I’ve been fascinated by the Financial Independence/Retire Early (FI/RE) movement ever since I was a freshman at Monash. Given the roll of the dice, where the vast majority of Homo Sapiens have agreed to follow a game where they need to spend their time and energy on producing some output that is deemed as valuable by the current state of society, and in return you receive currency that you can exchange for goods and services. Having also understood that time is the most precious resource we have, this seems like a downright terrible game, albeit a game few dare to not play (there are pros and cons to not playing the game entirely, of course, but that’s a separate topic).

So, the logical move would be to play this game for the bare minimal time, and then spend the rest of your life doing whatever you fancy, so that you might be able to extract maximum happiness and contentment from this journey.

On paper, this sounds like a really appealing move. Internet communities have sprung up discussing the various details of investments, lifestyle choices, historic returns and all sorts of nuances on how an individual might be able to achieve the magic number that allows them to FI/RE (also called “FU money”).

The more time I’ve spent as a part of these communities, the more I realise that most members don’t really care about FI/RE at all. At least not the end objective. The vast majority are fixed on figuring out the right number. They might calculate a number, but then read about a particular black swan event that causes them to inflate their number higher. Or their net worth reaches close to their number and now they need a higher number just to be safe or to maintain a certain level of comfort in their FI/RE life. There are others who just to show off their net worth and enjoy the mental masturbation of showing how good of an investor they are or how well their career is going. There are some that treat the whole thing as a hobby. They love creating complex spreadsheets, engage in online discussions (in communities they probably started) about the difference between lean and fat FI/RE, or reading up on the latest literature. And now with the growing popularity of the movement, you now even have a few that have technically FI/RE’d but enjoy a steady stream of income by being influencers in the community. It’s a grand circle-jerk that you enjoy, but often makes you lose sight of the goal.

In reality, there’s no model or net worth number that can have a 100% probability of carrying you through the rest of your life. There’s only two ways to get closer to your goal.

The first is if you find a way to exchange time to earn currency that you don’t detest, or maybe even one that you like (or love, if you’re lucky). These are folks that like “work” (ie the activity to exchange time for currency) – regardless of whether they’re an owner or a employee – and cannot imagine “work” not being part of the their ideal day, and see themselves “working” as long as they’re physically able to. Basically, they like playing the game!

For this route, optimise your search so that you can find an activity that invokes the same in yourself. Maybe this means a particular profession for you, or flexibility over your schedule, or working with a particular group of people. Whatever it is, you should be able to find with a combination of inspection and exploration. You’ll find examples of such folks everywhere, even in your current office! There’s plenty of examples of aged entrepreneurs or actors or cooks or accountants that just love to “work” and stopping seems like a terrible idea to them. Check out “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” if you want to see an extreme example of such a person.

The other is to go with the Tim Ferriss-recommended route of the stoic philosopher. Figure out the worst case scenario, you lose all of your assets, you lose your network of support, everything. Will you be able to survive then? Yes? Then everything is superfluous. You don’t actually need anything, or conversely, whatever you have now is great. It’s great that you have some funds you can use in an emergency, it’s great that you can afford health insurance for a few years with your savings, it’s great you have a roof over your head.

If things are great and you’re still spending your unrecoverable time feeling miserable at “work”, you just a dose of action and should jump into FI/RE as soon as possible. You might determine there are indeed a few things you absolutely cannot live without, but even in this case, you should be mindful that you do not get distracted by adding more to this list and actually work towards the goal. The idea being that if you take action and things turn out badly, you can always go back to “work” – it’s never a one-way ticket. It’s harder to find examples of the second category, but these are folks who have actually, successfully FI/RE’d.

I’m not sure if I’d want to look at the statistics around how many members actually get to FI/RE. In fact, the root of the problem with the community is that you’re looking at numbers being shared by other people, whereas the decision to FI/RE is a very personal one. Only you can determine if/when you’re mentally ready to FI/RE.