How much would you need to work if you bought a small-ish house, lived on a very strict budget, and generally kept expenditure to a minimum? There are places in the US where you can buy a house on a bit of land for just over $100k (ex: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/904-Grant-St-Tupelo-MS-38...). What could you do with half an acre of land, a paid off house, and minimal day-to-day obligations? Imagine: work for an hour or two per day so that you have money to buy food, pay power/electric, etc., then idk... read? write that book you've always thought about writing? get in shape? start a garden? go fishing? There are so many possibilities.
I recognize that moving across the country, having the money to pay off a $120k house, etc. is an enormous privilege for some people and I'm certainly not asserting that it's an opportunity that anyone could take advantage of. Only pointing out that the bar for FU money might be lower than you might think.
What'd I actually do? Found a series of startups, none of which went anywhere. Fiddle around with technology, and learn some new technologies. Fret about how I wasn't being productive enough. I didn't read all that much - I read much more when I was in college. I got out of shape.
I have a friend who retired at a similar age who said "One of the worst parts about having money is realizing that most of your problems were not because of money in the first place, and then having to face them." Retirement removes a lot of constraints, but that also means that if you're still unhappy with your life, it's because of you and not your boss or employer.
What an irresponsible advise, given that you factored out the importance of the relationship with the significant other.
"Just find the love of your life!"
"Just live happily ever after!"
I mean, you don't even care if someone's personality and mental state allows for that. A family is not a retinue waiting on you to fullfil your every need, is it?
If starting a family was a silver bullet then we wouldn't see such a high rate of divorce and so many kids screwed up because their parents divorce sucked.
I mean, the assumption alone that people never thought of something like starting a family is mind-boggingly idiotic and presumptuous, as it assumed everyone around is just a mindless NPC.
I would need a lot because I like the city life, for example. I do found idyllic to go to the countryside here in Sweden and spend quite a few weeks there for summer and winter but that's not the life I'd like to be living for years.
I enjoy being in a city for my hobbies, such as music, it's easy to find good concerts, people to mingle and chat about those hobbies. I like the human connections of cities, I enjoy meeting my friends to do something, to see an art exhibition, to make music together.
Nothing of that is possible with little money, I'd need to save a lot through decades to keep this lifestyle work-free.
I don't want a family life so that leaves me tied to having friends and spending time with them, moving to the countryside would be worse for my needs than having to work.
Not everybody dreams of owning a house and settling down in peace in the middle of nowhere, with all the free time to look at trees and write about them. I love going to a secluded cabin, bringing all my music gear and staying there for weeks but it's not something to live on for years.
I very rarely hear about FU money from people that don’t need millions of dollars to leave their job. It’s important (IMO) for people to know that that doesn’t necessarily _have_ to be the case.
Currently I just can't wait to reach that state. Sometimes I'm counting days even. I could never be happy/relaxed as long as I am forced to work, or forced to work under someone.
With regular work, I think I am saving around 70% of my total compensation, but I am also finding ways to do side-hustles. Hopefully I can hit something that will help me reach passive income or otherwise I will be dependant on my career compensation. So as long as I haven't achieved that state I will keep trying and spend most of my time trying to reach this state.
I've spent a significant amount of my career working on problems of my own choice, both in someone else's employment, with a co-founder, or on my own. The limiting factor turned out not to be time or money: it was that the set of problems that are worth solving in today's economy and can be solved by one person (or even a small team) is vanishingly small, and I just had a bigger impact when working with larger organizations.
That's an important observation. There isn't really that much interesting technical work left that a single programmer can do, as the field has been thoroughly mined for such work for decades now.
Interestingly, it's very different in art world - in technology, the new solution has to be an improvement upon state of the art, whereas in creative pursuits it merely has to be different and interesting. Hence, there's basically infinite work left for writers, painters, solo musicians etc.
You'll always be 'forced to work' even if that work is just keeping your body alive and well. Perhaps it would be worth trying to find happiness now, rather than hoping it's hidden behind the next achievement.
I just don't see how I can find happiness when I have to give away 8 hours of my prime mental resources 5 days out of 7 while having stress of needing to meet expectations and impressing others. I just don't see how.
I just need to be able to do things when I feel like doing them as opposed to confirming with someone else's set routine and answering to them. Otherwise I won't be satisfied/happy.
It’s a matter of perspective though, as always, and to me, happiness lies in being able to set my agenda and share power over it with whom I choose, not with whom I’m forced to share it with.
I've definitely got happier, more hopeful and more confident in myself as I've started to make enough to see that there's a possible way for me to escape this routine and still have decades of life left to live where I can spend time on whatever I want while still having youthful energy.
And I do feel like focusing on getting to that point as early as possible should be my main goal right now. The more money I make in present the more I can invest to achieve that point even earlier (as money makes money) as opposed to being half in, half out.
I won't sacrifice another 10-15 years of my life while I'm young to have a possibility to have all the time in the world when I'm 60.
It's a matter of perspective as you pointed out.
Yes that would be way too late. I am hoping to achieve this by the time I am 32 or 35 at the latest. If I get lucky, by 30.
I won't have enough from career likely by 30, but I should have enough to start some side project that would hopefully garner enough passive income.
The thing is that not everyone can or will achieve that. If we know that, what's the main drive for others to do that? We don't live in a system where this is possible, I'm glad you've achieved it but preaching this "money should be the main focus of your life until you have FU money" will just make a lot of people frustrated and unfulfilled.
So why should that be the main goal of anyone's life when there is so much more to life than that? Are we all slaves to money then? Are our lives only meant to be lived after we are free from the shackles of money?
I really don't like that perspective.