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Comment by cko | Hacker News Reader

About losing all motivation after financial independence, I've experienced it for myself. I'm not rich but I know how to live simply. What do I do with my time? I spend so many hours consuming random content on the internet nowadays. I feel kind of bad for the girlfriend, who has to listen to me regurgitate the content back to her.

People looking in from the outside scratch their heads. Don't I have hobbies? Passions? I'd do X Y and Z, they often say.

Reminds me of this blog post: https://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/

It's too bad Mike (the lackingambition.com guy) stopped updating his blog.

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Thank you for sharing Philip Greenspun's blogpost. I read his blog 10 years ago and now I rediscovered it through your comment. I think his post is even better than the one I originally submitted.

His old posts are so entertaining. His daily posts have taken on this 'political rants' flavor which isn't very interesting to me.

Not sure it's losing motivation rather than being confronted to one's wishful thinking.

If I have so many plans for when I retire early, how come I do none of it now? If that's really what I want, how come I don't spend at least a few minutes on it every week?

I don't have to find a 50h/week activity to replace my work. I don't need any activity that replace my work routine. I can simply take whatever hobby I had while working, and spend at least as much time as when I was working full-time.

Exactly something everyone should try. It can give you a lot of insight if those future plans are really all that interesting and rewarding if you start doing it now while you are alive and young.

Has financial independence been worth it?

I've never been a big spender and I likely never will be, so it's not like I sacrificed much in getting to this point. An 80% saving rate for 9 working years while being lucky to invest starting 2011 goes pretty far.

If financial independence is its own cage, I'm not willing to leave.

I can't say I regret it - perhaps I should have had something else cooking during my working years that doesn't include blogging about FI.

I suspect most people are like me (and not Elon) - without a carrot or stick, a kind of meaninglessness sets in.

Are you concerned about events that might cause your wealth to disappear or be drastically reduced? For example my old CPA was forced to come out of retirement and restart his CPA work because his wealth was drastically reduced in the 2008 crisis. It seems you'd have to have extreme trust in your risk mitigation in order to begin to "do nothing," for possibly decades while the skills that made that money atrophy.

I am definitely risk-averse. For that reason my savings rate is still pretty high despite a much lower income nowadays. So my only risk mitigation is "spend as little as possible without feeling deprived" - but sure, everything can crash all at once.

Because of this risk, I keep thinking about keeping myself economically relevant. I've been in this Resistance (as Pressfield would call it) limbo for almost two years but here's hoping I do something about it.

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