FIRE stands for Financially Independent Retire Early. There is a growing trend of people trying to achieve FIRE before the age of 40.
Everyone has a FIRE number based on their current lifestyle and supposed future expenses based on which they calculate a networth number which would allow them to retire.
As I complete a decade in the software industry, I often had contradictory opinions about the entire concept as a whole. In this article, I try to argue both for and against FIRE and then hope to come to a conclusion.
I have often grown up hearing the phrase "Karma is dharma", which roughly translates to "Work is Duty". Whenever I talk to my father about work, he only says "be sincere in your work and everything else will fall into place". He gave 37 years of his life to a single company as have many of our previous generation and have led happy fulfilled respectable lives.
Why then, has this trend suddenly become so popular? Why did people develop this overarching urge to stop working and just be "free"? What is the definition of "free"?
Does being free equate to owning your time? If so, what would one want to do with their time? Play a sport, learn an instrument, tend their garden, travel around the world?
But if you do something frequently and continuously, isn't that similar to work? It's just that you "like" doing it, so maybe you thought that you could do that more frequently. But would you be willing to sacrifice for it? For example, a sportperson has to sacrifice their entire childhood and major parts of their adulthood to be in the top percentile at their fields. A musician has to spend hours practising their craft to be the best.
Maybe you don't want to sacrifice so much for a specific thing? You just want to do it for the fun of it. You are searching for work-life balance. Maybe you are content with not being the best version of yourself in a particular field?
I believe overwhelmingly in being Financially Independent. I revolt even more strongly at Retire Early.
Being financially independent means having the ability to take more risks. Having the ability to take more risks means being
able to stretch into areas that one may have been interested in the past, but didn't get time to explore. Maybe that risk
taking capability allows you to start a new career which was under-invested in your life for some reason.