I have watched seven episodes of the series Fleishman is in trouble. With Atlanta, is one of the best I watched in the last year. While Atlanta was fun but I couldn’t relate to any of the characters (a bit of the racism parts since 3/4 of my family is mixed-race), Fleishman hits closer to where I am: a parent of 2 living in the closest proxy to NYC Europe can offer, London.
I do not feel the same social pressure from wealth as the protagonist simply because we decided to live in East London; but one of my best friends lives in Notting Hill and every time I go to visit, I get catapulted into a parallel reality of Soho House memberships, name dropping and people returning from a fancy holiday every month. At the right dosage, it is a fun recreational drug.
I never spent a full day alone with both of my kids (my wife neither, before you start making a judgement) but even before Fleishman, I wondered how long I would survive (days, not hours) before breaking, i.e. killing a colleague or a guy who parked his car on a sidewalk. I started to watch the series as a way to share the problems of parenting but I stayed for Libby’s monologues.
“What had happened to me was that at the beginning of the summer, before Toby called me, I was heading into my second year of being a stay-at-home mom and my thirteenth year of marriage and my fifth year in a suburb and my forty-first year of life. But none of that changed who I essentially was, which was a magazine writer with no assignment.“
Libby is one of the protagonist’s best friends (albeit at this point you start to ask who’s the story’s real protagonist), she is married and lives in the suburbs of NYC with two kids. Libby stopped working some years before and she is now a real housewife of New Jersey.
“I just didn’t like being this way with someone who still remembered me from back at the beginning, back when I was all potential. The world was going to take me to a million different places, and not one of them was here.“
Back when I was all potential. This passage resonated so much with me because for a long period, at the beginning of my career, that’s how I felt: all potential. And then the world took me indeed to a million different places.
In between episodes, I read this post from Jack Reines about finite and infinite games. I am not sure if it was pure serendipity or just confirmation bias: I had this concept stuck in my head and everything was reminding me about it.
“I didn’t realize that the real power I had was that I had no obligations. I could do whatever the hell I wanted. How was I supposed to know that one day, in seeking the safety of a grown-up life, I would lose that power? I thought about that thing Seth said about how people have affairs, not because they’re betraying their spouses, but because they’re trying to remember who they were in the first place. I thought about that a lot lately.“
“Some dream of safety that I hadn’t understood would never reconcile with who I was, which was a free and independent person. I’d taken all my freedom and independence and pushed them across the poker table and said, “Here, take my jackpot. Take it all. I don’t need it anymore. I won’t miss it ever.” ( Exhales ) God, how hot I used to be for life.”
I got married shortly before moving to London. And shortly after moving to London. I got married twice… to the same person: a small civil ceremony in Geneva and a big party in Florence a year later. If a marriage represents a big change for any couple, we added to it, at the same time, a change of country, a change of jobs and, for my wife, even a change in career. This ‘changing’ period lasted quite a while for us. That’s why is difficult for me to say if I had a “before and after” my wedding.
For sure, I can say there has been a before and after having kids. I never longed for my independence of being single; today, I would happily trade 10 occasions where I can be alone with 1 where I can be alone with my wife. That’s the main difference compared to Libby’s thoughts. I sometimes dream about our independence as a couple.
Before coming to London I was playing an infinite game in every aspect of my life. I cared about a career but I never really fought for it. I wasn’t a particularly big fish but I was definitely in a small pond. It was all potential, remember? “I can jump into a larger pond anytime I want, I just do not want to do it now and I do not have any pressure to”, that’s what I was telling myself. I was growing at my own pace, choosing the things I wanted to learn. Wasting a non-negligible amount of time in the process. I did not mastered the zen of the infinite game but at least a was living an almost stress-free life.
I realized there might be a crucial aspect missing in the FIRE framework. Some lads might land one of those 80 hours/week well-paid jobs and have plenty of room for savings from the start (we can safely agree that those high salary/high benefits/have a couple of meetings and be done for the day jobs, celebrated in the now infamous “a day in the life of” TikToks were just an anomaly of the past). Most young professionals will have salaries that hardly match their fixed costs but would have a different, plentiful, resource: time.
They can use their time to grow in their career, like studying for the CFA, but what I have in mind is a bit different.
Unless they are total sociopaths, our young professionals will “waste”, according to the frugal doctrine, their salaries meeting and interacting with other people. Relationships will be made, ideas will flow, experiences will be added to CVs (the life one). Saving is a great habit but is performed in a lonely manner, it adds optionality in the future while reducing optionality today. There is a trade-off component to it.
The exploring activity you do when you are young can compound, even in monetary terms, bigger than an index tracker. Once I met this weird guy who jumped out of the trunk of a car while I was queuing to enter a club, and now is one of my best friends. Someone I can rely on for a night out but also for career advice and investment ideas.
I am not saying they should spend all the extra time they have at the pub, but use that time to nurture and invest in some of these newly created relationships, the valuable ones. It is good to study for the CFA but it is great to have someone who already passed it to reply to your questions: these things can be complementary. Offer help in exchange to learn something in that side hustle they are thinking to start. They have the luxury to use that time to invest in a long-term project, like learning a language. As I said, I feel I wasted a lot of time in my early working years; later on, I participated in a Start-up Weekend in Geneva and it was an awesome experience I wish I had before. Before trying to optimise the savings, they should optimise how they use their time and their connections.
“How poorly I wear this life. How the adjustment to it is taking so long, that I’ve started to feel like it isn’t coming soon, it isn’t coming ever. It was never coming. This is what I was saying about questions that can’t be answered. Is life fair? How did I get here?“
This is not exactly how I feel after becoming a father of two but it is close enough, probably a tad less dramatic (and I could not have written it better anyway). I knew my life was going to change but I did not realize how much free time I had before my first heir was born. And then, just when I thought we (as ma and wife) reached a resemblance of a balance, the second one arrived. Turns out I still had a few minutes left for myself when we were 3…
Outside my gym training, my life became a finite game. Grind until son #1 will sleep at least six hours straight. Grind until son #1 stops eating powdered milk that is more expensive than cocaine. Grind until son #1 is out of nursery. Oh wait, let’s roll it back for son #2…meaning, let’s push the goalpost another 4 years in the future.
If the prize for winning finite play is life, then the players are not properly alive. They are competing for life. Life, then, is not play, but the outcome of play. Finite players play to live; they do not live their playing. Life is therefore deserved, bestowed, possessed, won. It is not lived.
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
The consolation prize is that my whole life became a Groundhog Day: prepare breakfast for the kids, dress up the kids, set and then empty the dishwasher, set and empty the washing machine, bath the kids, help kids eat dinner, put kids to bed, open Amazon to buy nappies, open Ocado to buy food. It is a prize because time passes waaaaay faster; it is a prize when your only goal is to complete your finite game.
It is definitely not a prize when you stop for a second and remind yourself that life is already short; living it with your thumb firmly on the FWD button is not that smart. Last week I went to visit a friend and, not surprisingly for mates living in London, we ended up talking about mortgages: when he told me he was about to re-finance I almost spit my beer ’cause…I was there when he got the keys to that apartment, how could have been a YEAR AGO already?!? 5 minutes later a friend of his came and showed me her belly, saying she was 7 months pregnant. The last time I saw her, she didn’t even have a boyfriend. I felt Marty McFly’s dizziness: what did I do while these guys had a life? Oh yes, I learned self catheterization.
[My daughter was born in 2019. Covid, the lockdowns and travel bans arrived as a sort of validation of my new I-do-not-have-a-social-life lifestyle. I eased into them seamlessly but returning to a more balanced social life was is harder than heroin detox. Maybe because I unconsciously fear that a taste of past freedom will make me addicted in the other sense, a bad father and a bad husband]
the FIRE escape door
They say people turn to religion in times of existential crisis. I discovered the FIRE movement during my wife’s first pregnancy. It was by accident, I think I was starting to write about p2p lending and many other bloggers in the space were also active in the FIRE community. Passive income, innit? 😉 Oh, good times…
The frugality bit sounded like BS to me. I studied engineering before it was cool, I played MagicTheGathering before it was cool: I spent a fair amount of time around nerds. I accept frugality the same way I accept a golf/running/cycling obsession: if that’s your thing, fine for you. But do not try to sell it as if it makes sense for everyone because it does not. Frugality is for lads that don’t know how to have fun. Yes, really.
Not everything that is expensive has value but if something is valuable, most of the time is expensive. Even new, expensive cars have value: they are safer than old models. Definitely more than cheap ones. We can obviously debate where is the optimal point (2 years old instead of 5 years old? Tier 2 brand vs tier 3?), but the solution is clearly not that 15 years old FIAT. And based on where you live, might not even be a bike.
Maybe for this reason, maybe because I discovered FIRE when I was already 40, maybe because I never hated my job, but the Retire Early part has never been a major selling point for me.
But as Renee Zellweger, they had me at Financial Independence.
I honestly do not know how people were managing parenthood before Covid and working from home. How they could even just do the nursery/school drops and pick-ups and spend 9 hours at the office? And then, on top of that, you have the house ‘maintenance’ (washing and cleaning and cooking) and, well, the gym maybe? Ah yes, one of the two parents had to give up her life only to find herself jobless at 50, or ending up in a mental breakdown like Claire Danes (btw, why the only non-mad character she ever played was Juliet with Leo DiCaprio?).
Frugality is BS but as soon as my daughter entered our world I did not have a social life anymore. No more travelling, no more night outs, theatre, cinema, restaurants. Who would move from the house now that even two hours at the park means you have a backpack the size of someone preparing to climb Everest? How relaxing is a date at the restaurant if you have to stay alert like an MMA fighter to make sure that everything on the table stays intact? Guess what, I did not have in my bucket list to change a nappy in the tiniest worst toilet of Scotland.
Financial Independence was a solution for my future and the carrot dangling in front of me to endure my present. When life gives you lemons…
It was a matter of framing. Simply, I never realised in the past how a gigantic waste of time 70% of the meetings I was forced to attend were. My job did not change but my priorities did. I was not starting from 0, savings-wise; having a solid plan B, that could become Plan A, for my early 50s was not a terrible idea. Without a dramatic loss of utility (I did not want to go out anyway and for a period, due to all the lockdowns, I could not) I dialled my saving rate above 30%.
Then, I became a prisoner of my target.
My FI plan was an excuse to not live in the present. I started to dream about my future self living in a hot place close to a beach. To avoid the real reason I do not already live in a hot place close to a beach: my wife does not want to (unless that place is in Africa, a scenario that creates a completely different set of issues). For a moment, my life became a plank exercise: just set your attention on something else, and this will soon be over. Do I have to tell you that this is a very, VERY stupid way to approach life?
It did not take me long to move from “check GOAT every day for a deal” to “$400 for a pair of Yeezy is dumb” to “my shoes have two holes but I can still wear them”. They should put a footnote to the stop worrying about what other people think of you* line, which is *unless that person is your wife (or someone close to you).
I decided to not waste money anymore and a second later I started to seriously complicate my life because I did not want to spend money. I am not 100% into the Jared Dillian fan club but here he explains well how only a tiny minority of people have a healthy relationship with money.
I need discipline but I also need the discipline to identify the right moment to say “fuck the discipline”. I would probably never manage to sell you an online course on this, but this is THE SECRET INGREDIENT 😉
And that’s it. To close the circle and go back to Fleishman, I loved how the show portrayed the three friends, Toby Libby and Seth, envying each other lives. But I guess you already know, the grass is always greener…
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