Does FIRE Make for Healthy Comparisons?

My good friends recommended a great podcast recently, Dr. Laurie Santos' The Happiness Lab. The show is based on Santos' immensely popular class on positive psychology at Yale, "The Science of Well-Being", which at one point had over a quarter of the students at Yale enrolled, with hundreds of thousands more enrolled online for free through Coursera.

The podcast tackles the myths of what we think will make us happy (but doesn't), while also outlining the science of what actually makes us happy (even though it's not often what we think).

Research on positive psychology has long been one of my favorite subjects. In fact, the podcast's first guest, Sonja Lyubomirsky, was the subject of this blog's first series way back in 2013, looking at happiness, debt and how various aspects of personal finances impact how we feel.

My favorite episode from the first season has been "Silver Linings": looking at how reference points, the thing we compare ourselves to, can be a strong determinant of how happy we feel about our situation, regardless of how objectively good or bad it is.

The episode uses the data set of Olympic medal winners to illustrate the point. Santos tells the story of McKayla Maroney, who you likely know as much from her meme as you do from her second place finish at the London Olympics.

While Maroney's illustration of being dissatisfied with second place is just fantastic in its own right, perhaps it's not all that surprising. Of course someone working for years to earn a gold medal might not be terribly happy with coming up just short.

What is surprising is that bronze medal winners seem happier with their result, despite being further from the Olympian's shared goal of gold. Dr. Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University recorded the facial expressions of all medal winners from one Olympic games and then asked third parties to rank those expressions on a scale of one to ten, from agony to ecstasy. Gold medal winners had the highest scores but they were followed by bronze medalists; silver medal winners showed the worst reactions, even ranking closer to agony than to ecstasy. This study was backed up by another by Dr. David Matsumoto, which looked at all the facial muscle reactions of medal winners at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

In both cases, those earning the bronze seemed to be using all the other competitors as a reference point: the athletes coming in third looked at the vast field of competitors who didn't win anything, and felt happy to have at least earned a medal. The silver medal winners seem to have been using the gold medalists as their reference point: the one person in the entire world who performed better than they did at their craft. As such, they felt disappointment, despite just achieving an objectively incredible feat. From the podcast:

"These findings show that the imagined alternative, that of a gold medal, poisons the actual really awesome reality that silver medalists experience. They've just won an Olympic medal: that should be a thrill. But end up looking enviously at the one single solitary person on earth who beat them. But this experience isn't just a problem for Olympians. It's a human bias...that's deeply ingrained in all of us."

This potential downside of reference points has me wondering about the public sharing, the public comparisons, and maybe even a bit of the public competition, that happens in the personal finance space, especially the financial independence and early retirement niche.

When we share stories about couples retiring early, in their forties, thirties, or even their twenties, do our readers then use us FIRE folks as a reference point for their own financial achievements?

That is to say, when I share that I'm hitting financial independence and could opt to retire at a fairly young age, am I more likely to give readers the experience of a bronze medalist, someone who looks at their financial situation and feels gratitude for all they've accomplished so far?

Or am I more likely to give my readers the experience of a silver medalist: someone who looks at what we're doing, at our weird, outlier early retirement, and maybe not feel that great about what may, indeed, be a very accomplished and incredible financial journey in its own right?

I get the feeling it's a lot more likely I'm giving the average reader the silver medal experience. Which isn't very nice.

While working towards a financial independence and an early retirement is a good thing, I wonder whether my writing about it has been a net positive for people out there.

Is it mostly just a vanity project: something that I write about so I can feel good about myself, and maybe brag quite a bit to people on the internets and say, in not so many words, "Aren't I very good with money?"

The charitable view is that sharing our experiences actually helps people achieve things that they wouldn't otherwise. We don't come out of the womb knowing about financial independence, so we have to read about how to do it and see examples of people doing it before we can give it an honest go ourselves.

I like that idea: that this blog helps people do something similar. That is a nice way of thinking about it.

But I think the other side of that help is that our own story, our weird, atypical story that most people certainly can't replicate, along with probably helping inspire some positive financial steps, very likely is making a lot of people also feel a lot of negative emotions about their finances, too. My decisions to publicly share our income and our progress to financial independence and an optional retirement by forty are probably giving people a bad reference point for comparison.

I suspect this is true because I, too, feel myself making these sort of comparisons. I see people who have retired a few years earlier than I did and, you know, it doesn't feel great. I see people with much larger incomes and much higher retirement balances and that doesn't feel fantastic, either.

And yet here I am, joining in the same game, putting our story out there, and guaranteeing that a whole lot of other people will feel some bad stuff, too.

I don't know what the answer to any of this is. Maybe we should work towards financial independence but just keep quiet about it: just don't blog about it. Lots of people, normal people, do this all the time. I suspect that, in almost all ways, we bloggers and content creators are the niche, not the norm.

The rub is that I like writing. This blog is the one way that I put my English degree to use these days, and is the one project I've managed to stick with over the years. I sure would like to keep writing, without feeling like this outlet is good for me but bad for everyone else.

If there's a middle ground, maybe it's in finding ways to make readers feel good about themselves, instead of comparing themselves to me.

I mean, of course it is hard comparing yourself with me.

But you, dear reader, you, too, are amazing. I know it, not just because of your incredible taste in media, but also because there are many, many ways in which you're the medalist and I'm nowhere near the podium.

The problem with online comparisons is not only that they are worse than zero sum games; that for every 'winner' there are many, many losers. But with comparisons online, we end up comparing our reality to someone else's carefully curated narrative. That we end up feeling bad that our real situation doesn't quite match up to someone else's based-on-real-events fiction.

Finally, thankfully, there is someone who actually understands how best to combat the urges to compare ourselves to the 'gold medal' reference points around us: Michelle Kwan, the figure skater who famously came in second place in at the 1998 Winter Olympics, but avoided the outcome that befell so many other athletes finishing second.

Rather than comparing herself to other skaters, even just after getting second, Michelle Kwan focused on internal motivation. "I never put myself 'against' somebody. I didn't want to wish anybody falls or anything. I tend to kind of focus on myself, "Kwan notes. "I was not that kind of that competitor where it was like, 'I'm against this person.'"

In addition to other healthy habits, like negative visualization (imagining what sort of outcomes we'd have if not for all the good things that had occurred in our lives) and having a good example of a reference point in her older sister and fellow elite skater, Karen Kwan, Michelle's positive outlook seems to come from her focus on internal motivation. 

Her goal going in to the Olympics was, amazingly, not to actually win the gold medal. Rather, she just wanted to ensure she skated the best routine that she could. "I want to skate my best," Kwan said. "Before thinking about medals, before thinking about anything, I wanted to do my very own best and have no regrets. It really was an awakening. It's not about the result, it's about the journey."

In that way, she could feel like she accomplished her goal, regardless of the medal. She focused on her own performance, on doing the best that she could and her own journey: not how much further along on the path someone else might be at any moment. 

So that's going to be my goal, too. As I read through so many blog posts and articles, profiling the successes of people who are younger or more accomplished than me, I'm going to try to overcome the envy that can creep in. I'm going to try to recognize that the comparisons are all in my head: the competition between us is not real. There is no race, and no medals are given. 

And if my blog inspires some bad feelings for you, my readers, I hope you'll accept my apologies. I hope that each of us gets to a place where we can opt out of these competitions. Because the way to win this messed up game is to not play in the first place.

*Photo is from The U.S. Army at Flickr Creative Commons.

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