What a Riff Off!

After discovering FIRE, I went down the rabbit hole of blogs. Starting with Mr. Money Mustache, I soon stumbled upon blogs like Afford Anything, 1500 Days, Go Curry Cracker, jlcollinsnh, the Mad Fientist, Our Next Life, Retire by 40, and many others. There was reading. Lots of reading. Lots and lots of reading. Lots and lots and lots . . . Well, you get the point.

And I didn’t just read the latest posts. I dug into the archives of these sites like a wild-eyed, gnarly-bearded prospector who thought he might, kinda, just possibly have seen a fleck of something gold-colored poking out of the ground. I binge read the entire catalogues of several blogs. The FIRE blog universe has since greatly expanded (my humble blog being one—if perhaps the sole and biggest pollutant—in this universe), as has my knowledge of the blogs in it. So now, I read other terrific blogs like Financial Chain Breakers, Slightly Early Retirement, and Financial Panther, among others.

But, keeping up with new blogs is tough, even though there are several excellent aggregator websites out there. But occasionally I discover a new blog that I like. And if I like it enough, I’ll binge read it.

I’d thought that in my initial rabbit-hole dive I’d discovered all the biggies and that as new biggies came online, I found out about them, too. But I’ve recently discovered a gaping omission in my knowledge.

A LAFing matter

A few months ago, I started seeing various references to a post on a blog called “Living a FI,” the author of which goes by the abbreviation LAF. Apparently, he’d not posted in more than four years. This new—long and comprehensive—post was a recap of what’s happened to him since last posting. At some point or other, I clicked on a link to it, read part of it, and then walked away.

But I kept seeing new references to this post. So, finally, I read it all the way through. The gist is that LAF retired early in 2015, then had some very happy years, later encountered significant unfortunate challenges, and has since gone back to work, likely temporarily. It’s a good read, and between that fact and that he’d not posted in several years, sort of explained the excitement in the FIREverse.

But something nagged at me. Did I already know of this blog and just forgot about it? The logo and name looked somewhat familiar to me. And although the last post before this new one was posted in November 2016, I’d started following FIRE blogs at least several months before that. So, it’d have been a bit surprising if I’d not stumbled upon this one. Also, at the time I read the post, it had about 330 comments (as I write this, the count is now well over 400). Those are monster numbers for a FIRE blog. We’re talking the most popular Mr. Money Mustache blog post levels of comments.

So, now I’m thinking to myself: OK. Hold the phone. Who is this LAF that he can come, out of the blue and with no apparent self-promotion as far as I can tell, and garner such a widespread reaction and hundreds of comments?! Further investigation on my part was clearly warranted, I concluded.

So, I did what I do. I checked out the archives. Maybe 100 posts, all posted between 2014–2016. An impressive, even if not gargantuan, output.

I’ve since binge read the blog.

Tour de force field

I’ve discovered what I think is one reason that Living a FI is the legend that the many references to, and comments on, the new blog post would seem to suggest he is. About six months into his blog, he started writing a series of posts titled “The Job Experience.” Over the course of 13 multipart, posts, LAF takes the reader on a journey through each year of his career to that point in time.

I don’t use the term “tour de force” (or, for that matter, any frenchified terms, you know, like “french fries,” or “french toast”) often or lightly. But to me, this series of posts unquestionably qualifies as such.

Although LAF does a great job of breaking each year into reasonable chunks, in the aggregate these posts are long. Very long. And detailed. Some may find them in part or whole tedious, or that he whines. I don’t see those posts this way, tho. Or, given that LAF is a techie, who’s held exclusively techie jobs, unrelatable if the reader is not a techie, or hasn’t worked in a techie environment.

I, however, was utterly and totally enthralled by these posts. LAF is a good writer and storyteller. Each post reads very well. So, too, the series.

And unrelatable? I’m also about the last person whom someone would describe as a techie. And although I happen to have once worked in a techie environment, it was only for a short time, and I held a non-techie role. Nonetheless, I found these posts completely relatable. That’s because while what LAF writes is in part specific to his techie role and industry, the themes and situations that he addresses, the points he hits upon, and the nuances he details, are common to a far, far wider spectrum of jobs and industries. Especially in the white collar sector, within which I have plied my trade my whole career.

In short, You. Should. Read. This. Series. I should add that the vast majority of LAF’s other posts are equally insightful and well written. All equally worth your time. Although “The Job Experience” is one major reason that I think LAF is such a revered blog, his collective output undeniably explains it.

The Book of Job(s)?

As I read each post, I many, many, many times found LAF hitting upon a point or a situation that he encountered—often so subtle that it might be missed completely, or not fully appreciated for how big a deal it is (at least to me, and I suspect, scores of others)—that spoke to me so directly that I found myself saying, “YES! YES! YES!,” and no, not in the sexual way. Get your head out of the gutter, Dear Reader!

As I read these posts, I pondered whether I, too, could (or should) write a series of posts like “The Job Experience.” Maybe, I thought. But there’d be two major problems.

First, my career has been far longer than LAF’s. That’d be a ton of writing, and I frankly don’t think that I could sustain interest in such a long series.

Second, while I’m sure that LAF remembered his career in great detail, I’m equally sure that he doesn’t have a photographic memory. Surely, he took liberties as to any number of details, even if the story ultimately very closely resembles reality. I certainly don’t have a photographic memory. And I’m not sure that I could remember my career history so well as to write a story that closely hews to the actual reality. You, Dear Reader, would never know. But I would. And that’d bother me. Because I’d constantly be thinking things like, “Awww, geez! I can’t believe I forgot to write about Person A!” or “How could I possibly left out the story about Situation B?!” I’m a proponent of never letting the great being the enemy of the good, but there’d all but surely be omissions in the story that’d gnaw at me. And I do not like to be gnawed at.

So, maybe I will and maybe I won’t eventually write a series like this. But in the meantime, I thought of another series that I think I could make a decent go at. It’s a riff off of LAF’s series (if you’d been wondering what the title of this blog post has to do with anything, wonder no further, Dear Reader). If LAF ever reads this blog post LAF will never read this blog post, I hope that he will believe me when I say that my quasi-imitation is meant as the sincerest form of flattery.

What I mean to do, at some point, is touch on many of those subtle points and situations that LAF touched upon, address them in the context of my own career, and explain how each has informed my interest in FIREing. My “Looking Forward” series of blog posts of several weeks ago were feeble, one-off attempts in this regard. Toe-dipping in the water if you will.

While I previously wrote a post on why I want to FIRE, this series will get more granular and address reasons not addressed in that prior post. If I’m able to write half as engagingly as LAF, I’ll consider it a victory. Brace yourself, Dear Reader, to be absolutely bored to tears learn a little more than you ever cared to know about your humble blogger, FIFTP (that abbreviation just rolls off the tongue, don’t it?).

And in the end . . .

Dear Reader, I think all writers borrow at least a little from other writers. I’m not talking plagiarism, for which there’s no excuse. Rather, just taking an idea or a theme, for example. I plead guilty as charged on that front. But I’m being up front about it here. Hopefully these riffs don’t damage the value of my blog.