I hear a lot of buzz these days about a retirement strategy called FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). Proponents of FIRE resolve to live very lean and work very hard for a decade or two to save enough money to never have to work again.
I have considered retiring early. I am in a financial position to retire, but I cannot tell you how unappetizing FIRE sounds. To be clear, I am not referring to the financial goals (saving and debt elimination). Those goals are worthwhile and admirable.
Here is an example of what does bother me though. I recently stumbled on a FIRE blog in which the author used every post to document his finances and purchases for the day: $5.71 at Walmart for a spark plug, finding ground beef on sale at Kroger, and on and on.
As I read, I was thoroughly bored, and I found myself asking why anyone talented and disciplined enough to save a million dollars in a decade would trade an active, productive life for that kind of life.
Let’s put aside the fact that spending all of one’s time trying to save pennies hardly feels like financial independence. That is weird enough, but it is not what bothers me.
In the interest of avoiding strawmen arguments, I want to make it clear that the real goal of FIRE is not financial at all. It is about the happiness that supposedly comes with freedom from oppressive bosses, debt, and a 9-5 chewing up your time.
So the real question is whether FIRE can make you happy. I suppose it might in some situations, but overall, I am skeptical, and here is why: it turns out people generally need to work to be happy.
If you quit your job, you likely will be unhappy until you find/create a new one. And quite probably, that new job will be inferior in many ways to the one you left.
For example, in the case of that blog I just mentioned, a person has replaced a probably decent job with a new job. That new job consists of trying to scrape fifty years of life out of a million dollars. The job description includes such things as saving a few dollars at a time at Walmart and micro-managing his mutual funds.
If that new job sounds tedious and maybe a bit boring compared to the last job, that is because it probably is. Be careful what you wish for.
Let’s step back for a moment. FIRE may be a new way to pursue happiness, but it is hardly the first way. Smart people have been writing about achieving happiness for a long time, and I want to highlight two authors that resonate with me.
We could start with the Hebrew book Ecclesiastes, a philosophical book written perhaps around 400 BCE by an unknown author. The general theme of the first part of the book is this: a very rich man who has everything he wants is searching for happiness everywhere, but cannot find it. Eventually, he arrives at this conclusion at the end of chapter 2.
A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. This too, I see, is from the hand of God, for without him, who can eat or find enjoyment?
Now, here is a passage from The Human Condition which was written by Hannah Arendt, a mid-20th-century agnostic philosopher:
There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance—poverty and misery where exhaustion is followed by wretchedness instead of regeneration, or great riches and an entirely effortless life where boredom takes the place of exhaustion and where the mills of necessity, of consumption and digestion, grind an impotent human body mercilessly and barrenly to death—ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.
I could quote many more relevant passages from both books, and I encourage you to read both books. While coming from two very different perspectives, Arendt and the writer of Ecclesiastes both are saying something very similar. Here are two general principles:
- Happiness requires a balance between pleasure and pain (labor) and it is futile to try to find happiness without that balance.
- There is value in the work itself. To put it in philosophical terms, it is a mistake to always see work as a means to an end. Rather, the work is an end in itself.
Pay attention, because I think they are right. You need to work to be happy. And if you are working only as a means to something else, you are missing the point. If your goal for work is to work your way out of work, as Ecclesiastes says, you are chasing the wind.
To take it further, if your plan to achieve happiness is to eliminate all the pain in your life, you are on the wrong path. Humans are not designed that way; we need a healthy tension between pain and pleasure, and we tend to try to self-correct to create that balance.
In other words, if you have too much pain in your life, you will try to eliminate it, but if there is not enough pain in your life, you will unconsciously try to create some.
To me, the easiest way to think about that balance is how you might view a board game. People like games because they simulate the pain/pleasure balance. No one likes to play games for long when the balance is off. For example, no one wants the game to be so easy that they always win or so hard that they never win.
Likewise, no one wants to read a book that has no tension between pain and pleasure, and no one wants to watch movies without that tension. Even the sappy Hallmark Christmas movies have that tension. We only feel truly alive when that balance exists.
This is why that FIRE retiree leaves a job that brings pain and immediately contrives a new pain mechanism: a job of stretching pennies. It is also why retirees leave a corporate job and immediately end up working on a daunting honey-do list around the house. People need the pain of labor.
I am not saying there is anything wrong with wanting to retire. People can do what they want to do. But in the case of FIRE, forgive me if I question the wisdom of overworking and living in poverty for a decade or two to save enough money to escape a pain mechanism that is going to be immediately replaced with a far less interesting pain mechanism.
Now, assuming that the true goal of FIRE is happiness, perhaps the real question should not be how to escape work, but rather how to find happiness in work. With that in mind, I want to talk about how to achieve a balance between pain and pleasure in your current situation.
To start, let’s talk about how that balance should look. To go back to the game analogy, people want to play games where there is tension between pain and pleasure, but they want the balance to be a bit off. They want to win most of the time (or even all of the time if the competition is challenging). In other words, they want the pleasure to slightly outweigh the pain. Not by much, but at least some.
That is how you should think about your work. You need a job in which you are winning the game but are challenged. You need a job that plays to your strengths, but in which you have to work hard.
Sculpting such work requires active planning on your part and maybe going against the grain. For example, it is very true that there are forces working against this balance in corporate America. I am reminded of the Peter Principle, which states that a typical employee is promoted to a level that is one step above their competence.
When I started my career, I was a software developer, and I was actually a very good one for a while. I rose rapidly in the company until about two years in, when someone made the decision that I should be promoted into management.
To say I failed in that position would be an understatement. I was just out of college and had no idea how to manage people. I lacked essentially all the professional skills needed to do that job, and within about six months, I asked to go back to developing software.
I cannot claim my decision was guided by any real wisdom, but it allowed me to get back into a better pain/pleasure balance. Sometimes, what may seem like a job advancement is just not best for that balance.
As it turned out, I would eventually leave that career to start a company, which improved my pain/pleasure balance even more. However, to this day, there are areas of our business that I intentionally avoid. I know that I cannot do those things well enough to be happy.
In a nutshell, that is why I am not interested in retirement. I actually cannot imagine giving up what I have now for a life of leisure. I also know that if I choose a life of leisure, I would probably unconsciously find a way to get some pain into it by lunchtime on the first day. So what would be the point?
My advice? Forget about chasing a retirement that will likely not make you happy and rather focus on positioning yourself better in your work. Get yourself in a position where you are challenged but yet winning. Change occupations if you need to. Take a demotion if you need to.
On the other hand, if you are already retired and feel that you are missing something in your life, I can tell you what it probably is: lack of work. It may not matter too much what the work is, because there is value in the work itself. However, if you have the freedom to choose your work, it might as well be something that you enjoy and are good at. It might be a full-time job, a volunteer position, or just a slew of projects around the house.
It is common today to hear self-improvement experts talk about finding purpose in your work, making a difference in the world, and finding your passion. Those things are all good, but they are also not necessary for happiness. In fact, the whole idea that one can do work that makes a huge difference in the world is a very modern idea that has been almost unimaginable throughout most of history. If your work is very noble or influential, that is a nice bonus, and you are lucky. If you enjoy your work, you are very fortunate too.
The truth is much simpler though: happiness comes from the work itself rather than the byproducts of the work. That is what Arendt and the writer of Ecclesiastes were saying. When you get to the end of most days, you need to be able to say “I worked hard today.”
Strangely, that is enough.
