How much money do I have? 35!

You bust your ass at work, you get a bonus, you get options, and then one day it all lands in the account with a little ding. And then nothing happens: your life doesn't change one bit, the number just got bigger. It's reached the point where for about 5 years now I've simply been saving every bonus and a serious share of my income on autopilot, and I barely even look at what's in there.

Why?

Because at some point I understood something very basic: money is freedom, the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want.

But how do you measure freedom? Here's a good metric: the number of months I could do absolutely nothing without my quality of life dropping. In 2022 that number was 19, and now it's 35, which is almost three years. Tomorrow I could write "I quit" and nothing would collapse, I'd just spend three years somewhere warm and then come back. (I'd have to give up the designer wardrobe, but you don't need one on a beach anyway!)

I'm not the only one maximizing this metric, there's a whole movement built around it called FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). One guy I read about quit a $250k/year job at 34, moved abroad with his wife and 4 kids, now lives on $28k a year and says he's happy. Nice!

But there are two things about FIRE I don't get:

1/ A lot of FIRE guys bust their asses at big tech, live in 12 square meters, eat instant noodles, hit "retirement" at 30, and then have no fucking clue what to do next, because they don't know how to enjoy life, they only know how to work.

Hence an important personal rule: if money can buy something that will actually make you happier, buy it, and don't even think about what it costs, because it's worth it.

2/ FIRE often ends in a pension (the guy above writes about this too), and I definitely don't think in pension terms. I'll stay in the industry and keep building products, just probably less commercial ones, more the kind that make the world a little better. I've always dreamed about a nonprofit, or about doing social impact inside a corporation, something like the charity arm of a big tech company. Doesn't seem to be much AI in there P.S.

Right now it's 35, while FIRE canon says you need ~380 (that's 10x+), so this one is very much a WIP.