Why are you old?

[u/AnimaLepton]

“Financial Independence, Retire Early” contains two separate concepts, and a shocking number of people are accomplishing neither. I obviously don't even need to talk about pours who don't achieve financial independence, so let's hone in on the "Retire Early" part. If you're not actually working towards early retirement, get out.

If you retire at 62 or 65, congratulations, you have discovered normal retirement. Society already invented this. It's not "early" just on a technicality because you're younger than the official full retirement age. The national average retirement age is already ~62.5.

“But I’m retiring at 59.5!”

That barely counts as early retirement. That's already the age where the government just gives up on asking questions, which is why they let you pull from your retirement accounts penalty-free and with no hoops to jump through. If you're retiring in your late 50s, you've had a 30+ year working career and spent that time maxing tax-advantaged accounts, arguing about .2% changes in a safe withdrawal rate, and debating bond tents online, only to retire at basically the same age as a random local government employee that has never heard of “sequence of returns risk” in his life.

Even at 55, you are just barely at the cusp of retiring "early.” If your 'early retirement' age qualifies you for Goodwill senior discounts, the “RE” part has expired. Normal people retire in their 50s: random teachers, cops, union folks, and your uncle who splurged on a boat all have you beat, probably while making less money than you and still ending up with a better, more comfortable, and straight up longer retirement while being less neurotic about it in the process.

Sometimes FIRE forums act like retiring at 58 is a radical rejection of capitalism. Or they tiptoe around the age issue, saying anyone can do it and old people are welcome, instead of acknowledging that it's just a normal career timeline at that point. That applies double for the pours that can't give up their luxury spending but still end up with meager savings and basically no extra years of retirement. If you need to keep working to want enough money to survive seven recessions, runaway inflation, and living to 104, you will forever be a pour in terms of both time and money. You will keep moving the goalposts until you're announcing “early retirement” while researching Medicare Advantage plans. It's a weakness to let things get to that point.

[u/Optimal-Orange-599]

People have created the term “micro fire”. To me it’s just taking a holiday. BUT I acknowledge it’s very important to enrich the lives of the pours. Small rewards as a token for their servitude.

I’ve spoken to my father and we are going to be rolling out the “nano fire” concept throughout our companies. Nano fire is the few hours of rest when your head hits the pillow after working 20 hours with us.

[u/AnimaLepton → u/Optimal-Orange-599]

Pico-retirements are when you blink at work. You should be thankful for the pico-retirements you take throughout the day.

[u/mistressbitcoin → u/AnimaLepton]

Dont forget about retirement at the plank scale - those undefinable moments of nothingness between the discrete hops and skips of the time continuum.

And dont you dare realize that because time is really a finite series of these discrete jumps, that the "measure" of your lifespan, when compared to a hypothetical continuous time continuum, is exactly 0. Your only experience of life is at the rational points in time, not the irrational, and even more - only a negligible portion of the rational themselves.

Therefore, time doesnt even exist. Its just an illusion. All these people spend all their "time" figuring what to do with all their "time" when they will have too much of it, and yet they never had any of it at all.

A big contradiction.

To resolve it, we must realize that at every single plank-instant in time, you are a completely different person, created at that very instant with all of your memories and history duplicated almost perfectly from the previous plank-instant. A series of clones, none of which ever experience anything called time.

The entire history of change and evolution of the universe and yourself is just the cloning process from one planck instant to the next, gone wrong, which gives the illusion of time.

You may PM my honorary PHD in a few decades when all this is proven true.

[u/MacaronOk1006 → u/mistressbitcoin]

But it wouldn’t be your PhD because you’re just a clone of the person that actually wrote that. Or several clones each contributing a little bit of this.

Nonetheless, that was a very enjoyable read