2. She couldn’t get her head around the idea that we were different.
I think (or at least hope) the author isn't saying they are special people with some kind of special destiny to FIRE. if I read it as "she couldn't accept our being different [from our friends]", it makes a lot more sense. I think the author is painfully aware that working and starting a family is the "normal" thing to do.
He saw her desires as vain and felt like she didn't understand his ideal of freedom. She saw his freedom as stagnation.
I can relate to the anxiety and ennui they experienced in 2018. Something good about being in the rat race is that even during bad days you don't feel adrift or wasteful. During the first couple of months after I quit working, and after moving abroad, I hadn't yet enrolled in full-time language classes. At first it was easy to enjoy myself meeting new people, going rock climbing, traveling a bit, going on dates, etc. But after a while, I started noticing that if I woke up at 11am and didn't have "something to do," i.e. a plan, I started feeling a very strong sense of unease, something like a very mild sense of panic or alarm. Like here I am with no work to eat up my day, plenty of money, nothing but free time. If I wake up on the wrong side of the bed, or just don't feel like I'm enjoying myself, I am utterly wasting my precious time on Earth. That's a pretty dark chasm lurking just beneath the surface. If I'm having a bad day but can still pour a cup of coffee and go to work, I'm at least banking up money for some future day that I can enjoy it.
I feel like he was a little unfair in how he characterized his partner's experience of that ennui, although I don't blame him for feeling bitter after an affair. I've never wanted to keep up with the Joneses or spend my life jockeying for status, but I still don't think I'd feel okay permanently quitting work this young. There's more existential dread in being immediately responsible for enjoying every single day to the fullest than I'm ready to face.
I also agree with your assessment of his partner. Keeping up with the Joneses sounds shallow at first, but I think it belies the true human desire to be respected by others. Maybe his partner felt like they weren't "accomplishing much" in life, which doesn't mean a 9-5 per se or an annual income $ per se, but that accomplishments were the best way to get respected by other people.
We're social creatures, so I don't think it's wrong to seek social validation by others. I think when one is single and looking for a partner, what other people think does matter a lot. I think if the author was still committed to not working, finding a partner would be much harder.
Work serves as a default purpose for lots of people. Family and children are a pretty good built-in biological one.
Learning things, building a company, making things can all serve that need. Working on big unsolved problems can too.
I think most people feel uneasy and unhappy if they're not part of a community doing something they think is valuable. A lot of religion serves this purpose for people (though I personally find religion to be a net negative).
Finding different things that motivate you and are worth dedicating your life (or some subset of your life) to work on is hard, but I think knowing that it's worth trying to find something is the first step.
True financial independence is a way to make the search more possible without anxiety of financial ruin, but it doesn't remove the non-money related anxieties and it doesn't fix all the other sexual selection incentives that remain.
But if there is only painting and music and cooking, it becomes kinda pointless, especially if most people you know don't have time during the day. You're doing this all alone.
I've been thinking about this all day, and I realized another experience it gives me similar feelings to. at 15 I absolutely hated public high school. I had been alt-schooled (home schooled, unschooled, something like that) up until 9th grade. After one year in regular school, learning at a mind numbing pace, I knew with conviction that I just wanted to finish school and get on with life, so I withdrew and enrolled in the local night school. I blew through classes and would have graduated in no time, but something started gnawing at me. I could finish school for the day at my own pace and then leave, but to do what? After leaving regular high school, my classmates were mostly troubled kids, or people trying to get their life back on track by getting a diploma. I fairly quickly realized that I was going to miss out on being in the rat race of high school for 4 years, and went back to regular school halfway through the school year.
If we actually listen to the original author instead of looking for confirmation of our own worldviews, the author tells a different story. He says, (this is a copy-paste quote): "The initial plan itself was fine." His original plan wasn't unrealistic, at least not any more unrealistic than any more traditional life plans--it simply fell prey to life events which would cause almost any plan to fail. His partner left him for another man and he was diagnosed with a serious medical issue.
And critically, while the author's plan has changed, the goals still haven't. Not working is still the goal.
I've seen the plan that's common on Hacker News fail too. Lots of startups fail, and even if your startup succeeds that doesn't mean you're satisfied. The best case scenario has nothing to do with economics: it's coming to peace with yourself, finding meaningful relationships, and feeling a sense of purpose and belonging. I won't write off the possibility of finding those things in a startup or a career, but in my life I've seen it far less than the self-congratulatory posts here would lead you to believe.
Both of those events are very common – especially medical issues. Once you're getting old, developing a "serious medical issue" is more common than not! Any plan which assumes that you'll neither break up with your partner nor develop medical issues for the rest of your life is a plan destined to fail.
Working a job doesn't fix either of these problems. At least in the US, many people who go bankrupt due to medical issues have health insurance, usually provided by their job. These problems are compounded if your plan was to work, but you can't work due to your medical problems. And while medical or disability insurance can theoretically account for these worst-case scenarios, they can be so costly that they may cause financial problems even if no disaster happens.
Divorce is also a major cause of bankruptcy, even if you're employed.
You're doing exactly what my previous post accused people of doing: gloating about how the author's plan failed, without looking at how plans that fit your worldview don't account for the same life events any better.
And you're still wrong. Retiring early renders your financial situation much more fragile and susceptible to disruptive events. Sure, you can go bankrupt due to divorce or illness even when employed, but it's much more probable when you don't have an income stream and when your financial planning depends on not breaking up or not getting ill.
> gloating about how the author's plan failed, without looking at how plans that fit your worldview don't account for the same life events any better.
You're making a lot of unwarranted assumptions about my "worldview" and about how I'm "gloating" over the author's misfortune. Don't.
This is exactly missing my point:
Just because you retire early, doesn't mean your financial planning depends on you not breaking up or not getting ill.
Just because you work out the rest of your existence, doesn't mean you've successfully accounted for breakups or illness.
> Retiring early renders your financial situation much more fragile and susceptible to disruptive events.
Why is that, exactly?
> You're making a lot of unwarranted assumptions about my "worldview" and about how I'm "gloating" over the author's misfortune.
What assumptions? Am I correct in saying that you believe "Retiring early renders your financial situation much more fragile and susceptible to disruptive events" is part of your worldview, and that you're taking the author's failure as a confirmation of that worldview?
Though maybe this is colored by the relevation that follows shortly thereafter. To me it shows an unwillingness to think critically about this. It sounds like his partner communicated with him changes she wanted to make (go back to work and not live like college students) and he just ignored them because he thought they were stupid.
It can come out in different ways, but I suspect it's not that divorced from the above. It's not very attractive to be unemployed and not very ambitious. Maybe the introspection of why is missing, but I suspect that's the reason.
Like if your partner directly tells you they are unhappy because of XYZ, rather than thinking it’s stupid/some part of how the woman brain works (eye roll), it seems pretty clear that not doing anything to fix XYZ - in this case working again and living more luxuriously - is being a bad partner. Doesn’t matter what the genders are or what XYZ is.
I’m not surprised at all at what happened.
> "it seems pretty clear that not doing anything to fix XYZ - in this case working again and living more luxuriously - is being a bad partner."
Yeah - and the why is the bit I was getting at. They have a core value disagreement here, it's likely to be a common one given sexual selective incentives and behavior. I'm not making a moral judgement, but that's likely the truth.
It also sounded like she didn't want to work again - it's unclear if she wanted them both to work, or just for him to work. The podcast I linked is pretty good, men and women often cheat for different reasons, but her motivation here is a pretty textbook example.
His comments are also in the context of her cheating on him and a breakup, so unsurprisingly skew negative.
> And she wasn’t trying that hard anyway, because she had acquired, somehow, New Life Dreams, which had to do with Conspicuous Consumption and Keeping Up and being Visibly Awesome — dreams which are at odds with my own.
The desire to be seen and take part in society is fundamentally human. Yes, you can overdo it, but you can also underdo it. There is nothing wrong with going to nice restaurants, posting about it, discussing it with your friends, etc.
My guess is that they simply stopped having a social life with their peers (he hinted at such). That sounds horrible to me.
There is a reason that retirement communities exist. Just because you retire, that doesn't mean you exit from community.
Different things make different people happy. Some people enjoy having the biggest TV on the block. Other people take pride in NOT having a TV.
My take is that what his wife wanted was not “conspicuous consumption” but rather just a healthy social life.
Granted that is just what i gleaned from his statements.
The author's outlook on life is completely valid, so is his partner's, so is yours. Your outlooks has nothing to do with social media, but maybe his partner's really did. We only have the author's words to go by for this story.
It's a dialog he is creating as a summary of many discussions. In his version of the story they both communicate well and seem to hear each other, but not agree on life. Then his takeaway is that she didn't hear him, which was an odd take.
My take away from the post is that they fundamentally felt 2 different ways about it. The author did not feel the stuff his SO felt. But she was on board with retiring on “lean fire” so I doubt she predicted this about herself either.
I read this post a few weeks ago, so maybe I’m remembering wrong, but I thought the author was perfectly open to SO returning to work, but she wasn’t sure in the middle of all this if she really wanted to do that? I don’t think it’s the author’s responsibility, and I don’t think he thought it was his responsibility, to decide for his spouse if she worked or not, that was up to her to decide.
The sense I got was that it was status related and he was pretty close to right. She didn't like being with someone who wasn't working, didn't like telling her friends her SO didn't work, didn't like not having things to talk about, etc. He was low status compared to her friends.
Eventually she cheated on him - I think that's wrong, but the motivation behind it is not unpredictable or uncommon: https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthli...
The new relationship is different in part because his SO is a librarian with a small income, there isn't as much of a status divide and he is high status in that match given his high net worth.
There's a lot of evidence that women tend to select people at their level or higher for mates: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/216-being-a-transhumani...
A lot of this feels like a narrative on top of that core issue without recognizing the underlying problem.
Obviously things are more complex than this at the individual level, but it feels like a lot of talking around the core issue without recognizing it.
I'm not making morality judgements on any of this (except perhaps the cheating), but it's good to recognize the pragmatic reality of the world you're in when making these kinds of decisions. If you decide to retire early, it'll likely affect your relationship opportunities in some ways you may not understand.
I can relate to his outlook. I hope he was more diplomatic during their discussions about this, but now that it's after the fact, we are reading his blunt opinions on the matter. It's hard to know if he is "right" and she really was influenced by status-driven thinking via Instagram, or if he was just being hard-headed. Either or both are plausible to me.
One thing that I missed the first time this article got posted is that he and his (ex)wife had separate finances.
He had an income of 30k/year, she presumably had a similar income.
Living on 60k/year seems like a whole different ballgame than 30k/year.
That is so smug and self-important. He clearly has social needs, he just feels them differently. And also, not everyone who wants to work and have wealth is just doing it to keep up with others.
I like having some wealth because it makes a lot of things easier. I like the stuff I buy, for myself, for its intrinsic value. A lot of things I spend money on I never even show anyone else. I don't post on social media or go on social media, but I still like a nice house and some toys.
The goal of retirement is to have enough that you will be able to avoid working even if some things go wrong. Otherwise you're not ready to retire.
The downsides I thought of were the inherit randomness of life (catastrophic incidents, children, relationships, health). I'm fairly certain the people working at my company past potential retirement are due to them having family and wanting the insurance perks and hedge for any potential uncertainties children and older age can throw at you.
I really liked that the author elaborated on the relationship dynamic, because I think that's something that could be a common issue in FIRE relationships with a middle-class or higher partner. What if they still want to work or do more? Can your lifestyle accomodate that?
2021: life is perfect with a new perfect partner who's never going to leave me unlike my previous perfect partner
2023: any guesses?
People have a different balance of either, so some are happy with just living while others need to do something, anything beyond the basics.
Neither is wrong from a personal point of view - if it makes you happy/fulfilled, that's it.
From a societal perspective those whose primitive brain has more control are seen as useless, however.
I feel like he needs an existential purpose or threat - everyone does. "Doing what I want" isn't a purpose, in my opinion, but rather a void that needs to be filled with something meaningful.
This is amazing, and so incredibly and refreshingly honest. This helps to repair some of the damage that FIRE bloggers have done to my professional motivation. I have been feeling the isolation during COVID and his description of the isolation than comes from hitting the career off switch really hits home. I have some thinking to do.
There's a pretty clear correlation between specific genes and EDS, and there's a pretty clear connection between EDS and chronic lower back pain ("cLBP" in the study). There's a connection between EDS and "psychological distress" noted, but the authors seem to indicate that EDS is causal in both the psychological distress and the cLBP, not the other way around. There's no noted correlation between psychological distress and cLBP. On the contrary, it seems like psychological distress and cLBP are actually correlated with different variants of EDS.
"Is back pain in an EDS patient caused by stress?" is a valid scientific question, but it's not one that's likely to yield any interesting results if you test it, because so far I see no evidence, even anecdotal, that the two might have a causal relationship. There are higher-priority questions to investigate that are more likely to yield interesting/productive results.