I find the FIRE movement fascinating but also slightly depressing.
Among the actually old (my parents' generation - in their 60s and 70s) retirees I know, around half of those retiring from decent 'knowledge worker' jobs have kept on working part-time to some extent. They are consultants, advisers, board members, independent researchers, and so on. They seem to be very happy - they are working at something they are good and believe in, while not having any economic constraint forcing them to work more than they want to, or for anyone they don't get along with.
I can't imagine having 'Financial Independence', but not wanting to do something like this. I enjoy my work in general, and I would enjoy it much more if I had almost complete freedom to plan my day and to walk away from toxic situations. But all the FIRE people that I see online seem to be basing their lives on the other type of retiree - the ones who take leisure activities and sports such as bowling and tennis far too seriously, read and watch constantly but quite aimlessly, and go on endless trips to 'tick off' different world destinations.
I've been following this movement for well over a decade now, and it's not a heterogenous community. You see the entire spectrum, from people who just want to get really rich and indulge in expensive hobbies like keeping their own private jet, people who end up working and earning more after they're financially independent, to people who are burned out and can only imagine a retirement existence consisting of beaches and Netflix, plus quite a few bitter folks who mostly care about tearing others down.
The 'RE' sort of implies not working, but I've seen plenty of accounts of people who ended up with varying degrees of work and income after they quit their regular jobs. For the folks who seem to seek retirement above all else, I wouldn't be surprised if burnout is both a big part of the motivation and the reason for why that is their main focus.
I would suspect that the online communities skew a certain way that may not be reflective of the people actually doing it. One of the most well-known FIRE bloggers is known for saying that he is as active after retiring as he was before, but that he now gets to choose his projects - and despite his blog bringing in an income comparable to his pre-retirement income, blogging was not one of the major 'pulls' in his life after a while. I imagine people who spend a lot of time contributing to such forums may temperamentally enjoy the fantasy better than the reality.
Yes, it kinda doesn't make sense. You don't want to "retire". You want to work on the things you care about. There are jobs that pay poorly but are still very interesting. Retirement is what you do when you can't work anymore.
Traveling the world is fun but it's not incompatible with work. You just need to ask for long chunks of vacation, say two to four weeks in a row. If all you do is work a 40 hour work week then given the right schedule you still have half a day plus weekends left for leisure.
What people truly want is FU money. They want negotiation power.
Retirement is what you do when you can't work anymore.
I wouldn't get hung up on the name. The main part is the FI, so you can pick and choose what you want to work on or if you want to work on anything. Arguing over whether it's a real retirement or not is missing the point.
I think for people who got two very senior levels but stayed as hands-on engineers don’t really have the option of consulting. I am extremely senior and while I could do contract dev, they are actually aren’t that many low-commitment consulting jobs for people like me.
The only places I have known who would care much about 'CV gaps' have been toxic workplaces who also discriminated against other groups for spurious reasons unrelated to their competence or likelihood of succeeding in the job.
Your attitude reinforces the corresponding attitude by many employers. If 50% of us signed a pledge not to have children, never to take any health risks, never to join a union, not sue our employers, etc, many employers would be delighted and would hire them preferentially, making things harder for the other 50%.
I honestly don't understand this. I enjoy driving, especially long distance. The benefit of being able to read a book or look at my phone rather than listen to music or an audio book is not worth anything like $8.50 an hour to me.
The general inconveniences of long distance drives like planning food and toilet stops, or delays due to traffic, weather or accidents would still be present.
I would pay a lot to be instantly transported to my holiday destination, but almost nothing to get there in the same time with someone else driving me.
Other people don’t like to drive, simple as that. Some people would like to fly but can’t afford the ticket so they have to make a long miserable drive. Or maybe it’s one of those destinations that is a 5 hour drive where a car clearly makes more sense than a 45 minute flight (that ends up taking 5-6 hours door to door). Im sure you can appreciate how pay by hour would be a huge upgrade in this case.
The situation with the 5 hour drive which would be a 45 minute flight + 4-5 hours of flight overhead is completely orthogonal to whether or not the car is self-driving.
If you like to drive, you are fine with or without autonomous cars. If you don't like to sit in a car for 5 hours, you are SOL in both cases. Only if you hate driving, but do enjoy sitting in a car not driving do self-driving cars add value.
It’s not orthogonal. Self driving 6 hours makes the drive a net positive. It goes from unpleasant/brutal to a net positive where you can sit in the car and do other stuff.
I used to work in high-frequency equity trading. We would run simulations against tick-by-tick data from real markets. The simulations were of very questionable value. As soon as you trade once in your simulation, from that point onwards the whole run is contaminated. Your trade, if it had actually happened, would have been seen by other participants, who would have changed their strategy, often in complex and unpredictable ways, and the timelines would have diverged rapidly and irreversibly from that point.
Data recorded from driving situations is useful for one thing - testing out split-second decision making - stop or accelerate? Steer left or right? This is a limited use case. Most situations don't have critical decisions like this. The ones that do, it's often hard to judge what would have been the right answer. Even accidents - where the post facto desired outcome is "don't have an accident", unfold over several seconds, involving several stages of actors responding to each others' actions. No one can be sure how the driver should have approached the very first interaction - the only one for which the data is meaningful.
Actual road testing, and meaningful simulation which isn't just replaying what actually happened is much more useful.
Among the actually old (my parents' generation - in their 60s and 70s) retirees I know, around half of those retiring from decent 'knowledge worker' jobs have kept on working part-time to some extent. They are consultants, advisers, board members, independent researchers, and so on. They seem to be very happy - they are working at something they are good and believe in, while not having any economic constraint forcing them to work more than they want to, or for anyone they don't get along with.
I can't imagine having 'Financial Independence', but not wanting to do something like this. I enjoy my work in general, and I would enjoy it much more if I had almost complete freedom to plan my day and to walk away from toxic situations. But all the FIRE people that I see online seem to be basing their lives on the other type of retiree - the ones who take leisure activities and sports such as bowling and tennis far too seriously, read and watch constantly but quite aimlessly, and go on endless trips to 'tick off' different world destinations.