It comes down to perspective tbh. For someone who's worked hard labor throughout their life, the cushy tech job you get is actually worth doing forever. But for people who have never experienced that, I can see why retiring early makes sense, but honestly most of us get to work from home and do our jobs on the computer, which doesn't require much. It's still an amazing career to be in IMO

I've worked in food service, landscaping and factory jobs. You're right, the tech job does feel super cushy after gigs like that. But I'm about 25 years in on the tech industry now and I feel the same GP. At some point, you can't avoid the politics and corp BS and it wears you down. Everything is relative. Now that I have the means to say "I don't have to or want to do this anymore" I'll be checking out after this year. It's been a good run.

I went from big tech to a team of four at a small org. To work uninhibited and with close to zero speed bumps from management has been life changing for me and my stress levels. We all have each other's backs and there is none of that "West Coast Nice" stuff going on.

I worked manufacturing in my younger days and also spent some time in the Marines, so I feel ya on the cushy tech jobs... But I'd just about rather go back to Iraq before I go back to corporate culture.

Not to mention that with AI, the pleasure is going out of it, at least for me. I enjoy the crafting of code at least as much if not more than the actual results of the code. For almost 20 years, I’ve been declaring myself ready to leave tech behind and buy a chicken farm, but now I’m pretty much there emotionally and financially. I likely won’t actually raise chickens (maybe a couple backyard chickens for eggs), but I’ll be pretty much opting out of economic productivity and just doing things for the pleasure of them instead. Unless, of course, the economy crashes and my retirement savings turn to dust and I end up having to continue being a cog in the machinery of capitalism until I die.

Why a chicken farm? The medium to large scale ones I have seen videos of look like terrible places, for both the chickens and the human workers. I expect they smell even worse.

It’s more a rhetorical thing than a reality. The appeal to me of raising chickens for eggs is not having to slaughter them,¹ but reality is much uglier than that, of course.

⸻

1. Back in the 00s, I would buy our weekly supply of eggs from a woman who sold eggs at the Beverly Hills farmer’s market. She had photo albums of the chickens at the farm. One Sunday morning, I overslept and arrived towards the end of the market. The egg lady had no eggs, but was selling whole chickens out of a cooler. I was relieved to discover that she’d just sold out of eggs and the chickens she was selling as meat weren’t the hens who laid the eggs (although still, chickens were slaughtered to make meat). And yes, I’m the kind of urban hypocrite who is happy to eat meat as long as he doesn’t have to think about how it transformed from an animal into a food.

>The appeal to me of raising chickens for eggs is not having to slaughter them,

Doing that in your backyard with a few chickens sounds great.

>but reality is much uglier than that, of course.

Much uglier at any sort of commercial scale.

> I end up having to continue being a cog in the machinery of capitalism until I die.

Vs what exactly?

Living off savings/investments and not having to do things because they will generate money.

You also don't need the politics and corp bs. I worked as a contractor for tiny little orgs doing good things for ~11 years - basically 2-5 people, almost no BS, good money, tons of time flexibility.

I shifted away to get more predictability and less accounting/biz management stuff. Maybe the party has ended, but I bet there's still some ability to freelance for small orgs? Alternatively working for small yet sustainable companies should be similarly lean.

I find the BS really ramps up with the size of the org. Small orgs obviously have their own problems (and often create problems that don't need to exist), but pick your poison.

I have this idea that AI might actually be a real enabler for small or 1-man teams if you find the right niche. I haven't acted on it yet, but I expect a lot of folks are doing that right now.

15 years in running a tiny micro agency (me and my wife), working with non profits. Still looking ok right now, and I still love it and my clients who are ace. I’m mainly a PM though with hacker-developer tendencies. Hoping my sector hold together for another 10 years. I’m 53 so that’ll do it. We’ve been relatively sensible over the years, good work / life balance and our children (now adult and left home) know who we are. So that’s the main job done :-)

Agreed this is one way to go. But tbh, I'm not sure if I've lost the passion for tech as much as rather spend my time doing other things like be with my kids, travel, ect. Also, take better care of my health and be more active. We'll see if there's a desire to keep the sword sharp but I don't expect that for some time after I retire.

I have had multiple years of good times like those. But eventually it always comes to an end from my experience. Usually because the business is not doing as well eventually.

I think you can get lucky and be in those good environments for longer (looks like you got lucky for 11 years) but by the nature of capitalism and competition those things never really last.

Oh it's definitely sink or swim, and you always have to be setting up the next thing while working on your current thing. It's a big part of why I got out - I'm much happier with a more stable situation. It's all about tradeoffs, how much you can stand the stink of corporate BS vs the downsides above.

And I will admit that the mid 2000's to roughly 2020 was a pretty good time to be in that mode. I haven't freelanced since 2019 so I might just be talking about good times that are gone now - it does seem like a tough world out there right now, but I bet there's still plenty of niches to be found.

Do you have a plan other than “wait for the money to evaporate”?

Wait for the money to evaporate ... more slowly than your remaining lifespan (and dying happy in your own bed for example) is one definition of winning.

Not entirely but looking forward to having the time to make one. Die with Zero helped a bit with perspective. At my NW and spend it will likely be much larger when I go.

exactly! after a certain time, you get to a new normal and you want something new or better in life. nothing wrong with that though.

Why not check out now? Why after this year ? You supposedly have the means to do so now , so why not exit now?

You won’t exit after this year. You’ll keep pushing it out.

Everyone always need twice as much as they have to retire. Most people will also never do it.

Reading the FIRE subreddit I have realized that most people like the fantasy of retiring more than actually retiring. A lot of them wouldn't actually know what to do without the daily societal pressure to grind. Life is tough when you are out of the beaten path and need to figure out how to fill your days apparently.

TBH I think most people's lives are on autopilot and I can't blame them. This is what late stage capitalism has endoctrinated into our culture. I was one of them until some events made me look critically at retirement. After crunching the numbers I could have retired years ago. Sticking it out a bit longer to squash the rest of the concerns my spouse has.

> How do you reconcile the apparent hypocrisy of your wealthiness?

Does this specific category error have a name? I see it so frequently, it's ridiculous. Being genre-savvy/aware of the meta-game doesn't mean one can opt-out, or refuse to play. Recognizing how a game is rigged often allows one to play it better than the average person.

I'm not GP, but my acknowledgement that society is unequal, and that I sometimes benefit from the inequality doesn't mean I have to be dude under the bridge, nor is it immoral since I cannot opt out of humanity. All I can do is minimize my odds of falling into societal cracks, and I make no apologies for that.

For myself I usually call it "(not) playing to win", after David Sirlin's book (see also https://www.sirlin.net/ptw for the free web version). In it, he describes a phenomenon in competitive videogaming where some people try to forbid valid moves in an online game because they are "broken", like throws in fighting games or rush strategies in RTS games. Sirlin argues that because they recognize a powerful tool but refuse to use it, they needlessly handicap themselves. As such, they're not playing to win but playing to feel morally superior and consequently lose to those who do use all the tools the game provides.

In reasonably balanced games, it usually turns out the "overpowered" strategy is not all that overpowered and that they have huge downsides when played against people who know how to counter them. In real life, which has no requirement of being balanced, we can recognize that certain strategies ((explicitly legal and often even encouraged!) consistently work really well. Choosing not to use those strategies doesn't make one morally superior, just bad at playing the game of life.

That said, "minimizing your own odds of falling into societal cracks" often still includes caring for others around you. On a small scale, being rich but alone because everyone around you went bankrupt and/or became estranged to you is not much fun. On a bigger scale it's just good governance to make sure everyone has food, safety and entertainment, just to keep the pitchforks away.

> How do you reconcile the apparent hypocrisy of your wealthiness?

I'm not sure this is full on hypocrisy.

In this case this is the game we are forced to play (late stage capitalism). Doesn't mean I need to like the game, but since I'm forced to play I will darn make sure to win as much as I can.

Hate the game, not the players

> I will darn make sure to win as much as I can.

Nicely demonstrating the root cause of late stage capitalism - us. Perhaps we should blame the players.

I see so many comments trying to blame others or blame systems. Blaming billionaires, or consumers, or boomers, or zoomers.

Of course I'm part of the problem too. I do fix things in my direct environment but I figure trying to help fix more would be beyond my skills.

Sweet summer child. Two things can be true at once

As you can imagine, it's a planning heavy decision. I came off parental leave earlier this year and prior to that my wife and I talked about me not going back. However, we decided to delay until my next vesting later this year and to see how the midterms play out with this clown car of an administration and the potential impacts on healthcare. Barring anything catastrophic, it's happening this year. Parental leave already gave me a taste of the life I'd rather have.

Same boat, my son was born in October last year and have been back at work since February and I am already completely overwhelmed. Our plan is to wait for the second child and get another paternity leave and then I will fuck off from any corporate/enterprise job and try to do my own thing first and we'll live off menial jobs + the income from the couple of apartments we have on AirBnB.

I am not planning to stay out of tech altogether though, at least long term.

This was also my plan; hang in there for the next kid, wait for the next vest, etc. ultimately daycare is expensive, healthcare is expensive… I’m still stuck 6 years later waiting to quit but something always comes up and there’s always another vest around the corner.

Well obviously. Vesting schedules are explicitly designed the way they are to keep people around. That's their entire purpose.

Retirement is inherently a choice to earn less lifetime money and pour that time into family and other things you like doing. Waiting for the next vesting cliff is inherently a choice to earn more money and spend less time on your family.

My point is that it being a choice starts to disappear with kids, rising costs etc. It was a choice I could make independently, now it’s a choice the entire family gets to participate in since we’d need to sell the house, move to a lower cost of living locale etc.

Happy journey friend. Enjoy those kiddos

> potential impacts on healthcare

Healthcare is the item that most FIRE folks underestimate. It was actually pretty tenable when the Obamacare subsidies were more fully in effect. Now that those are mostly gone it's a much larger line item in the household budget. I've only got a couple of years until Medicare kicks in so I'm not too concerned - unless they mess that up too - but for folks thinking of FIRE'ing in their 40s & 50s with kids still at home it's probably not advisable now.

I also worked hard labour at the start of my career.

They are not really comparable and are exhausting in a different way. Tech makes me mentally exhausted fighting things out of my control. Hard labour made me physically exhausted but I felt more in control of my life. I didn't need to do any performative tasks. Once the day was over, it was over.

Just different type of exhaustions. Grass is always greener on the other side I know

I worked 10 years in commercial fishing before getting into tech.

Although now sometimes I yearn for a solid day of physical labor out on the ocean.

But yeah, grass is definitely greener on this side. I can always go shovel dirt o a saturday.

If you're mid-career it's good. You can get jobs really easily, you have the networking time, you're in demand, they trust you're going to be learning shit quickly, you have the right stuff on your CV.

Late career is a different story. Tech is Up or Out. A lot of people here are off-the-grid contractor types living in LCOL areas, fully remote, with varying degrees of financial comfort. Those people in HCOL areas who got used to expensive lifestyles - sometimes because, let's face it, return to office meant living in a HCOL area, and eventually buying when the rents got tiringly highter - well some of us have choices to make. You can be not wealthy enough to retire, but still trapped in expenses, and seeing how you can pivot to continue the high.

Then the planning begins to where you'll live in a LCOL area.

Some others in early career are really suffering. People who were laid off are having issues at the moment. It's K-shaped.

So enjoy your mid-career bump. Or, you're in the lucky few late-career types with googleable reputations, you accumulated FANG money/shares, and then you're golden.

It's an amazing career because of the pay, not because of how American workers are relating to their hours. Kids out of college joining startups may be working harder than... just about everyone in America, really.

I had a taste of the other side for 2 weeks. I was building wood construction with my uncle who is doing this for 20 years.

I was digging 6 holes in full sun, 26 degree C, transporting 100 kg of dirt in 8 rounds, moved 600 kg of ceramic roof times, worked on rain and had sun burns which I treated 2 days with pain even sleeping

Everything for third of my normal salary

I consider myself to be very privileged to be a SWE. Yeah maybe it's not as great as it used to be as our capitalistic overlords rain down ever increasing workloads on us in an era of almost limitless productivity.

That said, I would like to retire early, not because I dislike it, but because I like a lot of other things more than it. I'd probably still have a software hobby project or business, but it's nice to be able to choose to do so instead of having to do it because someone wants me to.

Plus I can choose how much AI to use.

the cushy tech job is built to debilitate you. steel sharpens steel. once the steering wheel is pried from your hands, it is all down hill!

I basically agree, just adding context.

As companies grow, it's the natural state of things, as any hope for goal alignment goes out the window. I am OK dealing with situations where the good for the company's long term might not be the same as my personal preferences. But we often see situations where what is decided isn't good for the company, or for most workers, but great for a decision maker, and we all know that at those layers, talking about the misalignment to the layer above is a great way to get canned. A decade or that, and the company is a zombie.

I've enjoyed tech in environments where there was alignment, and in a few cases it made me serious money, which is why I have said optionality myself. But nowadays AI has led to much higher capital costs to do innovative things, so the number of companies with the right size and potential has shrunk, and that makes fulfilling careers far less likely.

My bigger take here is that nothing is fine forever. We might have fun for a couple years but eventually a disruptor comes in and changes everything. This disruptor today is AI but it will be something else in 5 or 10 years.

Therefore save when you can. Don't be fooled thinking you make a ton of money today therefore you will make a ton in 20 years. Get the optionality today, that's the biggest win you can add to your life.

I remember one of my first "tech job" interviews, probably around 1997. The interviewer liked me, and was basically trying to recruit me, telling me about all the perks of the job. One of the perks she kept talking about was the pension - if I "put in" 20 years, I could retire with a generous pension. She even broke down how the whole pension worked (I didn't even know what a pension was). I thought was crazy. Actually, no, I thought she was lazy. I was 26 at the time and took for granted all my energy and enthusiasm. I thought I was always gonna have that level of energy, and just couldn't grasp not working. I wanted to work until I died, and was proud of that.

Now in my mid-50s, I sometimes think about that interview and the energetic kid I was back then. I wish I would've understood that the future is gonna come, and I wasn't always gonna have that 26-year-old level of energy and enthusiasm for work. Plan for your exit, kid.

I feel like I could still endure this AI hype cycle a bit, that things will eventually stabilize to some point I’m comfortable with, agents already seem kinda cool after the psychosis wears off.

But the next big disruptive thing like this, that will probably be my last straw. Not sure what it will be, but when it comes, I’ll just know. Maybe it will be developers installing neuralink type devices or something into their brains to have some kind of “organic interface” or something using their thoughts to build prompts or whatever. You will have to have it just to stay competitive in the industry.

I will check out.

You know, I think the experiences you are describing are the norm for non-tech corporate jobs. Now with AI as an excuse, management is now subjecting the tech positions the same as the non-tech workers and it stings. Tech people were previously treated far better than the average corporate workers, and started after the tech hiring boom from Covid.

Quite right. I bemoan shortsightedness of managerial types often, but too many fellow techies had assume that gravy ride will last forever. In eyes of management we have not the same leverage now.

Some people need to touch fire to know the feeling of getting burned.

I was one of those people.

Excellent tech income; zero savings other than a 401(k) I barely contributed into.

After an amazing meal at a burger place several years ago, I asked my wife about upgrading to a Model S. She figuratively sat me down (after we literally sat into the seats of our Model 3) and was more straight-forward with me than she had ever been prior to that moment.

"How much do we have saved? Oh, _we_ have basically nothing? Yeah, so I'm not saying no, but you need to fix that before we discuss this again."

I took it defensively in the moment, but not for long because I knew she was right. Building that nest egg became priority #1 since that talk.

That was in 2023. I saved a lot since then. It felt VERY VERY GOOD to look at my savings and say "You know, I could fuck right off for six months if I wanted to. I won't, but I could!" It completely changed my priorities at work.

Now, I've had to drain my savings twice now: once to secure a down payment for our house, and again for a major repair of said home (b/c I am strongly against treating our home as a credit card). Regardless, I chip away a good amount into several savings accounts every two weeks and am expecting to regrow the account within the next year. I can't wait to feel that feeling again!

As someone who took that time off, don’t. Not unless you have a solid re-entry plan. The money was nice for raising our daughter but I’m out of runway and no way to recover. Do well at your job and be thankful to live such a luxurious life.

You are learning, but you haven't learned.

You didn't build a nest egg, you saved for a down payment.

You didn't rebuild your nest egg, you created a sinking fund for your home.

You praise yourself for not treating your home as a credit card, but your left hand is still borrowing money from yourself.

You've recognized there's an issue, but don't fool yourself into thinking you've done anything about it

This was my take too.

GP built an emergency fund, which is important, but then drained it twice for non emergencies.

A nest egg is a much larger tax advantaged holding that you don’t want to withdrawal from because you’ll have a massive tax hit. It’s also far more than a down payment, hopefully. GP had some low interest “savings” account at his bank. Poor wife, no pun intended :(

Thanks for your opinion and for your concern for my wife. She is quite happy, actually!

I have a 401(k) that I contribute to. I intend on contributing the yearly max starting next year.

Should I have contributed the annual max when I started working? Yes. I chose instead to pay off our student loans instead and enjoy life. I'm not a frugal person.

Thanks for your opinion.

Yes, I have a ways to go.

You're also right that these aren't nest eggs. I spent them on what I saved for!

Regardless, it's a start, especially for someone who never had a habit of saving before.

You've had to drain your savings twice since 2023?

Yes. Yet, the point was that I started saving in a much bigger way than I did before.

I'm coming up on 40 years with the last 17 at the same company. I'm so burnt out that I resemble a charcoal briquette.

I feel the same way. I feel sad though that it's over and I never accomplished what I wanted to.

But for the last 20 years my priority has been my family. Pickups and Dropoffs to school, sports, activities, and doctor appointments.

At least I was able to give them a good life.

Living in the United States, my retirement plan is "MAID"

MAID as in Medical Aid in Dying? Why would you do that?

To be able to leave some assets to my loved ones

In my country, best we can hope for is a quick, painless death - many people are bankrupted by medical bills and end-of-life care

Dude just leave the bay area, the literal most expensive place in the world, and you'll be fine. You'd rather actually kill yourself than move to, like, Boulder?

> My advice for anyone reading this that is starting your career: Live simply and save a lot

This is such great advice and really what I would suggest to anyone young in any field. A terrible thing I'm seeing is folks living a life that requires them to stay within their high paying career in whatever field they're in. Modern day slavery except it's mostly self inflicted.

I could and did live frugally before I had kids.

How can one continue living in a small apartment with lead and asbestos hazards is beyond me.

There is surely a spectrum between small apartment with asbestos and 5m$ house.

I read on HN all the time that once you have kid it is unavoidable to spend 300k$ a year. But yet 99.9% of the world and the US manages to raise kids with a fraction of that income and they turn out mostly fine. (Before you ask, yes I have kids and yes we still live simply)

I have 2 kids and we have a single Kia soul and a little house I do most of the work. I pay for a good private school mostly out of fear of big schools and gun violence in the US and giving my kids multilingual education. I can assure the rich kids have a lot of problems and have a schedule like a company CEO, they go to our place and have a blast, free range fun. The kids need money thing is mostly a marketing thing the system puts into parents minds.

> There is surely a spectrum between small apartment with asbestos and 5m$ house.

That's exaggerating a bit, but some places near offices are kind of that way. (Why I love working remote, which absolutely increases the spectrum of choices.)

The mental gymnastics I've seen kids enable is Olympic level. Need to upgrade to a bigger house, need to upgrade the car to a SUV, need keep traveling 2-3 times a year, need to sign up for some crazy sports league and coach which means domestic flights and hotels every other week.

Have seen that as well. Kids is the convenient excuse to go spending. Marketers have well understood that for multiple decades.

Meanwhile I would bet there is an inverse correlation between spending for the kids and kids happiness.

Friend had a baby.

She went out and bought a massive Cadillac Escalade.

To haul around a 10 pound infant.

American trucks are an arms race. You need one to protect the occupants from the other trucks on the road, unless someone legislates to stop all of you from driving them.

I feel we are engaged in the same race to the bottom in the UK, although it is not as extreme as it is in the US. One of the few constraining factors in the UK is that our car parking spaces are generally quite small and no-one wants to buy something they can't park anywhere.

I wonder how safe they look when you take into account the people running over their own kids in the driveway.

Many of the homes in the world were built when lead and/or asbestos were in use. Asbestos isn't much of a concern if you don't disturb it - don't let your kids play in the attic or tear out the drywall, and you should be fine. Don't let them lick the paint, and you're probably good. Or paint over it / get it remediated - it doesn't have to be a deal killer.

I certainly agree that it'd be hard to have kids in a small space though, I definitely appreciate having more room - especially with a WFH setup.

I have asbestos in this modest[0] house: it's not any sort of a problem. (Lead only in my soldering kit in significant quantities so far as I know...)

I always have been fairly frugal and am in semi-retirement now from the residues of my last two small start-ups (to which COVID was unkind, so died simultaneously!).

My extended family has/had big houses, including one in which a famous film was set it seems, but I see those as mainly expensive liabilities. Never owned a car. Etc etc.

[0] As described by a visiting Secretary of State!

Plenty of people grow up in apartments in cities and live great lives. Often, they enjoy greater autonomy as they age into adolescence. Suburbs are basically prisons for children these days.

The truth is you don’t need a home or an SUV or a front lawn to raise children. And it’s also not necessarily better for them. It might be more cushy, sure, but that doesn’t mean it materially improves their lives in any meaningful way.

I agree with this. From my experience the more isolated and cushy early kid's life are, the less capable they end up being able to manage rough situation later in life. It's counterintuitive because as parents we feel like we need to build a golden prison in the suburbs for them.

I broadly agree, but expensive homes are an odd example because, like, you can just sell the house later. There might be some opportunity cost relative to investing in a broad market ETF or whatever, but that's not the sort of difference that makes or breaks your early retirement strategy.

It's a bit odd to get moralistic over saving/spending money in general, but that's especially true around expensive homes.

Yeah I'm more worried for people spending all their income on high rent apartments or quickly depreciating cars.

All projections currently show it is better to pay rent on an apartment than buying the similar apartment. Especially in tech cities. Do the math.

I agree the ideal thing to do is to probably rent a cheaper apartment to start with.

Is that with current interest rates or irregardless? Can you link to one of these projections?

why would it be especially true around expensive houses? When you own a house, you are still paying an implicit rent to live in it (the opportunity cost of the rent that someone else could pay you instead).

Given that in almost all locales it is so much better financially to rent than to buy right now, Buying a 5m$ house is probably one of the least financially responsible things you could do in the current climate (And especially in the Bay area where the buy-to-rent ratio is all time high)

This has been me as well. While I don't think my time is quite up, I have heard the call of the sea. Grey ships are waiting.

There have been times in the last decade where I wished I had chosen a profession that lets me stay offline more. Ironically, AI has given me more enthusiasm for tech than I've had in years, which seems opposite to most people's experience.

I always figured I would get sick of it or burn out. I'm hitting my 4th decade of software engineering with renewed excitement

I bought a farm and ran away from tech. Euphoria! For a bit. Honeymoon period's well and fucking over. I did not enjoy chopping that cord of firewood, but I didn't hate it, either. I miss making impulsive, frivolous 4-figure purchases, and I miss not having to literally fucking conjure money out of soil. I don't miss the self-important corpo wankbags, "quick meetings," or the yearly cycle of having to pretend that someone who works for me is deserving of being compressed into the bad end of a bell curve because HR or some MD came back and said that we have too many high performers relative to another department. I've done more computing and written more code (and documentation!) for fun in the last few years than I did since about 2016, which is nice.

Don't run away from the desk job until you're really sure. If you're really sure, then don't let the door hit your ass.

Would love to hear more of your experience… Plant farming? Animals? Acerage? Income? Kind of looking at this myself

"spending everything they make to buy multi-million dollar houses in the bay area" was very good financial decision, wasn't it? ;-)

They will not be approved for a mortgage if it costs “everything they make.”

Very good advice. I was at it for 40 years, actually did some MUMPS (for those of you who watched The Audacity), as well as every tech from the old days, even some hardware, and kept current and on the very edge up until the end. I also loved it and thought I would do it forever, I felt so grateful that my hobby and passion as also my career, and very well paying (eventually, back then no one thought it would be a career).

I retired 10 years ago when I had enough (money) and had enough (of the industry). Always lived below my means. I cannot imagine what it was like to be in the industry for the past 10 years.

As far as the nonsense that is pushed top down, it is not so simple. I was at/near the top. I know what was happening, what I was doing, but everyone has a boss, even the boss. The industry is too important, too big, too critical for it not to be run by human nature. So glad I got out when I did.

I'm not sure it's human nature as much as it is a system that compresses everything into finance.

And we've all seen what happened at Boeing when the MBAs and spreadsheet jockeys took over from the engineers.

Immense power and profits attracts certain behaviors. This has happened throughout history. Finance is a lot more efficient, flexible, and powerful than other mechanisms, and has become the modern choice.

At my “first” job, Ramit Sethi came in to pitch “I will teach you to be rich,” which basically amounted to: every time you get a raise, have that amount automatically moved to savings/investment and keep living on the salary you had. Great was to avoid lifestyle creep (at least until kids!).

You almost convinced me, but then I remembered that you can sell that multi-million dollar home somewhere in the early 5-10 "years of grinding" and still end up the same.

i am 43 . years i have worked in restaurnt as chef and waitier. i ran it for a long time and tired. on ly 3 weeks ago i realised the coding was a language. though i know extreemely litttle what i realise it was more about he tech knowledge but more that exprience. i am enjoying building and breaking things. recently by mistake built a something that is i would have nevr in my life would be able to do it. so yeah if you are tired it might be good idea to enjoy life and watch it in anew perspective. and then may be th eth elife and code will come i to balance.

such a wonderful advice, this resonates a lot with me. I know i would ignore it when i needed to hear it though

I would take this advice a bit further even -- I don't think savings alone is the key, because inflation and de-dollarization are exponentially eroding purchasing power. The key is ownership of income-producing assets. In late-stage capitalism, the vast majority of people who work in exchange for wages will be members of the debt class; workers who manage to escape debt will still be living on a knife's edge where you can be laid off at any moment regardless of how well your company is doing. The only people living with stability will be those whose lives are paid for by the assets they own, rather than by the hours they sell.

A society where the only people with stability are those who parasitize on a increasingly emaciated wealth-producing population surely doesn't seem like a stable society, nor one that would be pleasant to live in.

There's no true stability in the world, but if the only option for "safety" we see is to be one of the few who snatch self-perpetuating generational wealth, aren't we just speeding up the unraveling of the very system off of which we desire to subsist on?

It sounds like a return to the way things have been for a long time. Our post-WWII abundance has been a bit of an aberration compared to most of our history.

I'm not saying it's good, I think it's very concerning and potentially very destabilizing. But it is the way things are right now. It's also possible to be on the wealth-producing side and not see your savings disappear into the ether while still providing things of value to people that appreciate it. "rent-seeking" is a real thing, and much of finance doesn't actually provide any real value to society, but this isn't a simple black and white dichotomy across the have's and have-nots.

We ought to find ways out of this mess, ideally something that doesn't involve communism and the typical humanitarian nightmares that usually come along with it.

> aren't we just speeding up the unraveling of the very system off of which we desire to subsist on

Self-perpetuating generational wealth is not a zero-sum game if said wealth is put to good work.

Having wealth morally obligates its holder to put it to use to benefit others. I think we all intuitively understand this; it's the impulse behind calls to "tax the rich!"

People the last 500 years who put wealth to good use, even in modest proportions, are part of the reason western culture is so rich. We would not have Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven today if someone hadn't employed them (though I do decry the relative poverty some composers lived in and some OSS maintainers currently live in - come on, people). And modern infrastructure wouldn't exist if capitalists hadn't at one time thought it worthwhile to invest in railroads.

If OP said the important thing is to be appropriately generous with your blamelessly earned wealth as you safeguard it against future perils, I would not have replied.

This really just sounds like a return to slavery via indentured servitude. If the working class is the debt class, someone owns that debt as an “income-producing asset”.

Easier said than done, no asset producing income will do so indefinitely without a lot work/investments.

My S&P 500 fund has done this and will continue to do this without any work or investments of time.

Passive investing is a fairly new phenomenon and we don’t actually know if it works long term. The premise of the stock market is that it’s a market. Blind and wide investment goes against the principles of how investment works. We could be accelerating bad outcomes because we are basically rewarding and punishing companies based purely on momentum, not performance.

Basically, I think it’s possible that passive investment only works when it’s a small slice of total investment. Essentially, then you ride off the expertise and decisions of others.

What happens when it’s the majority of investment? We don’t know.

Did they say it was easy? It's still the right thing to aim for, even if it is a lot of work.