Ack!! Hate hearing stories like that!

Oh wow haha… total rawness up in here today – love it. As Ferris Bueller once quipped, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.”

Hi Shaun! That’s the irony. It does come back full circle. You can’t reap what you haven’t sown!

Exactly. Thank you for reading ZJ!

Appreciate the generous compliments! No one said it had to be one or the other (FIRE or legacy). Thanks for reading!

Thanks Javi! Agreed!

This is very well-written. It hits home. It’s why, at 22, I’m making international travel one of my biggest priorities. My first job, I was a deli clerk at a grocery store. I got to see people every single day — average, every-day, middle-class people, people who I thought had it all figured out — come into the store depressed and tired after a long day at work. Never smiling, never happy. Every day bleeding into the next, everyone was always looking for something DIFFERENT to happen. Something to break them out of the monotony.

It made me wonder: What the fuck is the point?

You work hard in high school so you can get into a good college.
You work hard in college so you can get a six-figure job.
You work hard at that job, 60-80hrs/week, so you can, if you’re lucky, become a VP.
You buy a big house and a nice car.
Then you find out your wife’s fucking the next door neighbor.
Then your wife finds out you’re fucking the secretary.
And then you realize, before you ship them off to college, you don’t even really know your kids.
Then you retire and you don’t even have the energy to spend all the money you saved.
So you spend a couple idyllic months on the beach before you start losing your mind.

That’s it. The American Dream.

I, for one, don’t want to travel the world at 60. I want to do it now. I have the rest of my life to work.

On another note: “Barring a huge medical and/or technological breakthrough that greatly extends our lives,” I think this is on its way. My great-grandmother lived to be 101 (her advice: “Always Keep Busy”), and she never went beyond the first stage of dementia. I think, if you eat healthy and exercise, you should live a very long life.

Couldn’t agree more – if we’re financially blessed then there’s almost an obligation to pay it forward and help others.

It’s funny how it often comes full circle then too, and we wind up with more resources to help bless again!

Really well written and a great note to everyone to read
Thanks for sharing, and thanks J. Money for publishing out to your audience!