Comment by yata69420 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yata69420 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm doing the weird thing you're describing right now!

I have a miserable high paying tech job that I would absolutely not do if I wasn't being paid so well.

Maybe I'm delusional, but I believe this is my best strategy for buying my freedom.

The way I see it, it takes about $3M to bond yourself away from a lifetime of servitude. That much capital would allow me to pay myself a middle class income without any time commitment.

The best answer would have been to have rich parents with a large trust fund so I could go pursue my interests without worry. I don't have rich parents, but that doesn't change my requirements.

So instead, I'm going about acquiring the funds I need by whatever legal means I can, which in practice means job hopping at tech companies, looking for equity payouts, and buy/borrow/die with companies and funds that I anticipate to be around for 50+ years.

Of course, I don't get to have kids with this strategy, but ethically I wouldn't want to birth a child into a life of bondage under capitalism anyway. It happened to me and I'm not particularly keen on how it's going. At $10M+ I may reconsider, but I don't expect to get there in my lifetime.

I don't know how to say this without sounding like an asshole, but why do most people who are all about FIRE talk this way? Am I the only one who doesn't look at working a cushy office job 30-35 hours a week as "a lifetime of servitude?" I'd rather give up some time for a few decade, and enjoy life during that time, and retire earlier than most but later than I could, than be miserable for a decade just to live a lower middle class life without any skills to fall back on (as would certainly be the case if the market drop 50% 8-10 years into your retirement - you're now in your 40s, a decade removed from tech, and you need a job now).

How does anyone read fringe nonsense like "ethically I wouldn't want to birth a child into a life of bondage under capitalism" and not roll your eyes hard enough to get RSI?

They lack insight about nature and other political systems.

That last part is definitely overdramatic, but I do think that you're looking at the math of work in a way that I (and presumably the poster to which you're responding) don't agree with.

The thing is, your 30-35 hours at a cushy office job isn't just 30-35 hours of fungible time - it's a commitment to a lifestyle that revolves around office work. A lot of folks talk like a person who has a job has the same amount of freedom as someone without a job, just minus the time they spend in the office. That's part of it, but there's also the loss of spontaneity/flexibility/control.

If those are things you really prize, then it can be perfectly rational to optimize your life for the maximum number of years in which you have total control (i.e. you're not working). If that's what you want to do, then it makes perfect sense to work as much as humanly possible and save as much money as possible on any year in which you're working at all, since you're giving up that total control of your life whether you're working 20 hours or 80. Then, when you've got enough money, you get total control of your life for as many years as possible. Depending on what you value, it can be a totally reasonable optimization.

> since you're giving up that total control of your life whether you're working 20 hours or 80.

You forget the age effects: when you're 80 you will have less control on the basics (like, control over being able to run for a few hours without pain)

> Then, when you've got enough money, you get total control of your life for as many years as possible. Depending on what you value, it can be a totally reasonable optimization.

No, the FIRE logic seems self-inconsistent to me: if you do believe in this "control" part, it's not a reasonable optimization!

A much better logic would take into account the age effects to conclude it's better to enjoy life as much as possible until say 40, then slave away to repay the debt incurred.

Or even better- die in debt!

> A lot of folks talk like a person who has a job has the same amount of freedom as someone without a job, just minus the time they spend in the office. That's part of it, but there's also the loss of spontaneity/flexibility/control.

Personally, I disagree with the FIRE logic for other reasons: I believe it's better to participate to society, to do great things together as species, as a team!

I've seen some people call it "team mankind" or "team earth" and I wholeheartedly agree: we've accomplished miracles at the planet level!

Why go FIRE and be lonely? Isn't that waiting for death?

Having a job means participating to society, which is not just a net-negative of losing "spontaneity/flexibility/control", but doing interesting things with other people, which requires coordination/synchronization and therefore entails some degree of a loss of control.

However, I personally believe it's for the better, not just at the species/planet level, but at the individual level: I like having colleagues. I like the small talk. I like being part of a multiple persons effort. And so are you, unless you've got some quirks, because most humans are pro-social.

Not having to work doesn’t mean you can’t be participating in society anymore. It just means you’re now calling 100% of the shots instead of suffering someone else’s decisions.

If you are fully insulated from everyone else decisions, I'd call that not participating in society anymore...

Based on your theory I'm calling the shots but somehow my kid's elementary school still starts at 8am... What gives?

> Or even better- die in debt!

You know as I get older I've come to think the two ways to go out are with either 8+ figures in the bank (assuming you have unethically birthed a few offspring into bondage, of course), or owing as many people as much money as possible. You either have enough to leave more than a token amount to your kids (so they can escape their bondage) or you lived as good as a lifestyle as possible and got it relatively cheaply.

I'm kidding, but only mostly.

This is exactly it (and ok, perhaps "life of bondage" is a bit over-dramatic).

I really value being able to sleep until I am rested and wake up without an alarm.

I also want to be able to act on things when spontaneity strikes. Whether that's doing a marathon coding session to solve a problem, staying out late with a new group of friends, or deciding I'd like to go travel somewhere today.

Also freeing up the area of my brain that is filled with perpetual worry about my employer's expectations has got to be a good thing, even if I'm not sure what would fill the void.

The anxiety and depression that come from knowing I have to sleep because I have to wake up to an alarm tomorrow so that I can solve some arbitrary problem for my employer is pretty much killing me.

The other problem is that once I tap out, I'm going to have a resume gap that may make it hard to find high paying work again in 5-10 years should the need arise. Because that's how our system works, I need to secure all the funding I need now, because I know I may not have access to it again.

We have access to all of the world's knowledge now, but I don't have time to sponge up as much of it as I want. It's like we live in this amazing future but I use it to maintain obscure software systems all day.

I sort of feel like this episode of The Twilight Zone ("Time Enough At Last"): https://youtu.be/oLoNGRVeC7Y?t=65

> The anxiety and depression that come from knowing I have to sleep because I have to wake up to an alarm tomorrow so that I can solve some arbitrary problem for my employer is pretty much killing me.

I mean, having crippling anxiety and depression because you have to wake up at a certain time definitely isn't normal, by any means.

Yep. Time, energy, and mental freedom isn’t fungible, and you can’t “just” give away the best 30-40 hours of your week so you can live your “real life” in the remaining 2/7 of the week.

I wouldn't want to birth a child into a life of bondage under capitalism anyway.

I understand the economic issues (and de-facto coercion) you are referring to.

But at the end of the day -- whether it's "bondage" or not is all in your head. Especially if you let it go so far as to block you from having children. In fact this outlook seems to fall under the very definition of "prisons we build for ourselves".

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