My Why-FI

I’ve often lamented that I don’t get why anyone who learns about FIRE doesn’t immediately drop everything and dive right into pursuing it. After all, I did.

But why?! Why wouldn’t one be at least intrigued by FIRE, if not laser-focused on pursuing it? I can’t know for sure, but I have some ideas:

• they think it’s all fairy dust and magic beans
• they think it takes too much work and/or would take too long to achieve and therefore not only is it not worth pursuing, but the tenets (like, for example, spend less than you earn and invest the balance) aren’t even worth adopting
• they believe the stories saying that FIRE only can be achieved only by saving some super-high (unattainable?) percentage of their income, living in a tiny or shared space, eating nothing but rice and beans (full disclosure, I like them on the merits), and never spending money on anything fun

Flip the switch

But I think the biggest reason that the switch hasn’t turned on for most people is that they haven’t found their “why.” I suspect most haven’t even thought about a “why.” In fact, they may never even have thought to think of one.

And that’s too bad. Because if you ask me, everyone . . . everyone . . . has at least one “why.”

I think that once you find your “why(s),” it all clicks. Maybe (probably?) after finding your “why(s)” you shoot for FI. Great! But maybe you find that RE is the thing you didn’t even realize was the key allowing you unlock the door to your best life. Yay you!

Here are some of my “whys.”.

People power

Most people I’ve worked with over the years have been at least acceptable to deal with. Many have been been great.

But not everyone.

As to those people, I’ve bitten my tongue many times. As long as I’ve been in an employment position, or a third-party service provider to clients, I’ve occasionally (but not always) felt the risk of losing a job/client too high to speak my mind. Those decisions are personal to me, of course. Others in my shoes might have spoken their mind more readily. That’s fine. I can just speak to myself.

What’s bothered me a lot about many of these people is that many have proven to, objectively, be dim-witted. And most of them have fat salaries, would I’m sure rather be doing something other than their current jobs, and could have retired or taken up an occupation more agreeable to them long ago. Yet they’re instead blindly leading lives in which they’re regularly working 50-80-hour weeks, year in and year out, and will do so until at least age 60, if not well beyond. Fair or not, I look at them with no small measure of contempt. As opposed to pity, which is what I’d feel if they were nice people.

Reaching a position where I can be a Kevin Hart, and either freely speak my mind, demand most or all of what I want/will accept, or walk away without an iota of care or worry, is spine-tinglingly appealing.

Working for no living

Another cohort of people I’ve worked with have been workaholics. They seemed to work all . . . the . . . time. And had been for decades. And would be continuing to do so until they retired or walked away (if they ever decided to do so). Or died. Maybe on the job.

This way of living—even for a year, let alone an entire working career—literally makes me recoil in horror. I’ve vowed to never live that way.

Boss, baby

I’ve had the good fortune to have worked/done work for some wonderful people for the majority of my working life. But I’ve also had a few bad bosses. Really bad. The memories of the good bosses/clients form a nice warm, glowing cloud in my brain. The memories of the bad bosses are seared deeply into it. My face scrunches up a little bit in anger just thinking about those people.

And the thing is, as an employee, one typically has no control over who his or her boss is (or, on occasion, who that person becomes). So while you might lovvvve your boss today, who knows what tomorrow brings? Maybe your boss gets new demands from management (or is management) and his or her personality and demands on you change for the worse. Or maybe your boss is secretly pursuing FIRE and, one day, reaches it and says that he or she is sailing off into the sunset gets an opportunity that he or she can’t pass up and so leaves your organization. And then your new boss is someone you, um, aren’t quite as fond of. Boom! Work conditions changed for the worse, lickety-split.

Buzz off

During the dot-com boom of the late-1990s/early 2000s, I worked for a tech company. It was a bad fit. In part, because the people there were big on buzzwords, which I generally don’t care for. I find buzzwords in almost all instances dumb, manifestations of unnecessary artifice, pretentious, and sometimes dehumanizing. Words and phrases like “bandwidth” (used as “the physical and mental limit of your working ability”) or “ramping up” (“to increase over a period of time”). At the very least, they make my eyes roll. Worse, I’ve found myself using them on occasion. That’s made me ill.

It’s not the buzzwords themselves that for a “why” for me. It’s what they symbolize for me. See, above, references to “dumb, manifestations of unnecessary artifice, pretentious, and sometimes dehumanizing.” My best working conditions have been with people who are real, at least with me.

Working stiff

When I graduated from college many, many, many several years ago, I had a job that I really enjoyed and was low-stress, bordering on no-stress. Not unexpectedly, of course, it paid pretty poorly. And anyway, I’d already planned to go to law school. So I only had the job a short while until law school started.

Since that time, and but for a period of several stressful months of being unemployed, I’ve been a working man. Each job has had stressors, even if in varying degrees and varying times. That’s now many years going. It’s getting old. I’m getting old.

One day(dreaming)

Another “why” for me—that there are other things I’d rather be doing—is one I’ve thought about from a different perspective recently. Namely, I’ve been asking myself if, at any given moment while working, whether I’d rather performing that work or reading for pleasure or cooking or spending time with the wife and/or kids or in another (part-time) job or hiking or camping or exploring . . . In short, any number of other specific things. Recently, the answer has always been the same: a much more emphatic “yaaassssss!” and my daydreaming about actually doing one of those other things at that moment.

Secure the perimeter

I’ve known financial insecurity. I first became acquainted with it as a child. I was reintroduced to it in my law school years and the years following it while repaying a mountain of resulting debt. And later yet again when I was unemployed. That feeling sucks. There’s no other way to put it. For me, achieving FI is a way to minimize, if not obliterate, the chances that I’ll ever experience it again.

Race to the finish

I’ve had several jobs over the course of my working years. Most have been good fits. A few have not. See, e.g., the tech job mentioned above. I generally found my time in these positions awful. And the specter of being let go hung over me like the sword of Damocles.

Regardless of the job, as an employee I knew well that the at-will employment relationship meant that no matter how great an employee I was, I could get canned in an instant. Similarly, now working for myself, I recognize that a client can sever the relationship with me in an instant.

I also suffer some measure of impostor syndrome. It’s never been debilitating. But neither has it ever been absent.

Oh, and I’m also a natural pessimist. So I hope for the best in people, but assume they’ll do the worst. Rotten way to think about people. Hugely helpful in living life.

Combined, these things have pushed me to reach FI so that if any client/employment relationship goes south—let alone if it does so quickly—I’ve built up a financial fortress protecting me and The Family from any financial impact imperiling our way of life. And certainly against the prospect of financial ruin.

OptionALL

This last “why” is, in a word, options.

I don’t hate working. But I want the option to do so or not.

I don’t hate working full time. But I want the option to do so or not.

I don’t hate my field of work. But I want the option of switching to another.

I don’t hate working in a field that pays well, but that isn’t my ideal. But I want the option of taking a much-lower-paying job in another field.

I don’t hate having work-related obligations. But I want the option of more frequently (if not always) being able to choose to do something else in any given instance.

And in the end . . .

If there are themes in my “whys,” they’re: (1) that I’m probably burnt out a lot bit; (2) I want to adopt the Kevin Hart attitude to live my life more authentically and spend more of my time with good people; and (3) I likes me some options.

But that’s me. Like I mentioned earlier in this blog post, everyone . . . everyone . . . has a “why.” If you haven’t found yours, I encourage you to find it. Hopefully it’s not too difficult to do.