I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do. And the "won't you be so bored?" people. No, I'm not bored. You might be because you need someone else to tell you how to spend your hours.

Between learning new hobbies, tackling my backlog of projects in my old hobbies, taking care of my health, and spending quality time with my family, I still have more to do than I have time for. The awesome part though is that now I can do all the "must do" (family time, personal health) and "should do" (hobbies, socializing) things, and pick and choose between the "nice to do" things. When I was working, I struggled to even do the "must do" things.

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Aurornis an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> I don't understand why someone would FIRE and not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do.

It's a common phenomenon in those communities because many of the participants are young (the E is for Early retirement).

The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate.

Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money. Even many hobbies start to require money. Then reading books, browsing the internet, and playing games starts to get boring when it's your entire life.

	▲	tbrownaw 9 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate. Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money. Partition living expenses from hobby expenses, and once you have enough to not have to work for living expenses switch to doing just enough part-time to cover hobby expenses?
	▲	vkou 35 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Even many hobbies start to require money. Hobbies require money, but a lot of hobbies don't require very much of it. Yeah, if your primary hobbies are skiing and golfing and traveling and rebuilding 60s cars, that's not going to come cheap. But there is no shortage of much cheaper hobbies.

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Vedor 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You are talking about retirement, yet I was working with people who couldn't stand the 2-week long annual leave (which is mandatory for every under contract of employment where I live) because they had nothing to do. 30, 40 years old people. It's terrifying.

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JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> not already have spent years lining up all the things they will do

They aren't conditioned for it. Learning to relax, enjoy nature, prioritise friends and family, et cetera aren't hard coded like walking and talking. We benefit from it. But if you never learned to do it while your brain was most plastic, you probably aren't going to change because a number added a zero.

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antisthenes 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The tragedy is that people who are most likely to successfully FIRE have spent so long being laser-focused on making money to FIRE, that they neglected their (hobbies, social circle, health - underline as needed), so they find themselves in such a predicament.

Personally, I'd love to FIRE. I have at least 5-10 years of personal projects in my head that I would do if I didn't have a 9-5 job. Unfortunately, graduating into a shitty 2009 market and not having nepotism connections means I am unlikely to ever FIRE outside of some expat poverty FIRE in a cheap country.

	▲	singpolyma3 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		FIRE isn't about job market, you can't control that. Though in tech most people are still making quite large incomes which does help. Rather it is about controlling expenses. The thing you can actually control. My sister's family of 5 lives on less than 50k CAD / year, because they simply must (low income) so if one is making a 100k white collar salary (for example) one can live a lifestyle higher than hers while still banking 50k/an. Etc.