What is FIRE?
Before we jump into the obvious question, it might help to understand where my definition and desire for FIRE comes from. If all you wanted was a definition, that would be easy enough to find on some personal finance blog, but Mantra is about the human stories that make us who we are, drive us and allow us to live our most authentic selves, so today I’ll share mine with you.
When it comes to our futures and how we envision our lives, we all see something different and it usually involves the balancing of a four key elements: Family, Career, Fortune, Lifestyle.
The idea is that in striking that right balance, we ultimately achieve happiness or satisfaction in our lives according to our own preferences. If we’re lucky, we find someone who believes in that same vision and builds that future with us.
Each of these four levers feed into each other, and, how we pay attention and nurture each of them changes how they develop and grow over time. Ultimately, as is the case with all things in life, the sum of the decisions we make every step along the way will become our future at one point or another.
The adage of we reap what we sow rings true.
Consciously or subconsciously, we all pursue our own ideal of these values and as someone who has always felt “other” and a strong need to belong—we’ll talk about Third Culture Kids and their struggles of never belonging in another post—I always wondered if anyone felt the same way about the world that I did. I believe that despite a strong sense of needing to belong, I’ve always had my own little black sheep’s view of the world.
What do I mean by this?
I’ve never subscribed to the idea that my role in life was to work until old age to ultimately die with regrets. I’ve always wanted more than that.
I’ve never felt like I could or should only do one thing in my life and that it would be my life’s calling. Even now, doing something I’m quite good at and enjoy, I know that it’s just a chapter that will eventually end; it’s a means to an end.
I’ve never felt tethered or attached to one place, believing that I needed to build a life one place in order to build something meaningful or beautiful. The world is my home and so the world is the scale of my vision. It’s a playground and I’ll build as many sandcastles, in as many places, as I want.
I’ve never believed in settling, in love or life, for something that didn’t align with my core beliefs and values out of fear of being alone or because “society” told me I should. I would much rather be alone and nurture my own peace and joy according to my own standards.
Maybe it’s that growing up as a Third Culture Kid, I never truly belonged to any one tribe and it happened to be built-in that I would have to see the world a bit differently. Growing up with three cultures and being an outsider on all three, you were always “other” and were forced to marry different cultures and thoughts in a way that no one ever really teaches you as a child. The more I speak to people about mindset and culture disassociation as an adult, the more surprised I am to learn how mentally and culturally isolated I really was.
Now, it’s not to say I wasn’t social or had an unhappy childhood, that couldn’t be further from the truth. However, there was an incredibly important need to develop a mindset based on conflicting cultures and values. That wasn’t something I was able to start reconciling until much later on in life and still, bringing these vastly different cultures and opposing values together, and internalizing all of them to become the most complete and authentic version of myself, is something I’m still working on today.
On a separate note, I grew up playing a lot of video games (RPGs, JRPGs and adventure games primarily), watching anime/reading manga and reading about Greek mythology (and other stories). This built up a foundation and thirst for knowledge that eventually led to devouring dozens of self-help books in high school going into university, studying Greek philosophers as a minor in university, pursuing my Master’s in business, and eventually living in a half-dozen places around the world, all before 30 years old.
For a long time, I had seen life as a game and I was Player One. All of my choices and actions would build experience in specific skill trees that “leveled” me up so that I could complete objectives and “quests,” ultimately unlocking new levels and better adventures. But, like in any game, player one always needs to remember:
What is the main storyline, or what is the primary quest of this life?
Now, remember that we can never connect the dots moving forward, only looking back. So, as I reflect on my own arguably “nerdy” upbringing where I would devour stories about Greek heroes defying the odds or watching the manga protagonists fighting for their dreams; or, learning about Aristotle’s Eudamonia and Golden Mean, Plato’s Virtuous Man and Allegory of the Cave, and Socrates’ Dialogues and understanding Happiness, what I’ve found is that all I really want is a life spent Free.
Free to roam, Free to think, Free to breathe.
Free to follow my heart and Free to fall in love with all the people of this world.
Free to live life fully and taste the abundant bounties and mysteries of the Earth.
Free to let my heart grow and love as big my mind knows that it can.
Just… Free. Free to live life as the Grand Adventure it was always meant to be. Free to help others see that it can exist for every single one of us, if we let it.
Our realities or our dreams don’t need to be the same to achieve the Grand Adventure we envision our lives to be. We need only balance our Family, Fortune, Career and Lifestyle to the extent that’s needed to achieve our vision.
So, onto the question: What is FIRE?
Now that you know what pursuing a full life means to me, what is FIRE exactly and how does it fit into this story?
The simple answer is that FIRE is an acronym that stands for: Financial Independence, Retire Early. It’s important to note that you don’t need FIRE to live a Grand Adventure, these are separate things.
In practice, FIRE is a lifestyle enabled by achieving a level of wealth where you are no longer reliant on a “stable” income to live your life sustainably. If we look at the levers we mentioned above, this one is heavily weighted on the “Fortune” category, but FIRE is more than just that.
My belief is that FIRE is a mindset that bleeds into every part of your life, and interestingly enough, even though many pursue it, I’ve found that actually most people don’t see it beyond the Fortune aspect.
To bring things back to our four key elements: FIRE is a Lifestyle, sustained by Fortune, enabled by your Career that allows you to pursue your Freedom and enrich yourself and your Family beyond just monetary gains, but rather life experiences.
At least, that’s my take on it, but really it can be anything you want it to be, this is your adventure at the end of the day. The point is that you’re able to achieve a point in life where you are Financially Independent. In fact, I’ve found most people to be more interested in the FI part of FIRE more than the RE (Retire Early), including myself.I think that most people who pursue FIRE are high productivity people, so retiring early could be considered an early death for some.
Personally, I see it as an opportunity to pursue your passions or projects without attaching yourself to any financial motivators. It’s the ultimate “quest” objective because it effectively allows you to break out of the game completely and unlock a secret level that most people never get to play. Effectively, it’s a New Game+ where now you can focus on completing the side quests (my fellow gamers will understand that one).
It’s important to note that it requires an incredible amount of discipline to achieve and there’s a very good chance that it alienates you from a lot people that don’t understand it—a feeling I’ve become accustomed to since I was young, which in retrospect has been quite useful, go figure. However, anything great is a bi-product of thinking contrary to the masses. The world was made by people who broke the mould.
The reason I explained my mindset before introducing FIRE is just to illustrate that this is a goal that is contrarian to traditional ways of thinking, and what is Mantra, if not a gateway to contrarian ways of thinking and living?
As I’ve mentioned before, Freedom, for me, is about breaking out of the norms and dogma that are pushed on us by society as children.
Most people operate under the assumption that “work” is something that just “happens” and some 30-40 years down the line, you retire and—if you happen to have saved along the way, which by the way, data shows, most people don’t.
If you’ve ever felt like maybe you don’t belong, or that maybe you’ve wanted something more for your life than just eat, sleep, work, die, it could be that FIRE is for you, maybe it’s not. All I know is that deep in my bones what I want for my life is a Grand Adventure, and this is the pre-requisite for my vision.
As I continue to document my journey to Financial Freedom, I hope you’ll join along as there will likely be many trials and tribulations. In the meantime, I’ll share as much as I can around budgeting, planning, saving, travelling and what I’m doing to turn this dream into a reality.
If you’re interested in sharing your own journey and what you’re doing to achieve FIRE (if you are), I’d love to learn from you too. Or else, feel free to ask any questions in the comments below and I’d be happy to share what I can.
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