Booooring

A few days ago I read a post from a fellow Swiss about financial independence, and I recognized myself in a lot of it.

More importantly, it made me realise the FIRE movement has a branding problem.

FIRE — Financial Independence, Retire Early — is one of the more successful pieces of personal-finance branding of the last two decades. It took a genuinely powerful idea, financial independence, and bolted it to a much narrower and more provocative one, retiring early, and the combination is what made it spread. “Save (aggressively) so you have options” is good advice that nobody tweets about. “Quit your job at 35” is what makes your YT channel reach 8k subs.

This is a familiar dynamic to anyone who has watched how products get sold rather than how they actually get used: you bundle the boring, valuable thing with the exciting, narrow thing, because the exciting thing is what gets attention, and the attention is what gets people to adopt the boring thing that actually matters. The bundle is a distribution mechanism. It was never meant to be a description of the outcome.

The trouble with bundles, though, is that eventually people are no longer able to disentangle them. It’s been written about extensively at this point: the “retire early” mostly doesn’t mean what it sounds like… and yet the name persists, because names are sticky even after the thing they describe should have moved on. That stickiness is now the primary source of confusion for everyone encountering the idea for the first time, and, I’d argue, a source of anxiety for people already inside it.

They’re not failing. They just bought a bundle and are only now unbundling it.

Unbundling the Retirement Half

Financial independence is a balance sheet condition. It means your assets can fund your life without new labor income. Retirement is a decision about how you spend your time. These are not the same axis, and treating them as one variable, as if reaching independence automatically triggers retirement the way a chemical reaction triggers at a threshold temperature, is a big part of the confusion.

Once you separate them, what’s left of “retire early” is just one point on a much larger surface of options that financial independence unlocks. It happens to be the louder point but it is not the destination. It’s a checkbox that most people, once they arrive at it, discover they don’t actually want to tick.

I know a good number of people in this pursuit, myself included, and almost none of them are racing toward zero hours of work. What they’re doing instead is something much less dramatic and much more interesting: they’re renegotiating the terms.

The mistake is thinking of financial independence as a binary (working or not working) when it’s better modeled as a spectrum, with dozens of points along it, each with a different mix of income, purpose, and time.

One option in front of me is dropping to an 80% working schedule. In corporate terms this is very close to a career-ending move: the kind of thing that quietly removes you from consideration for whatever comes next. And I’ve mostly made peace with that, partly because I’m not convinced there’s much left to protect. I could try to keep the door open. The more I think about it, the less point I see in the effort.

That’s not because the corporate track has nothing left to offer financially. It’s because, measured against the alternatives, it has less to offer in total. I’m working on a couple of projects that matter more to me than restructuring again another insurance balance sheet, or building a 120-slide deck full of what I’d call compensating narratives for investors who don’t understand that a dividend is simply money moving left pocket – right pocket. Those projects might make less money. They also might not. Either way, they’re a better use of the one non-renewable resource in the equation, which is time, not capital.

My wife is already at 80%, and by the letter of FIRE terminology this might be considered “Coast FIRE”. But even that label doesn’t quite hold, because time isn’t just being spent; some of what we are doing might generate income, and savings, too. The framework wants a clean taxonomy. Real life keeps refusing to sort itself into the boxes.

This is the actual promise of financial independence, and it has nothing to do with retiring: it’s the ability to move along that spectrum in either direction, deliberately, as your circumstances change, instead of being locked at one extreme by necessity.

The Portfolio Fallacy, Applied to Life

There’s a version of this same category error inside investing itself, the same mistake wearing a different costume.

That bucketing approach to portfolio construction: stocks for growth, bonds for safety, cash for liquidity, each doing one job, each evaluated on its own. It’s tidy, it’s teachable, and it’s wrong in the way that tidy things are usually wrong: it optimizes each piece in isolation and ignores the fact that the pieces exist to serve a single, holistic goal. The right question was never “how do bonds perform,” it’s “what does this portfolio, taken as a whole, need to do for my life,” and that question doesn’t respect asset-class boundaries.

Time and money have the identical relationship, and almost nobody manages them as one system.

Take the cleaning lady example. You can clean your own house. That’s the “safe” bucket move: it costs nothing extra, and every euro you don’t spend is a euro closer to independence. Or you can pay someone else to do it, which costs money but frees up hours you can spend at the gym, at the pool with your kids, or, less productively, watching Netflix. Neither answer is correct on its own terms. The stocks-for-growth version of this logic says “always do it yourself, maximize the number.” The holistic version says: what is that time actually worth to you this month, given everything else competing for it, and given that your health degrades if you have zero recovery time and also degrades if you spend all your freed-up hours doing nothing at all.

I mention Netflix specifically because it’s a useful edge case. Some amount of doing nothing lowers stress and is a legitimate use of freed-up time. Too much of it is just time evaporating. There is no formula that tells you the right ratio, and anyone selling you one is selling you the bucket approach again, just with better production values.

Once you accept that every domain of your life is drawing on the same underlying resource pool, the neat categories dissolve. 100% of effort toward one goal, ie a project that isn’t optimized for income, can simply be the mechanism by which you make progress on a completely different goal, like being present for your kids. The goals blend into each other. That’s not a failure of discipline; it’s what an honest accounting of a life actually looks like, as opposed to the spreadsheet version of it.

What You’re Actually Buying

If financial independence isn’t retirement, and it isn’t even really “more free time” in any simple sense, what is it? I think the answer is optionality, and I think optionality is a much better sell than early retirement ever was, even though it markets worse (although, if you ask Annie Duke, you can sell many books about it ;)).

The most underappreciated risk most people carry isn’t that they’ll be forced to work until seventy. It’s the opposite tail: that they’ll be pushed out of the workforce at fifty, involuntarily, in a manner nobody planned for, and will discover that the plan was always “keep working”, with no fallback defined for the scenario where that stops being available. Financial independence is the fallback. It’s not a lifestyle choice at that point; it’s closer to insurance, purchased over a couple of decades, against a risk that’s a… faux pas? from a societal point of view (at least in Europe), which most people do not price in at all.

It’s also the mechanism that makes real pivots possible: moving to a different country, taking a sabbatical, stepping back from a life you’ve outgrown without having to first solve for how you’ll survive the transition. None of that requires retiring. It requires having already built the capacity to say no to a specific arrangement, which is a different and more durable thing than having stopped working.

Looked at this way, the whole project stops being boring, which is the opposite of its reputation. The boring version of FIRE is the one where you reduce your life to accumulation and decumulation phases, as if living were a treasury project with a funding milestone and a drawdown schedule. The interesting version is the one where you stay aware, continuously, of the actual menu of options your independence has purchased, instead of collapsing it down to the one option — stop working entirely — that happens to have a catchy acronym attached.

None of this is an argument against urgency. The Poor Swiss’s original point, don’t delay your life, is correct. And I’d go a step further: for some things, “delay” isn’t even the right word, because there’s no later version of the opportunity to delay into. My son will not be five years old again. That window doesn’t reopen at a discount once the portfolio hits a bigger number. I think the point made by The Poor Swiss is closer to mine, just a different framing.

Urgency and unbundling point in the same direction, not opposite ones. If retiring early were really the goal, optimizing for the number would be the whole strategy, and everything else — the 80% schedule, the meaningful-but-uncertain projects, showing up at practice without a headset on — would just be a distraction from getting there faster. It’s only once you unbundle financial independence from retirement that those things become the actual point, and the number becomes what it always should have been: a tool that buys you the standing to make those choices, rather than a finish line that tells you when you’re allowed to start making them.

I’ll get plenty of this wrong. There’s no single correct allocation across money, time, and purpose, and whatever mix looks right this year won’t necessarily still look right in ten. That’s not a flaw in the plan. It’s just what it means to hold something that’s a spectrum, and not a switch.

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