Hey FAANGFIRE!
“What will I do when I retire??”
This is one of the most common questions I get from people who are starting to approach their FIRE number. The standard FIRE dogma will tell you that “you should FIRE to something, not away from something”.
When I was early in my pursuit of FIRE I loved reading that. It was aspirational.
I agreed with it… in principle. But I think it ignores the realities of working a demanding FAANG job. Yes the total comp is high, but with that comes high expectations.
So you end up with an extremely demanding career, an overachieving personality that struggles to turn it off at home, a growing family, aging parents who live far away, and everything else life throws at you.
How are you supposed to find the time to figure out what you want to do with your life once the financial constraints are gone?
My advice?
Give yourself permission to do nothing for a little bit.
There is nothing wrong with not having an answer. You don’t need to know what your next thing is. You don’t need to have a new passion to jump into. You don’t need to kick off a side hustle. You don’t need to immerse yourself in the world of AI.
It will probably be the first time in your life that you have time off without a clear idea of what happens next.
Give yourself time to decompress.
You can try new things. Decide that the new thing sucks and change your mind (or hurt yourself like I did).
It’s been over 1,000 days since my last day at Meta, and I still don’t have it all figured out.
But I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with not having an answer.
The entire point of FIRE to me is having optionality over my time. The freedom to try new things, decide they aren’t for me, and change my mind.
I spent years working towards that optionality. Fight the urge to turn it into yet another thing you need to optimize.
Hi Andre,
I'm getting close to retirement myself after nearly 40 years working in technology, and I think you've made a really interesting point here.
I've actually started experimenting with different things before retiring. I've borrowed £5K at 0% to see what happens when I invest it, published a book, and I'm having a go at making and selling some rather unusual physical products.
Some might work, some might be complete disasters. I'm rather looking forward to finding out.
But I think the important bit is that I don't HAVE to make any of them work. After decades of deadlines, targets and people wanting things yesterday, the last thing I want is to turn retirement into another job with performance objectives!
I'm curious, though. Have you discovered anything in retirement that you never imagined you'd enjoy when you were still working?
Cheers,
M.👽.G.