I need to confess something.
I run a blog called But First, FIRE. I write about financial independence, early retirement, savings rates, withdrawal strategies. I've published pieces on how to calculate your FIRE number and whether $500k is enough to retire at 35.
And yet — I'm not sure I actually want to retire.
I don't think most people do, either. Not really. What they want is to stop doing something they hate. Those are very different things, and conflating them is how people end up financially free and deeply miserable.
What retirement actually is
Here's how we're trained to think about it: you work for 40 years, save diligently, and then one day you stop. You play golf. You garden. You travel. You're free.
But that's a 20th-century fantasy. It was invented for factory workers who destroyed their bodies by 65 and needed rest. A reward for physical labor in an era when most people didn't live past 72.
We've inherited this narrative without questioning it. We moved the goalpost — from 65 to 45 to 35 — and called it a movement. But the logic underneath it never changed.
Retirement isn't a destination. It's the absence of something. And you can't build a life around an absence.
When someone says "I want to retire at 35," what they almost always mean is one of these:
- "I hate my job and want out."
- "I want to travel without asking for permission."
- "I want control over my time."
- "I don't want to answer to anyone."
- "I want to do work I actually care about."
None of those require retirement. Every single one of them requires freedom. And freedom and retirement are not the same thing.
Hating your job isn't the same as wanting to stop working
Let me get specific.
At 23, I was buried in $40,000 of debt. At 25, I started commuting to an open desk where I wrote code for a product I didn't believe in, managed by someone who scheduled meetings about scheduling meetings. I would sit in standups thinking about how many days until Friday. Then on Friday, I'd think about how many days until the next Friday. My life was a countdown to nothing.
That's when I found FIRE. And it felt like someone had handed me the key to my prison cell.
Just save 70% of your income for 10 years and you'll never have to work again.
I latched onto that like it was scripture. I paid off the debt, built to $1M by 33, moved to Vietnam, and brought my expenses down to $1,100/month. By every FIRE metric, I'd made it.
But here's what nobody in the FIRE community talks about honestly: the day after you "retire," you're still you. You still wake up at the same time. You still have the same brain. The same anxieties. The same restlessness.
The discomfort I felt at that desk? It wasn't about the job. It was about not having agency over my life. The job was just the most visible symptom.
The real problems with quitting everything at 33
I know — uncomfortable territory for a FIRE blog. But I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't say it.
You lose your identity faster than you expect. In every culture on earth, one of the first questions people ask is: "What do you do?" It's not small talk. It's how humans locate each other socially, intellectually, tribally. When you retire at 33, the answer becomes... nothing? "I manage my portfolio"? "I'm retired"? Try saying that to someone over dinner and watch the conversation die. Work gives you structure, purpose, and a community — even if the mission is just shipping a quarterly report. Strip that away and you have to build all three from scratch. Most people vastly overestimate their ability to do this.
You may have solved the wrong problem. If you hate Monday mornings, the issue might not be that you need to eliminate Mondays. It might be that you need a different Monday. Quitting everything to escape a bad job is like selling your house because of a leaky faucet. The faucet was fixable. You just needed a different job — or a different relationship with work entirely.
Boredom is real, and it sneaks up on you. The first three months feel like an extended vacation. Months 4 through 8 feel like freedom. Somewhere around month 9, something shifts. You start waking up without a reason. You scroll more. You pick up projects and drop them. You feel vaguely guilty about being unproductive, even though productivity is supposedly something you've opted out of. People who retire early without a clear sense of what they're moving toward — not just what they're running from — tend to struggle more than they expected.
55 years is a long time to fund. If you retire at 33, you're betting that the next 57 years will be financially smooth. No major health crises. No market downturn that lasts a decade. No inflation regime that quietly erodes your purchasing power. The 4% rule was designed for 30 years, not 57. You're running a financial experiment with no control group and no do-over.
But also — the other side is real too
None of that means you should just accept the default. The standard 40-year career was designed for corporations, not humans. It optimizes for predictable labor supply. The fact that it's "normal" doesn't make it good.
Time is the only thing you actually can't make more of. Every year spent doing work you don't care about is a year you'll never get back. At 33, you can hike Patagonia. At 70, maybe not. The value of a free hour at 33 is worth dramatically more than a free hour at 70.
And here's the irony: many people who "retire" early end up doing the most meaningful work of their lives. They write. They build. They teach. They start companies not because they need the money, but because they're free to take real risks. When you remove financial pressure from the equation, you unlock a completely different relationship with work. You do things because they matter, not because they pay. That difference — chosen work versus required work — changes everything.
What I actually did
I'll be honest because theory is cheap.
I hit my FIRE number. I "retired." I moved to Vietnam. For the first few months, it was genuinely euphoric. I woke up without an alarm. I went to the gym at 10am. I ate pho for breakfast and watched the world go by from a café overlooking the ocean.
Around month four, something changed. I started feeling restless. Not bored exactly — but untethered. Like I was floating. No deadlines. No team depending on me. No problems that needed solving urgently. It sounds like paradise, and in many ways it was. But humans aren't really built for paradise. We're built for problems.
So I started building things again. Not because I needed the money — my expenses are $1,100/month and my portfolio covers that easily. But because I realised that what I hated was never work. What I hated was working on someone else's dream, on someone else's schedule, for someone else's reasons.
I write this blog now. I build tools. I'm learning things I never had time for when I was optimising for a promotion I didn't want. I work maybe 4 hours a day, on whatever I feel like, from wherever I am. Is that retired? Is that working? I genuinely don't know. And I've stopped caring about the label.
The question worth sitting with
If you're somewhere in the FIRE journey — grinding through a job you tolerate, watching your savings rate, almost there, or already past the finish line and wondering why it doesn't feel the way you thought it would — I want you to sit with this:
If money were no object, what would you spend your Tuesday afternoon doing?
Not your Saturday. Not your vacation. Your Tuesday.
Because that's what retirement actually is. It's 10,000 Tuesdays. And if you can't answer that question with some clarity and some genuine excitement, then maybe the problem isn't that you need to retire faster. Maybe it's that you haven't figured out yet what you're retiring to.
The math of FIRE is genuinely straightforward. Calculate your number, pick a flavor of FIRE, execute. The harder part — the part nobody talks about — is deciding what your life is actually for.
Don't retire from something. Retire to something.
Or don't retire at all. Just get free.