Essays
All essays
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Five Retirement Calculators (And Why They Lie to You)
Every retirement calculator answers a question. Often it’s not the question you asked. A review of five popular tools and what each one is actually solving for.
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The Tyranny of the Bucket List
Most bucket lists are someone else’s idea of what your life should have meant. A defense of small, particular, possibly boring last things — and an attack on Machu Picchu as a life milestone.
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The Things You Can Stop Wanting
A good life is not only built by getting what you want. It is also built by deleting wants that were installed by people who profit from your restlessness.
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The Optionality Trap
Optionality is useful until it becomes a religion. Some people keep working not because they need more money, but because every extra dollar preserves a life they will never choose.
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Your FIRE Number Should Shrink Every Birthday
Most FIRE plans treat your number as static. It should not be. Every birthday reduces the amount of life your portfolio has to fund.
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The Job Is Not the Cage. The Identity Is.
Most people who say they are trapped by work are trapped by something stranger: the identity work gave them. The badge comes off before the self-image does.
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Sequence of Returns Risk, Explained in 600 Words
The risk that ends FIRE plans is not the average return — it is the order the returns arrive in. A short, sharp explainer.
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The Spreadsheet of Your Remaining Tuesdays
There are roughly 780 Tuesdays between me and the day my knees give out. I counted last night. The number changed how I felt about this morning.
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The Real FIRE Number: How Much You Actually Need to Retire Early
The familiar “annual spending × 25” formula was designed for a 65-year-old in 1994 — not for you. Here is how to calculate the FIRE number that is actually yours.
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Bernard Williams and the Tedium of Immortality
There’s an essay by Bernard Williams, from 1973, that argues you shouldn’t want to live forever. Not because you can’t. Because you’d be bored to madness. The strongest serious argument for the position SuicideFIRE quietly assumes.