One of the big questions that I'm dealing with is post-retirement issues after FIRE, because no one really has a proper grip on the early retirement beyond financial figures, as successfully completing the FIRE journey is quite rare, and if only a few MBTI archetypes complete it ( INTJ, ENTJ, ISTJ) even getting advice from folks who completed the journey might not create a complete picture on how to retire early systemically.
I have always harboured doubts that the answer can be found in books on personal finance, and I think I might even be better off looking at religious or philosophical texts.
Problems with early retirement are existential issues - they need a deep level of philosophical understanding to decode them. FIRE can barely solve 60% of your issues, as it can probably give you a level of personal satisfaction. But the remaining 30% comes from living a meaningful existence that FIRE cannot bestow. The final 10% is even more elusive, as it relates to psychological richness.
So The Meaning of Your Life by Arthur Brooks is an important read for folks contemplating the completion of their FIRE journey. It contains actionable steps and mental models to help you figure out the meaning of your life.
Very briefly, it comes in three steps.
a) The first step is to connect the dots and figure out how you got here.
This can be a deeply therapeutic step. For a certain attraction to the FIRE movement comes from my parents' background in retail, when I witnessed them fighting over insufficient sales to pay the rent on the pet shop. I wanted to have passive income even when I was in primary school, constantly asking my dad what the AUD fixed deposit rate was if I had $1M AUD.
The other issue is that in secondary school, I was a troll, and the crappy humanities and language teachers marked me down because, well, they could, and marks can be awarded on a subjective basis. An English Literature teacher hated my guts so much that I won a Best Actor award and the overall best performance for my class, and he never even delivered a trophy because the top drama class for my cohort year did not study English Lit. ( Felt great delivering that dick slap to him after so many years. )
And I hated my language and humanities teachers, and found solace in mathematics and the sciences. Eventually, passive income became a way to reinforce my inner troll: if I have passive income, I can't be stopped because I have "fuck you" money, and no one can pick on me simply because they have authority over me. My passive income (and legal training, because dividends are not enough without serious legal firepower) makes it very hard to bully me into doing anything.
b) The second step is to figure out where you are going. What is your vector?
This is hard for me to confront because my career post-FIRE is less well-coordinated or planned than my career pre-FIRE. Financially, I know that I still want more CPF money. But that excuse is wearing thin as I'm about 3xBRS and my SRS is 1xBRS. Why do I need 4xBRS with a five-figure dividend paycheck? I have no idea.
I enjoy teaching, and the subject combinations I have this year are "category-busting," with lessons on law, data analytics, and dividends investing. But do I enjoy teaching, or do I simply enjoy defying expectations?
It's hard to unpack this.
c) Which leads us to the third step: how would I like to impact the world?
The third step is what I think ultimately defines me.
While I play roles in my family, somehow, I do want to leave my students better off than when I started teaching them, so maybe at my funeral, some students will appear during my wake.
That's basically it. To teach, I have to do a baseline level of administrative work that I truly detest; some adult students are just downright mean and entitled, but I see suffering as the price I pay to positively impact students.
I suspect the most positive impact of Arthur Brooks' book on me is to highlight the centrality of suffering across all religious movements.
And it's dawned on me that if suffering disappears, as it often does when you complete your FIRE journey, so does the last shred of meaning in your life.
You can pick up a copy of this book here :
No comments:
Post a Comment