I didn’t mean to retire this year and when I say I have retired, I mostly mean I am not going back to tech. I haven’t been able to say this out loud because it sounds brash and possibly foolish and regrettable. I’m quite risk averse and our society isn’t set up for anyone to believe there is such a thing as “enough” money, let alone too much of it. But the more I sit with the thought and my life right now, the more I think it is true. I don’t need to go back.
Accidental early retirement
For those new to the idea, FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. There are countless blogs about it if you’re interested, but I don’t read them and, honestly, I didn’t set out to do FIRE. It wasn’t until my bookstore job that I realized I had maybe, timidly, inadvertently FIRE’d.
A quick FIRE how-to
The general method is:
Calculate your annual spending (e.g., $40,000).
Multiply it by 25 (e.g., $1,000,000). This is your FIRE number.
Once you’ve saved that amount, you have achieved financial independence and can retire early, where you take on projects out of personal growth/interest and not necessity.
If you’re more risk averse, you can multiply your spending by 30, etc. and plenty of FIRE followers play geographic arbitrage so that they make money in the US but live abroad, where the cost of living is much lower even while quality of life is the same, if not higher.
FIRE criticism
If you’re cringing at how much this reeks of privilege, I understand because it does. I hated FIRE for years and still have my reservations.
Saving 75%+ of your take-home pay is only feasible if you’re making above-median income, which means FIRE is inaccessible to at least half our population. It’s likely no surprise that FIRE has a reputation among tech and finance bros. And given that tech and finance – some of the highest-paying and most exploitative industries – refuse to address DEI, most people who FIRE (and write about it) seem to be straight white able cis men, often with no dependents.
Fiery irony
I agree that people who stand to benefit most from FIRE are the people whom FIRE excludes. But I’m not sure that FIRE can (or should) address what are fundamentally policy issues (e.g., housing affordability, minimum wage, monopolies, tax codes) any more than staying in a well-paying tech job can.
If anything, since I’ve FIRE’d, I have been better able to curb my complicity in the corporate-capitalist machine. As a bookseller, my time and energy is spent reading and discussing books by authors of marginalized identities and increasing literacy among communities of color. I’m nowhere near being an activist, but FIRE has helped remove me a little more from preserving the status quo and a little more towards disrupting it.
Slow Things
Slow Read
From revisiting Anand Giridharadas’s Winners Take All:
For example, Giussani observed, ideas framed as being about "poverty" are more acceptable than ideas framed as being about "inequality." The two ideas are related. But poverty is a material fact of deprivation that does not point fingers, and inequality is something more worrying: It speaks of what some have and others lack; it flirts with the idea of injustice and wrongdoing; it is relational. "Poverty is essentially a question that you can address via charity," he said. A person of means, seeing poverty, can write a check and reduce that poverty. "But inequality," Giussani said, "you can't, because inequality is not about giving back. Inequality is about how you make the money that you're giving back in the first place." Inequality, he said, is about the nature of the system. To fight inequality means to change the system. For a privileged person, it means to look into one's own privilege. And, he said, "you cannot change it by yourself. You can change the system only together. With charity, essentially, if you have money, you can do a lot of things alone."
Slow Cook
You know, this was a week of quick cooking on my part. My partner made two epic dishes, slow cook style. First he made a gourmet spinach, mushroom, roasted brussels sprouts mac and cheese, which I spooned into a ramekin so I could better savor three (okay, four) little bowls of it. Then he spoiled me with udon noodles made from scratch, complete with bok choy from our last CSA share!
Slow Joy
Peeling cloves of garlic and having their skins fall right off in two big, full flakes.
Thanks again for reading! May you enjoy a lovely slow day.