Early-Retirement Update

I've had friends with trust funds, who just seem to dither around in life. "Making music" they never release. Picking up little "pass the time" jobs. And these are people that aren't living "leanFIRE"

It seems like such a nihilistic way to live. You're just floating along the stream of life. Things worked out for you, but you have no further passion or inclination to improve the world? No problems you could set yourself to solving?

As much criticism as Elon Musk gets (he's certainly not perfect), the path he took is the only thing that makes sense to me in that position. He didn't take his wealth and begin doing angel investing in new CRUD app startups, he wanted to solve real problems humanity faces.

Not everybody has that amount of money or skill, but it's surprising to me how many people's alternative to having a day job they're forced to do is just complete leisure time 100% of the time or picking up arbitrary hobbies.

In this guy's post, like with writing, it sounds like he wasn't actually passionate about it. There are plenty of places to post serialized fiction as you write in online and get feedback (Royal Road, Substack) but it sounded like the measuring stick he was judging himself was becoming a very popular/famous author, not actually writing great stories. It seems just like a different version of the treadmill he was talking about with other people.

I skimmed through maybe 50% of it, but a really great read. I'll try to re-read in-depth some more later.

Some really good nuggets of wisdom in there, even if you are not planning on retiring early. I'm kind of in the same place as the author, although I don't think I would necessarily really retire. I'd just take lower-paying jobs that were more fulfilling so as to keep me interacting with others and giving me some sort of daily challenge.

My takeaway from the post is you really can't predict where your life will go in the future. It's good to recognize that and be okay with it. A lot of us, myself included, are caught up in planning and doing the right things, but even with careful planning, you really don't have total control over what happens to you. Being resilient is an important part of moving forward.

The inability to relate to those working is understandable. I wonder if the author had been doing something more fulfilling to fill his time, he would have related more to his friends? Maybe not on the "making money and buying things" side, but the feeling of progressing in something. If I were to retire early, I feel like I would need something to keep me occupied, some sort of "life's work" to keep me going. Otherwise, it just feels like living out the rest of your days, filling it with movies, video games, and books.

He mulls over and comes to the conclusion later in his post that he probably could have done more to save his relationship. Just based off of the sentence you quoted and other things he said, I wouldn't be surprised if he was very dismissive of his ex-wifes struggle to find meaning, or desire to go back to work. Cheating is terrible, but having a partner who doesn't try to see your struggles can be crippling.

I don't know. I'd love to have a basic level of income and then be able to dither around with random jobs. I'd love to be a bartender for 6 months, work in a bookstore for 6 months, become a carpenter for a year or two. I'd probably feel differently if I actually had a trust fund since my upbringing would be different but it does feel stifling that in order to have a financially rewarding career one has to stay on a relatively narrow path.

And I say this as someone who has made a major career change during their life.

I was with the story until I clicked on the link to the discussion with the partner and there was the sentence about how she "learned French last year." That description really tells me something about the person who wrote this.

First of all, you can't "learn a language" in a year. It takes multiple years, and it's really a journey not a destination. I guarantee you his partner doesn't speak French at, say, a C1 or C2 level. Impossible.

Second, I feel like it exposes something about the writer here. Too much emphasis on state, too little on the transitions between state.