fortunefavored wrote: ↑Sat Jul 31, 2021 12:41 pm
Normchad wrote: ↑Sat Jul 31, 2021 10:00 am
If I tried to forecast at 35 what my life would be like at 50, I would have been very wrong. And that’s only looking 15 tpyears into the future. It gets more out of whack the further out in time you go…..
I’m sure some of them will be successful. But I fear most of them won’t.
Interestingly, as I approach 50, my life is pretty much exactly what I expected at 35. But I am rigorous, plan oriented person who always executes on the plan. It is a defining character trait.
I think one common Bogleheads (not you specifically, but generally) misunderstanding is how any people hate working and what ends they are willing to go to to avoid it. Most Bogleheads seem to enjoy and/or tolerate working as a fair exchange of money for time.
If you move that principle up, many FIRE people will figure out a way to be "successful" despite some bumps along the way. I have loathed working from the very first day I punched a time clock for minimum wage right up to making $500K+/year. Some people are just not cut out for that world. But it is the only one on offer when/until you can make the numbers work to your satisfaction.
You make a lot of great points in your post. For me, my life at 50 is orders of magnitude more successful than I ever imagined it would be.
I don’t hate work the way that you do. But I don’t love it either. I have no problem with the idea of “doing nothing”. But I don’t hate it. Im certain now that I am FI, but I continue to work. And I honestly don’t understand why I am doing it….
And you are right, a lot of people like to work, and others just loathe it. I think this board skews towards very successful people, and I think it’s hard to be that successful if you hate working. So there is probably a strong bias here to people that like/love working, or can’t imagine not working. (See the thread where a fellow doesn’t want to go back to the office, and there is a bonus coming in 4 months that is insignificant to his projected 1.5% WR. Most posters tell him to go get that bonus….).
My uncle worked his entire career for the phone company. I remember him being the most unpleasant, miserable, SOB on the earth. Always grumpy and pessimistic. He eventually retired, and I noticed a few years later how much he changed, in a really positive way. That was a formative experience for me, to realize that all those years, I wasn’t seeing the real person. I was seeing the effects of decades of toiling at a job at he hated.
In this blog, in some ways he failed. He failed to understand what life would throw at him, and he failed to accurately predict his expenses. To me, those are failures. On the other hand though, he spent many years away from work, at a young age, which is what he wanted. It might be that overall, his life still turned out better for it, even though it didn’t go as planned.