A median income with a median cost of living and a median lifestyle won’t do it, obviously. Otherwise everybody would be retiring early.
There’s a lot written about finding remote, high-paying jobs and then living like an ultra-frugal bachelor. That’s actually much harder to do than people like to admit and the lifestyle isn’t for everyone.
The more common approach is to get married, keep expenses reasonably low but don’t torture yourself, and one or both spouses should have a moderately high paying professional job. Consistently invest the difference between income and expenses for a few decades and you’ll get there.
Nobody is retiring at 30 and living like a king unless they’re extraordinarily lucky with a startup or some other gamble. However, it’s very reasonable to retire before the age of 50 or even 40 if you’re smart about it and willing to live a moderately priced lifestyle.
Also I'm really curious what people consider valuable environmental work - like, if you didn't have to work for money tomorrow, what kind of environmental work exactly would you take on?
For example, in my area I would probably push for the local mangrove coast line to be protected from development. Or perhaps for my county to ban or somehow restrict two-stroke engine use.
The same as retiring in any other field.
make half a million dollars per year total comp, duh.
It's more complicated than I make it sound there but ultimately it's a matter of deciding it's important to you to do this and making it happen.
That is fantastic and inspiring. I'm shifting my life around in order to focus on similar priorities.
For people who think it is extreme, this is my perspective: Previous generations built 99% of what we have - the political system (freedom, democracy, peace, better justice), the economy, the knowledge, arts and culture, the endless social goods (school, healthcare, FOSS, etc.), the technology. How are we building on that for the next? Environmental catastrophe? Political chaos and social distrust? Online manipulation, cryptocurrency scams, and lulz? So far, IMHO we are mostly liquidating, as vulture capitalists, that largess by our predecessors - by their hard work, their forward thinking to build a 'More Perfect Union', and their sacrifices:
Many sacrificed everything. Some saw nothing more of life than high school, boot camp, and a bullet. Too grim? Too dramatic? Too serious? That's reality; it's too late in the day, in our myriad crises, to hold back so that it's not too challenging or upsetting. I'm not saying everyone should do what I do (certainly not - they should figure out what is right for them, as individuals), but I think we all have very serious obligations. We have the free choice to do good or bad; the good news is, the results are up to us.
The IPCC report suggests first-world citizens reduce their energy footprint by 80% if we are to have even a remote chance of keeping things under control. Yet everybody is now making plans where to travel next when the pandemic becomes milder.
Meanwhile Germany closed half its nuclear reactors yesterday and people were cheering.
Are you sure you want to save this version of humanity?
This fatalistic, sneering attitude is the least effective way of discussing climate change with people who don’t yet understand the issue.
I think a lot of people don’t realize just how much of a turn-off these attitudes are to people who are on the fence or otherwise doubtful. It’s not helpful.
Personally, I simply don't think we have the capacity as a species to overcome the challenges of climate change right now. I'd like to be proven wrong and think we should be trying anyway, but veer towards solutions which actually provide another benefit and help with CO2 emissions as a secondary effect - the most obvious example being renewables as a means of securing energy supply sovereignty.
This approach probably won't see us beat even 3 degrees of warming but let's be honest - most people in the western world will adapt to a less convenient life, and we don't care about the pending deaths in Bangladesh and similarly poor countries nearly as much as we like to pretend.
This was predictable, and was predicted: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/. The technical summary is 160 pages and should be required reading for anyone over the age of 13: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6.... The Paris Agreement, for all its problems, tries to keep increase below 1.5 C over pre-industrial. We are locked in for 20-30 more years of increases like this if we stop emitting net CO2 in 5 years, best case. This is the beginning of global warming, it will be getting worse. I plan on retiring from software soon to devote the rest of my life to technical and political work to keep Earth habitable for subsequent generations while retaining the knowledge and technological progress made possible from the carbon age. Too many people in software - just my experience, and definitely not limited to software - have no concept of the orders of magnitude of energy involved and unreasonable expectations of other engineering fields to solve this problem. I hope more people will join me.