...not every rich person is interested in the same luxury goods or houses on the west side of LA. Not all of them live in LA or SF or NYC. This is especially true if you practice geo-arbitrage and move to a place with lower cost of living.
... It's human nature to want to be competitive. That's what drives us. But no matter how much we accumulate, there's always someone who has more than us. It's a game we can never win.
But now there's only one score I care about---how much free time I have left on the face of the earth to enjoy and do things that I want to do.
... I just think comparison is a thief of joy. Once we FIRE, the only thing that matters is enjoying the time we have left. Leave the rest of the stuff behind because they just don't matter. YMMV of course.
You are broadly speaking quite right. 2500 years of philosophy would lend salutary support.
But as you note, we wrestle and wrangle with the competitive drive. Going to the gym, one tries to exercise vigorously, to remain healthy and to get stronger. Even so, it is inevitable to be comparing oneself against other guys… who benches more, who curls more, who has bigger biceps. Smith bench presses 200 pounds. Is Smith a strong man? That depends on who at the gym, can maybe bench press 300. If most gym attendees top-out at 150, then indeed Smith is strong. Left unchecked, this yearning to compete, results in monomaniacal obsession with bulking-up, even to the detriment of the very same health, that we purportedly were trying to advance, by going to the gym in the first place.
It is the same with money, except that pursuit of money doesn’t depend on age, testosterone or genetics. In a way, that makes the money-pursuit more equitable, or more “just”. We age out of hold-my-beer masculine contests of raw physical prowess. We don’t age out of comparing our Vanguard balances. We may, in some cases, garner the wisdom to rise above such competition. Or we may not.
The geo-arbitrage is also an insightful point, but here we have a practical impediment. There is higher quality of life where there are more amenities, proximity to an international airport, balmy weather, mountains, ocean, ethnic foods and so on. These aren’t essential, but they’re nice to have. Thus the appeal of retiring in Los Angeles as opposed to say Des Moines or Peoria. Is this a puerile fascination, or as the kids say these days, peacocking? Maybe. But one likes what one likes. Suppose that one likes East European sausages, soups and caviar. Easy to find in West Hollywood. Not so easy, in West Topeka, Kansas.
As for the question of time, my view is admittedly unorthodox and dour. I place next to no value on my time. If tomorrow I find myself wearing a striped uniform, gathering garbage along the ditch adjacent to the highway, while men in mirrored sunglasses, toting rifles, oversee our gang… there wouldn’t be much failure to communicate. If that’s how my time gets spent, so be it. I have no burning alternative projects. This is also why I haven’t had particular yearning to retire! Retirement just sort-of happened. There is nothing that I was chomping to do, but couldn’t do, while still working. True, I did want to escape from some restrictions and ructions at work, or perhaps, at any workplace… but that’s more a case of “retiring from”, than “retiring too”.
Saving money, and accumulating money, has been an invariant, a constant, a sense of continuity… through employment and unemployment, youth and middle age and I guess late-middle-age (whatever it is now)…. Quite literally, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer. Would it be an indecorous stretch, to also wish to keep it, until death do us part?
