I'm a long time reader of Darrow Kirkpatrick. In fact finding his blog three years ago was my first exposure to the idea of FIRE. His advice is always unvarnished, common sense and practical. I'm a little perplexed by all of the criticism of his post. ("Hey get a load of this guy! He says early retirement doesn't solve every problem. What an idiot!")
His post is simply saying that early retirement is not nirvana. Life still goes on. You get older, your friends and family get older. If you were prone to worry before ER, you will still worry once you ER. More importantly, if you ER without some goal or purpose, whatever that is, you will likely have an adjustment period. If you were not happy before ER, you may not be happy after.
I applaud his honesty. I've had a history of depression in my past and I wonder sometimes whether ER will make it less or more likely that I have depressed thoughts.
Kudos to all of you have found your happy hunting ground in retirement and for whom those concerns are irrelevant.
Moderators, feel free to take down my post, but the name of the thread is "Downside of Early Retirement." So, if you don't think there is any downside to early retirement or you think people who have trouble adjusting are flawed, stupid or otherwise worthy of snarky comments, maybe you should chat about that in another thread -- "Early retirement solves every problem and we don't want to hear any other opinion about it."
I suspect you'll find it doesn't change your overall outlook, unless work stress or other work factors specifically cause your depression, in which case it should improve. But if finances cause it, it will probably be worse as you've taken the jump.
As the old saying goes, money can't buy happiness. I find it can remove a lot of stress, which helps my outlook on life. But I don't think money or retirement can really change who you are. I don't think we're saying anything too different, but I would say that people who are already enjoying life at least have the potential to enjoy it even more in retirement.
As daylate says, the author may be having some money issues, because that seems to be a lot of the message. It's a no-brainer that if you retire on the edge you'll worry about money, and if you have to return to even part-time work you've kind of defeated ER unless you really had to escape your current job. I don't know if downsizing was in his original plan or not but if that's going to be such a traumatic event (and I agree with Terry that it's a good life if that's your biggest trauma), maybe he shouldn't have ER'd.
The other message seems to be having meaning in your life. If your job gives you meaning, maybe you should keep it if you don't have another plan. But I didn't base my identity on what I did for work. I'm not doing anything too big but even with the small amount of volunteer work I'm doing I feel like a more productive part of society now. I should disclose that most of the creativity and even productivity had been sucked out of my job the last couple of years, and I was just doing busy work while waiting for a few fires (customer situations) to put out. I could've asked for (and I'm sure I would've gotten) a new assignment, but I wasn't up for learning another technology anymore.
The author also talks about not being in as good of shape to enjoy life, and also being out of excuses for not getting in shape or doing other things. That's a bit mind-boggling. One should have control in your life for things like that whether working or not. Staying at work to retain an excuse for not taking better care of yourself is an awful reason to not retire. Truly awful.
I ER'd 5+ years ago, and I quite honestly can't think of a moment where I've regretted it or had any second thoughts. Best I can muster is thinking, it probably wouldn't be TOO terrible if I still had to work, and I rarely even think that.
