The fantasy of FIRE

FIRE, or "Financial Independence, Retire Early," is a personal finance movement popular mostly online. FIRE adherents typically use a combination of high-paying professional-class jobs and judicious savings to try to retire far earlier than standard in the United States: in their 50s, 40s, or even 30s.

In FIRE terminology, the concept of "independence" means that you can earn all the money you need to cover your expenses through increased value of your assets—that your money makes all the money you need. Adherents speak of their "FIRE number," usually in the mid-seven-figures, at which point they are free to quit their job and never work again.

Two trends may make one suspect of the FIRE worldview. First: very few people actually retire. Many continue ask whether $1M, $5M, even $10M is enough to retire on. Maybe they graduate to fatFIRE, the Reddit for extremely high-worth individuals looking to retire early while maintaining a properly upper-class level of consumption. Their anxiety about money conceives of FIRE as an endlessly deferred goal, one in which just a few more years of work would make their fantasy real.

Secondly, many who actually retire early find themselves lost, even returning to work. After spending their whole life in high-ambition, high-income careers, when they actually reach their goal, they become miserable.

In theory, the FIRE worldview detests work and valorizes leisure. The irony is, many FIRE adherents work far more and have far less leisure than the average American. Living threadbare existences, they generally have high-income, high-pressure jobs in tech, finance or law in major U.S. cities that they work to ascend in order to leave.

A concept foreign to FIRE adherents, and American work culture in general, is that of limits. There is such a thing (all too familiar in this country) as too much work, but more importantly, there is such a thing as too much leisure.

I quit my job in January of this year for a bounded sabbatical and got a taste of the FIRE lifestyle. Some of my most unhappy times were precisely when I was living with an excess of leisure—drinking too much, sleeping in, lying in bed and staring at Twitter and YouTube. I became far happier when I became more disciplined: waking up early, writing on a relatively consistent schedule, balancing, like I would with a normal healthy job, work and leisure. As Simone Weil wrote, it is not only rights, but obligations that are a need of the soul.

It is this sense of obligation that is missing from FIRE discourse: the concept that work could and should be in service to others, and also in service of yourself. The kind of white collar work that FIRE adherents partake in is often, as I am intimately familiar with, psychologically crushing: boring, bureaucratic, stressful, rigidly hierarchical and so on. But those are not issues with work itself, they are issues with the particular kind of work that FIRE adherents generally do, often specific roles that they hate but persist in for the sake of saving money. They are not familiar with, and thus are unable to demand, "good work," they see all work as something to escape.

In French work culture, workers have far more labor protections guaranteed by the state: nearly ironclad employment protections, short days, long vacations, early pensioned retirement. I think these are excellent ideas, and the lack of these protections is major fuel for the FIRE movement in America. However, sometimes I think these concepts are misinterpreted in the US as "anti-work" (bad according to the right, good according to the left). I agree with the right that "anti-work" is bad, but I disagree that the French labor policy is anti-work.

In 1983, socialist French president François Mitterrand reduced the retirement age to 60 years old. For a long time, France's retirement has been among the lowest in the world. In 2010, it was raised to 62, and in 2023, a massive protest came in response to an attempt to increase it further to 64.

Many French considered their low retirement age to be an essential part of the identity of the French Republic and a point of national pride. One young protestor described it as "a French specialty that other countries envy." Criticism also came in defense of pensioners as an essential part of French civic life: volunteers of non-profit and civic organizations. The protests came not just from pensioners who would personally immediately be harmed, but unions and young people too, who viewed it as, among other things, an attack on "notre modèle social" (our social model). In other words, the defense of pensions was not merely a defense of leisure, but of French civic life, of the social contract towards which their labor was directed.

Rarely do people speak in the United States about retirement in these terms. Rather, the trend has been in the opposite direction: privatizing retirement, turning it to an individual responsibility to be achieved through investment in a volatile markets via 401(k)s. This is the world FIRE responds to: they think they have found a way to leverage these financial instruments to free themselves (and only themselves) from the toil of work.

It is this individualism that is the failure, in my view, of early retirement. There is no coherent social role for the kind of people that early retirees are. In some sense, they are an "aristocracy," but even the aristocracy was a coherent social class whose freedom from work was thought of as ennobling in their capacity to lead and pursue other forms of excellence. They are not even easy-going "bums," a noble social role and historical part of California culture: surfers, The Big Lebowski's "The Dude".

Rather, early retirees are generally ambitious strivers: highly educated, urban, mobile. They openly entertain moving anywhere in the world that is "VLCOL," with no connection to place, and reject the idea that one should accept a lower "standard of living" (more accurately: level of consumption) in service of some goal other than personal fulfillment or pleasure. They are wealthy and highly educated, but their frugality means that they live a lifestyle of those with far less income, but rarely spend time among that class, often leaving them isolated.

Their orientation towards work requires early retirees to, ironically, perpetuate the problem they are trying to escape from. They work more and enjoy life less, tolerating more abuse than the average worker, out of a fantasy that by doing so, they can eventually "escape the system." In American life, with so much work so unpleasant and undignified, many have come to reject work entirely, rather than asking for better work: balanced, dignified, independent and pro-social work.

Some of this can only be achieved through broader political changes to American labor (which I support). But there is individual choice here too: FIRE adherents generally have a high degree of economic freedom: they choose high-income, high-stress careers. Off the table are options which this class of people very much has: maybe take a better but lower-paying job within your field? If your work is asking too much of you, assert boundaries yourself: accept fewer demands, allow yourself to slack off a bit, go home early, and so on. Everyone is in a different circumstance where this will be more or less tolerated, but I find in my experience, among this class of worker, almost universally people do more work than is strictly demanded of them. As Wendell Berry writes, "We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from." Ultimately early retirees still can't shake the striver hustle culture that they inherited: they just believe that at some point, with enough hustling and enough striving, they will finally be free.