To be or not to be… F.I.R.E.

I want to be F.I.R.E., and you? FIRE is one of many acronyms circulating in the information and knowledge society. It is the Anglo-Saxon acronym of Financial Independence Retire(ment) Early. How many people spend part of their lives dreaming of their retirement! Thinking about what they will do and will not do. 

Read Spanish Version

Some come to savour their desire; others, not even that, they stay halfway and, like chaff, return to the dust from which they were made, before having the opportunity to comb grey hair. This is life, a kind of russian roulette on which we have little or no control.

If we cannot choose when we will be mowed, why not choosing what we will do while life gives breath? A possible option is to enrol into the FIRE mode. There are many reasons for that. I will try to explain them in a reverse way; that is, showing the opposite behaviour, or anti-FIRE, which I will also call working-ant behaviour.

The working ant lives to work, and humans who adopt the pattern of the insect are usually formed under the influence of industrious families, in which their character is forged. They are families that, for a bunch of reasons, prefer to accumulate rather than enjoying-spending (even though in moderation). Always fearful of bad contingencies, shortages and recurrent plagues of skinny cows, these harvesters of surplus feel an excessive compulsion towards anticipatory saving. This leads them to postpone enjoyment; they dream their life in the very long term. And they do not notice that life is what happens every day, and not what they envision for their theoretical future. In short, they live lives of deprivation, incomplete lives, and truncated ones, in which only the savings are prioritized to face the unknown becoming.

Looking for that perfect future, they very often conjugate their lives as imperfect presents, self-damaging and damaging the people of their environment. Whoever has had a miser (saver, mean, etc.) nearby will know very well what I mean.

The years go by with that dynamic of war economy and the working ants age and eventually get retired. This is the moment to live the dreams that they left parked while accumulating the opportune resources. But, alas!, the practice differs from that theory conceived decades before. With sixty-five or more years, ant-people are full of aches and health problems that indicate a degenerative process with a more or less close end. Their forces weaken, they lack desire, and do not have the humour or the disposition of suitable spirit, and they are absorbed by the setbacks -small or great- of their biological aging, inexorable condition for the living beings. In addition, they begin to see that their autonomy is suffering cuts that are increasing, and that they go through a spiral of dependence.

A retired FIRE-man that prides himself does not even speculate in the stock market as a hobby. That is reserved for young people, the pre-FIRE, because the FIRE-men, by definition, run away from stress

When faced with these hardships and their bad forecasts, the working-ants -in a situation of forced spare destined to be put-out-they discover the mistake they made in their lives, in the young years, and the fallacy of their Spartan philosophy of existence, model that they copied from their ancestors.

Thus, one day, the retired working-ant, in an impulse of sincerity with itself, says: “Why did I spare and save so much in life? I have not managed to be a millionaire, nor do I have to. But it is that the goods and the patrimony that I have accumulated in this life allow me to live -without never doing a stroke of work- a second life...”.

The problem is that, at this point, the life expectancy of the retired working-ant is rather limited, and there is no second life. What a paradox: saving so much for the future and, ultimately, discovering that there is no future, or this will be very short! The moral message falls by its own weight: treasuring goods-resources without fully living does not make sense. There is no purpose in saving something that is not to be used.

For what has been said, I believe that the working-ant behaviour is the antithesis of FIRE behaviour, which is what I propose. It is preferably to be independent, although resources are limited, and enjoying life from middle age (40 years) than waiting until turning 65 to end up vegetating, without doing what was intended, while money only benefits the banks and future heirs.

FIRE-men are not born but they make themselves at early age

I shared the thought with one of my sons and, as a ‘millennial’, he told me:

-You could take advantage to learn about financial markets and stock market, and take profit of your savings.

-“Error. That is totally anti-FIRE”, I replied.

-“I doubt taking advantage of the money is anti-FIRE”, he replied.

-“At my age –I said- it is. From the age of fifty you have to flee from stress the way you do from sugar or fats. Money without life is the same as nothing”.

-“With no pressure, no stress, like a ‘hibby’ that’s not demanding”, he proposed.

I did not understand the expression ‘hibby’. I thought it might be part of some urban slang; for that reason, I answered him: “We’ll see”.

When I finished writing this text (in my ‘outdoor office’ of the Mirador de Horta, while seeing some people passing by with bunches of wild asparagus in mid-February), I concluded that my son was referring to ‘hobby’, but the rush of the whatsapp caused the error.

I disagree with the idea my son proposed. A retired FIRE-man that prides himself does not even speculate in the stock market as a hobby. That is reserved for young people, the pre-FIRE, because the FIRE-men, by definition, run away from stress seeking a peaceful life. As a limited resource, life must be enjoyed, and activities must adapt to our biological cycle, prioritizing leisure over “business” as soon as possible. What benefit do ‘rich’ people get in the cemetery?