How much money do I have? 35!
You grind at work. You get a bonus. Stock options vest. The number in your account gets bigger.
And nothing happens. No life change. Just a bigger number.
I've been automatically saving all bonuses and most of my income for about 5 years now. Don't even really look at it anymore.
Why? Because at some point it clicked: money isn't things. Money is freedom. Freedom to do what you want, when you want.
The metric I use to measure that freedom: how many months can I do absolutely nothing without my quality of life dropping? In 2022 that number was 19. Now it's 35. Almost 3 years.
Tomorrow I could write "I quit" — and nothing collapses. 3 years in Bali, then come back. (I'd have to give up the designer stores in Ushanova, but Indonesia is warm.)
That's the number I optimize for. And I'm not alone: there's an entire FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early) built around this logic. Artem quit his $250K/year job at 34 and moved to Portugal with his wife and 4 kids. Lives on $28K/year. Happy. (The full story is a must-read.)
But I don't get 2 things about classic FIRE:
First, a lot of FIRE people grind at FAANG, live in 200 square feet, eat instant noodles, retire at 30, and genuinely don't know what to do with themselves. They know how to work. They never learned how to actually enjoy anything. If money can buy something that will genuinely make your life better, buy it. Don't think about the price. It's worth it.
Second, the endpoint of FIRE is usually retirement. I'm not thinking in retirement terms. I'm staying in the industry, building products, eventually less commercial ones, things that actually move the world forward. I've always wanted to build something in social impact. Lots of opportunity there with AI that nobody's touching yet.
TL;DR
Bonus hits the account. Feel nothing. Because I stopped using the bank balance as my metric years ago. My metric is months of freedom. Currently 35. The FIRE canon says you need ~380 (10x). Work in progress.
Stay tuned
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