For Me, it's the RE

The correct thing to do in FIRE is to focus on the financially independent part: the freedom you gain from having financial security. If you no longer needed to work for money, what would you do with your one and precious life? Would you travel the world full time? Write that book you've been thinking about for decades? Start a business or non profit?

I feel some shame for not having great answers to many of those questions. Or, maybe I should say that the things I'd choose to do are not all that different from what I'd already been doing while working: playing board games, writing and reading, hanging out with my friends, watching the kids, cooking, tending to the house and the cars, taking some tasty naps. But these are mundane and totally ordinary pleasures. None of them require retirement. The only somewhat impressive thing we'd like to do once financially independent is travel more abroad, and we were kind of doing that already. 

Besides, having children slowed our travel down far more than work ever did, as there's a nine month window on either side of the birth where we don't want to get on a series of planes and trains.

Rather than the financial independence itself, retirement was always the thing I longed for. While there were parts of my job I enjoyed, I'd known for a while I didn't like doing it for forty or fifty hours every week. I wanted to stop. 

I know I'm supposed to retire "to" something but maybe I'm just wired differently, because cutting bad things out of my life has always worked pretty well. Some of the best decisions in my life have come from subtraction, not addition. Ending toxic relationships with significant others, friends, and even family has brought some legitimate peace. Leaving my first university, and the small town in Pennsylvania where I just did not fit in, was a good decision, even if I barely knew what awaited me on the other side of the country in San Diego. 

Was there something really magical about San Diego? Or was getting out of that college town the thing that did it? 

There are other things that made my life better just by removing them. While I never wanted to write about this much while I was working, I spent my early twenties addicted to meth. What started out as a casual habit on the weekends with friends ended up nearly costing me my job and several friendships, along with twenty pounds or so. 

I started out just staying up all night on a Friday, and then catching up on sleep over the weekend. But after a few years, I'd be up from Friday morning all through the weekend. And then Monday morning would show up and I'd either have to call in to work sick or try to tough the work day out and pass out as soon as I got home from work on Monday. 

One day I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror coming out of the shower and was shocked by how thin I'd gotten. I wish that I could say I moved "towards" something, but the truth was that I just needed to cut that out of my life. It didn't matter what goals I had if I didn't take that step.

I rented a room in a new house, which got some distance between me and my old housemates. I ended up substituting with other drugs, which is not a great idea, but it worked. After a year without meth, it stuck. I was able to start doing normal things, like working out, joining a kickball team, getting my teaching credential at night after work, going on some dates. I haven't touched meth since June of 2006. 

Sure, maybe it wasn't as noble a solution as sticking around and learning to face my temptations head on, but my life got better when I got out of that house. I tried to quit a lot of times before, and I never had much success. But leaving, with a little physical distance and the ability to put my phone on ignore, that did the trick. Other things I wanted, like a better (and better paying) career, finishing my education, getting my finances together, those things only seemed possible after I was able to get away from meth.

For better or worse, I think work ended up falling into the same sort of pattern for me. I don't know how common this is, but I ended up burning out at whatever job I had: teaching, procurement either in government or with a big corporation. I'd change jobs and things would start out fine. I'd try to bust my ass and keep up with the work but, as the years went on, more and more projects piled up until I couldn't keep pace. Work was terrible for my mental health, but I didn't see many solutions other than leaving: for another job to start fresh, or eventually to retire.

I know there was supposed to be some sort of job out there that didn't feel like work, or some sort of system of organization and email management that would finally make the mountain of work manageable. If that career or system is out there, I never found it. But I did find the FIRE movement. And for me, financial independence wasn't a path to something specific: it was a fire escape.

I've always heard that escape is not a worthy goal. But I don't need to sit down and solve every problem or forever endure every terrible person in my life: sometimes the right move is walking away. Like with habits that bring more pain than happiness. Some relationships. Maybe a job, or an entire career, too.

Our culture values facing problems head-on, and then conquering them. Quitting is a four letter word, because it is seen as giving up or, worse, running away from your problems. We are supposed to face our fears, and then emerge victorious, with Queen unironically blaring in the background. We admire the fight, not the flight.

Like a lot of American ideology, I think this is too simple and encourages us, maybe intentionally, to keep toxic things and people in our lives far longer than we ought to. At least that's how I felt about our relationship with work. For the last year and a half, we were all just supposed to keep plugging away during a pandemic like nothing else was going on in our lives. How is that healthy? 

I'll never get used to how America seems so obsessed with work.

Work wasn't an addiction for me, but it was pretty toxic. Maybe I was just unlucky with the jobs I had. I was bad at telling bosses "no" or speaking up when things got to be too much. 

I don't want to put all the blame on work culture: a lot of this must just be due to how I was made and how I deal with stress. I had some pretty great bosses throughout my whole career, too: this wasn't on them, either. Work was just not something I had a healthy relationship with. I let things pile up, let the stress get too bad, to the point that I'd stop sleeping and start having bad thoughts.

So I walked away. I quit and FIRE was always about quitting, at least for me.

Maybe it's that way for you, too. I'd like to let you know that you can still find some happiness when you retire away from something. The first step can just be getting away from whatever is causing you harm, even if you don't have the next steps all figured out yet. 

If financial independence is about freedom then it's okay for that freedom to be the choice to cut out the bad. You don't always need to know what is going to replace it. 

**Photo is from fuzzcat at Flickr Creative Commons.

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