This is my biggest concern about deciding to ER upon reaching FI. My experience has been leisure pursuits are really fun as an escape to whatever challenges I am currently facing. When the challenges requiring expertise are gone from my life, I can't enjoy "relaxing" activities. I find them dull and pointless. My life seems meaningless and without direction.
Pursuit of a challenge makes me feel useful, especially if the output of my pursuit is valued by other people. Maslow caputures this at the peak of his needs hierarchy, as Esteem and Self-actualization. YMOYL calls this work and describes ways it can be valued other than dollars. Unfortunately (
), my experience is that money is the glue that holds people together for work on significant, long term efforts that are truly interesting (ie those which enable development of and provide an outlet for expertise).
Lemme get this straight.
People on this board have managed to somehow stumble through the years of analysis, planning, & discipline required to earn money, save it, cut expenses, and otherwise do incredibly creative and innovative things necessary to achieve financial independence. I suspect that this achievement places them in the top 1% of the American population. Maybe in the top 0.01%... in a strata so rarefied that it has to be plotted on a semi-log scale.
Having finished that accomplishment, the next comment out of their mouths is "OMG, I don't know what I'm going to do all day!!!"
And here I thought that only military veterans had an occupationally-imposed inferiority complex.
Folks, get a grip. If you made it to early retirement then you can surely figure out how to ENJOY early retirement. You might even be able to figure out how to enjoy it without re-creating the workplace environment and without [-]bribing[/-] paying a bunch of people to entertain you. I know-- that's a stretch and you're skeptical-- but that's just the sort of wild-eyed seat-of-the-pants out-of-the-box thinking that your co-workers accused you of when you mentioned that you're planning to achieve financial independence. Right?
And if ER doesn't work out then you can always go create yourself a real job...
Jacob, for instance, is going to be in a technically rich environment filled with pragmatic math and physics Phds - certainly not something he would find at the trailer park or martial arts dojo.
I'll acknowledge the "trailer-park" stereotype (Hey, Jacob, what do you think of that?) but I think you have a distorted perspective on the types of people you encounter at a martial-arts dojang.
It's like the difference between cruising sailors who prefer to sit in the cockpit and sip daiquiris and racing sailors who like to pound waves. To the former the latter looks like misery. To the latter the former looks boring. It's just different personalities. IMPORTANTLY: This lack of mutual understanding does not prove that sailing is impossible.
To torture the sailing analogy for another paragraph, I'm surprised that you chose to sign on as crew instead of skippering your own boat. No matter how good you are at trimming the sails, and no matter how much they respect your skills, someone else has their hand on the rudder. Someone else is deciding how to handle the wind and the waves. What happens if they're taking you where you don't care to go? Is the voyage wasted when you could have spent that time in charge of your own voyage?
This is indeed an unsolved problem for me: What to do with unnecessary money. Remember Buffett's comments before he finally gave it all to the Gates Foundation? He thought he could take care of the money better while he was alive and make a much bigger contribution if he grew it in the mean time than handing it out. For the reasons above, I think the same thing.
I haven't solved the "extra money" problem either. Part of it is the emotional reflex "But I might NEED that someday!!" Part of it is being able to self-fund a life annuity... hopefully with the same "guarantee" as an insurance company.
I guess the good news is that successful quants need a Buffett-sized [-]ego[/-] confidence to succeed in that field, along with a host of other skills. However it would appear that Buffett changed his mind when another choice finally presented itself. Perhaps the key is regularly assessing one's performance against the benchmarks and being ready to align one's decisions with the facts.
That same confidence lends itself to entrepreneurship, not so much to paid employment.
I believe I've found that (yes, I spent plenty of time during the interview finding out if I'm just "headcount" or not. Obviously, I'm not
).
I'm still not sure. Who was interviewing whom? Are you being paid or are you sharing a partnership profit pool? Deciding whether you're headcount rests with the person signing the checks-- not your opinion.
I think you're about to rediscover the long-term relationship differences among dating, weddings, honeymoons, and (after everything else is "over") marriages. Hopefully you chose partners who really believe that they're partners, not employers.
Is the discussion board on ERE being run by Quinstreet or by Jacob or by someone else?
Jacob, is the ERE blog going to start running fresh content or will it keep recycling your posts?
I'm a little confused by the link between "selling the blog" and "free to pursue YMOYL".
Thanks for the insight. Interesting. I've been posting on discussion boards for seven years and find blogging to be at least as satisfying. There are times when the self-imposed deadlines are a drag, but that's the same thing with eating healthy and exercising and doing chores.
So far I haven't found the need to "move on" to anything else. It's more to be managed than to be ditched.
I'm acutely aware of finances, but I'm more interested in the "writing" part than in the "making money" part. Since The-Military-Guide blog revenue is being donated to military charities, I find that I don't have much interest in the first dollar of revenue or the ten thousandth. I'd rather write.
I think that another aspect of writing is a desire to share knowledge, impart a legacy, and pay forward the effort that people put into training us when we were younger.
Now moderating a discussion board... I can understand how that motivation would disappear in a hurry!
