Even if we love our jobs, we still need FIRE

I've heard it said that if you love your job then you never need to worry about retirement or financial independence. Or that the FIRE movement is a symptom of people hating their jobs more than anything else. I've been noodling on this for the last 12 months and still arrive at the same answer: financial independence gives the future versions of myself a platform from which to take flight.

I touch on the topic of our future selves in an earlier blog post about The Aspiring Adult origin story. TLDR, humans are really bad at making good health and financial choices for future versions of ourselves because we have an impossible time imagining that this version here today is not the final version.

This means that it is very easy to preach about loving your job if you in fact love your job today. Or even if you plan to make a change in the very near future that allows you to love your job then. But we cannot imagine that there are versions of ourselves out there, 5, 10, 15, and 20 years from now that will have different interests or tastes. That doesn't mean that we are destined to hate a job that we love today, though that does happen for some people that turn their hobbies into careers. Instead what this means is that we simply grow apart from certain careers or interests and develop passions for new things we cannot even imagine today. 

​FIRE gives us choice.

Over the past year I have done a lot of self discovery and work on myself. And I realized that I love solving problems. But I hate trying to make money solving problems. I want to live in a world where I can just spend nerdy amounts of time researching and thinking about difficult problems and ways that they can be solved. And FIRE will allow me the financial freedom to do that. And maybe there is some future version of Jessalyn that wants to drive a bus of kids to school every day. And maybe there is some future version of Jessalyn that wants to build rocket ships.

So even though I can or do love my job today, there is a whole big world out there of fun things I could also be doing with my time and FIRE gives me the choice and time to do those things. Or not. Choice is the gift that FIRE will give me and future versions of me.

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