Monday morning. 8:45am. Streams of excited parents and reluctant kids head towards the first day of school in almost six months. In a triumph of public health theatre, schools had been declared COVID free “safe” spaces, where masks were unnecessary and year group “bubbles” would contain any infection.
Safe spaces are like the notions of meritocracy and “independent” regulators: there is no such thing!
As we walked towards the school gate, my seven-year-old son was firing off questions that were impossible to answer:
“How do the bubbles work, when most kids have brothers and sisters in other year groups?”
“Why do we have to wear masks on the bus to school, but not allowed to wear masks at school?”
“How can we catch coronavirus at swimming lessons or the supermarket, but not catch it in class?”
“Why can children play with other year groups at before and after school care, but not at lunchtime?”
“Why can teachers from all the different bubbles play together in the staff room during break times?”
“When a class teacher gets sick, where will supply teachers come from? They aren’t in our bubble!”
I gave him my best Gallic shrug, and told him the rules were designed to protect the hardworking teachers from all the horrible noisy sticky children. He giggled, as we walked past a bawling five-year-old little girl surreptitiously wiping tears and snot on her mother’s shirt sleeve.
The first day of “big school” was off to a rocky start. She didn’t know it yet, but the school’s social distancing rules would prevent her new reception class teachers from holding her hand or hugging her to make it better.
If they followed them.
We abruptly halted when we saw the vast crowd of parents and kids milling together outside the school gate. The school buildings may have been made “COVID safe” inside, but the mostly maskless parents were ably demonstrating that the general public has poorer self-preservation instincts and survival skills that the average Lemming.
We opted to sit out the scrum from across the road, watching parents jostle and shout like a mosh pit full of teenagers on ecstasy. Given how many of them had noticeably gained weight during lockdown, it appears the government’s newfound fear of obesity was well-founded.
Eventually, the gates creaked open. The new caretaker appeared, his long-serving predecessor having been felled by COVID the week before lockdown commenced. A voice worthy of an army drill sergeant boomed from behind his mask: “Children step forward. Parents stand back!”
Those adults closest to the gates physically flinched.
Several young children burst into tears.
The older children tentatively shuffled forward.
A boy racer in a hotted up old blue Mazda screeched to a halt in front of the school gates, scattering parents and children alike. A small tribe of kids erupted out the passenger side of the double-parked sports car. The doof-doof beat of dance music with a heavy baseline thundered out the open car door, disrupting pace-makers and setting off car alarms up and down the street.
As the last of his children clambered onto the footpath, the driver gunned the engine and fishtailed back out into traffic. The song on his stereo changed to the Pharrell Williams song “Happy”.
“…
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
…“
From our vantage point across the street, we watched the parents start to drift away from the school gates after dropping off their progeny.
The single father of a boy with allergies had a spring in his step as he headed for the coffee shop. Ordered to “shelter at home” throughout lockdown, man and boy had spent virtually every waking moment confined together in a tiny one-bedroom flat with an air mattress on the floor and no outside space.
“…
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth
…“
The young mother, who endured an arranged marriage to an older cousin and now had two special needs kids, openly wept as she looked to the sky and gave praise to her deity of choice. She had aged a decade since I last saw her back in March. Grey. Drawn. Haggard.
“…
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you know what happiness is to you
…“
The old Ghanian guy was literally dancing down the street. His daughter was one of the happiest people on the planet. A ray of sunshine who genuinely brightened up the day of everyone she meets. She was also exhausting. Like the Energiser bunny, her boundless energy keeps going and going!
“…
Because I’m happy
Clap along if you feel like that’s what you wanna do
…“
Happy parents indeed! For many, this would be the first time in months they had time to themselves.
My younger son gave my hand an anxious squeeze and teared up. “I don’t want to go back! Why can’t we keep working from home together, forever?”
I gave him a big hug, and told him to focus on how great it would be to play with all his friends again. If the pandemic had taught us anything, it was that life is unpredictable and we shouldn’t take anything for granted because we don’t know how long it will last.
We crossed the road together. He joined the stream of children filing past the glowering caretaker.
“…
Bring me down
Can’t nothing bring me down
My level’s too high to bring me down
Can’t nothing bring me down, I said
…”
I skirted around the assembled gaggle of relieved parents. There were more than a few celebratory grins. High fives. Victory dances. They had survived homeschooling and the initial lockdown.
Finally, they could palm their kids off to the professionals and return themselves to work. Leisure. Or in a great many cases now that the furlough scheme was winding down, job seeking.
“…
Happy! Happy! Happy! Happy!
…”
Self-awareness evolves
The sentiment my son had expressed, of not wishing to return to his pre-COVID “normal” was a recurring thought for much of that week.
Much to my lady wife’s chagrin, I too have little desire to go back, to select a client site for my annual winter working hibernation. The idea of working hard to deliver yet another lucrative but uninspiring “enterprise” software solution to a disinterested audience at an ungrateful megacorp leaves me cold.
This reluctance to return to the old normal is a sentiment that I suspect many share, though few will openly admit to. Understandably concerned about appearing to be tone-deaf or ungrateful, when plenty of unemployed and underemployed folks would gladly trade places in a heartbeat.
Railing against corporate life is a staple within the FIRE community. Challenging the premise that selling life by the day in return for a pay packet, social interaction, and (for a fortunate few) intellectual stimulation represents a good trade.
Some FIRE blogs even maintain a timer. Counting down the days or dollars until they can cry “Freedom!” and avail themselves of the whole world of options that their newfound financial independence affords them.
But here is the thing. Anyone who has watched the FIRE movement for a reasonable length of time will have observed an intriguing pattern.
The vast majority of FIRE bloggers quit long before they achieve financial independence. Blogging can be a thankless game. Shouting into the void, while pursuing a lengthy but uneventful dream. Get the basics right, then set and forget, there isn’t a whole lot else to write about.
Inevitably, most get bored. “Life happens” events occur. Priorities change. Few stay the course.
Amongst those FIRE bloggers who do achieve independence, most quit blogging shortly afterwards. Their race is run. Their focus naturally moves on to whatever comes next. Of great interest to the individual, much less relatable to the audience who had vicariously joined them on their journey.
Of those precious few who do continue blogging after reaching financial independence, many eventually return to some form of work. Often within months. Others never end up pulling the trigger at all, just having the option proves to be enough to remove the pressure of the financial imperative.
Maybe not to their old profession.
Possibly not in a full-time capacity.
But most invest some of their time in forms of recurring organised activity. Doing something they value, in between those holiday activities that FIRE seekers devote so much time to fantasising about.
Babysitting grandkids.
Mentoring.
Non-executive directorships.
Starting, buying, or running a business.
Writing a book.
Volunteering.
That latent desire to escape the workforce isn’t about no longer working, it is about no longer having to work. Being free to decide how and where to invest their time.
They still wish to contribute. Add value. Feel a sense of accomplishment. Make a difference.
Ask the audience
Here is a quick thought experiment for you.
What hobbies, interests, or side hustles do you currently enjoy outside of your day job?
If you decided not to go back to your current job for whatever reason, but were not yet financially independent, which of those activities might you look to scale out into an income-generating pursuit?
For those of you who already earn income from activities outside your day job, perform a quick calculation to determine what the financial reward for your time investment currently is:
Gross income from activity / Total hours invested = Approximate hourly revenue
Once you’re financially independent or traditionally retired, what activities will occupy your days at home, in between those amazing globe-trotting adventures you have long dreamt about?
Use your imagination and have some fun with it.
It will be fascinating to see what readers come up with. Leave a comment below with a one-sentence summary of your activities, and the results of your calculations. Anonymous comments are fine if you’re shy.
To get you started, here were a few responses from colleagues when we recently had a similar discussion.
| Activity | Currency | Hourly Revenue | GBP equivalent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Children’s guitar instructor | HKD | $650.00 | £65.22 |
| Children’s swimming instructor | GBP | £5.00 | |
| Handmade timber furniture maker | BRL | $48.00 | £7.08 |
| Residential retreat host | GBP | £80.00 | |
| Residential landlord | GBP | £825.00 | |
| Successful non-fiction author | GBP | £1.50 | |
| Unsuccessful niche technical author | AUD | $4.66 | £2.64 |
| Surfing instructor | USD | $40.00 | £31.11 |
Back to square one
One week later, my younger son woke up with a sore throat.
In pre-COVID times, I would have dosed him with the magic elixir of Calpol and sent him to school.
According to the school’s “COVID safe” rules, any form of cold or flu symptom results in an automatic one week ban. Self-isolation for the whole family. Until negative COVID tests have been returned.
Except the government’s COVID test processing capacity is overloaded.
As was the case back at the start of the pandemic, testing is currently reserved for symptomatic patients only. In some parts of the country, those without access to a car can’t get tested at all.
Test processing is now being offshored to labs in Germany and Italy, after under-resourced and overwhelmed domestic labs faced a backlog of 185,000 outstanding tests.
This is just week two of school. Commuter life for the majority of the hotdesk jockeys has not yet resumed!
My elder son’s high school class have already figured out how to game the system. Students who hadn’t kept up with their homeschooling before the summer break were now phoning in suspected COVID cases to get out of exams and public speaking assessments. Class sizes are down by a third, with no home school offering for those out “sick“, quarantined, or self-isolating pending a COVID test result.
The school chooses not to ask too many questions. Under their “COVID safe” rules, two positive tests within a year group bubble would see the doors closed and a resumption of distance education.
They are already short-staffed, after several teachers took ill-advised late summer vacations abroad, only to be caught out by the government’s ever-changing quarantine guidelines upon their return.
If these experiences are any indication of the new normal, then the old normal is a long way away from viable resumption.
Any client work I consider taking one would need to be of the remote working and super flexible variety.
Perhaps it is time to seriously explore those alternative options? To create a portfolio of income-generating activities that keep me entertained, without being tied to a strict schedule that random school closures will inevitably disrupt?
References
- Adams, R. and Stewart, H. (2020), ‘UK schools to be closed indefinitely and exams cancelled’, The Guardian
- Lawrie, E. (2020), ‘Coronavirus: Will the furlough scheme be extended?’, BBC News
- Pogrund, G., Calver, T., and Wheeler, C. (2020), ‘Leaked figures reveal scale of coronavirus test shortage’, The Times
- Schraer, R. (2020), ‘Coronavirus testing system “falling over”‘, BBC News
- The Accumulator (2020), ‘I hit my FI number’, Monevator
- Williams, P. (2013), ‘Happy’, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
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Fire And Wide 15 September 2020
Hey. Loved the question stream from your 7 year old. If only the gov would employ him & his pals to test out any new policy for the large gaping holes of logic we end up with each time.
To be fair – I get that it is logical – when you want to view it through the lens of “this is what we want to happen so let’s just all pretend if we say it’s ok, it is and clamp down elsewhere”. Sigh.
Glad to see I at least make the rare blogger camp in starting up after FIRE instead of on my way. Probably because it would have driven me nuts with boredom to do monthly updates, let alone any poor sod reading it! We’ll see how it goes but yes, as a long-time FIRE blog follower the rhythmic up/down wash/repeat cycle can be pretty predictable. I’m glad you are still going.
I wish more people understood FIRE is about exactly that – not having to work but choosing how to invest your time based on meaning & satisfaction. Whether it pays or not.
Too often life is presented as a choice of “do what you love & give up your material dreams or do something that pays well & give up on your life dreams”.
I think most people would have far more success with the 50/50 approach of invest enough to give up the high-earning but dull & life-sucking jobs and do something that pays less but will enjoy.
Look forward to seeing which way you jump!
{in·deed·a·bly} 15 September 2020 — Post author
Thanks FIRE and Wide, some wise words there.
Lol! Some may argue you cleverly gamed the system once the outcome was already known, a real life case study in survivor bias. ?
Now you just need to unveil the “big reveal“, and start taking pre-orders for your exclusive platinum course, luxury residential retreat, and series of e-books that promises to reveal the secret sauce behind immediate gratification, quick riches, and sex appeal.
I jest, but unfortunately that is the route that far too many former FIRE bloggers venture down once they cross the finishing line and look for what comes next.
Fire And Wide 15 September 2020
Ha, love it. I’m sure there should be a clever pun there about secret sauce and gravy train but I clearly haven’t had enough tea yet to come up with it ?
But ofcourse – did I forget to mention I have a special offer running right now – only £19.99 for the 5-part mini series that will see you sail off into the sunset. Bargain at twice the price. So would you like two for twice the promises?!
Downside, I’d have to actually write the thing and you know, that’s just too much like actual work for someone like me right now…so how about I promise to send it by carrier pigeon in a bit..
I jest too clearly but you made me laugh so much I just had to ? . But yeah, it’s a real shame when that happens. Undoes all the good work showing it is possible to live a different life. I’m glad not everyone does.
David Andrews 15 September 2020
My 6 year old managed to returned for a month of school (along with half his class), before the summer holidays started. He’s now been back full time with all his class. We receive daily emails from the school reminding parents to avoid busy drop off and pick up times. Reminders for parents not to congregate chatting in school grounds. Sadly I see people blatantly ignoring these rules daily. I do feel very bad for the school staff who will be trying their best under very difficult circumstances.
I feel that a significant amount of people are now just doing what they want. probably because they perceive that those in leadership positions have been doing that for quite some time.
The neighbours over the road consistently ignored the rules on gatherings at home. Some shoppers aren’t wearing masks ( I’m sure not all have justifiable reasons not to ) and I suspect many businesses aren’t turfing out the non mask wearers because they need all the business they can get.
It’s a pretty impossible situation to manage. My son has also questioned why the rules seem to be so contradictory and I’m also unable to explain why.
{in·deed·a·bly} 15 September 2020 — Post author
Thanks David, glad to hear your boy is back at school and able to play with his friends again.
I think all those observations you called out stem from a common root cause: trust.
Trust is hard won, but has been constantly eroded by inconsistency, institutional silliness, and self-serving hypocrisy.
Once our faith in those setting the rules has been sufficiently eroded and undermined, people fall back to alternative narratives that seem plausible and are consistent with what they can personally observe and experience.
However, the lens through which we each perceive the world is very narrow and filtered.
Are bodies piling up your local neighbourhood streets? No.
Have there been vast numbers of people fall ill or die within your direct social circle, people you personally know and interact with? No.
Therefore the fears of the threat seem overblown, the instructions today will have inevitably changed to something contradictory tomorrow, and there is no penalty for non-compliance amongst those who have reverted to leading their pre-COVID lives.
These are troubling conclusions, possibly based upon faulty reasoning, yet it isn’t hard to see how people arrive at them.
The truly scary thing isn’t whether people aren’t wearing masks in the supermarket or on the bus, but rather where this prevalent style of dishonest populist leadership may ultimately lead. Nils Gilman recently penned an article about this, focussing on the forthcoming US elections. It was the scariest thing I have read in a long time.
FullTimeFinance 15 September 2020
Our schools are on virtual learning for at minimum the first six weeks. I hold little hope that in 6 weeks they will open. Oddly enough companies are opening up locally that will watch your children why they do school work.
We are struggling with remote work. Thankfully our school age kids are fairly self sufficient and my wife’s contract work allows flexibility. In that respect I am very lucky with covid.
{in·deed·a·bly} 15 September 2020 — Post author
Thanks FullTimeFinance. Hopefully the virtual learning provides a reasonable substitute until the school feels it is safe to resume physical classes.
We had three months of homeschooling before the summer holidays. The virtual learning element varied greatly by school. My elder son’s high school, run by ardent Luddites, did a great job adapting to virtual learning and tried hard.
The younger son’s primary school didn’t try at all, once a week emailing out a couple of half-assed handouts they had downloaded from a free teaching materials website. My son knocked over the activities that were supposed to last a week in about twenty minutes total, so we were largely left to our own devices to keep him challenged and stimulated.
Good luck with the remote working, performing double duty with full time parenting is a tough gig indeed.
weenie 16 September 2020
Haha, I’ve been boring people for 6 years with my monthly updates and will likely continue until I pull the FIRE plug. If I keep on blogging, maybe I’ll rename the blog, Quietly Retiring or something!
I don’t intend to monetise any of my hobbies as I feel that would just suck the joy out of them.
After graduating, I was unemployed for a while. I used to love cartooning/doodling (used to illustrate the students’ union mag) and came up with the idea of drawing sets of postcards and selling them. Sold quite a few sets to friends and my sister’s colleagues but after a couple of months, I was sick of it despite making decent profits for a few hours’ work each week. I might start doodling for fun again.
Anyway, my nephew’s back at school, so far so good. He was on top of all his online work – his school kept him busy with a good programme, which even included the kids attending regular virtual assemblies.
{in·deed·a·bly} 17 September 2020 — Post author
Thanks weenie. I hope you do stick with it, your blog provides great inspiration to folks from all walks of life, demonstrating that a sensibly balanced approach to personal finance can make FIRE a viable option for anyone, even those who aren’t high earning Masters of the Universe in the City or Tech Bros.
Your blog is also a good example of that Darwinian process at work. How many of those FI bloggers you were reading back in 2014 are still around today? Of those, how many still regularly post more than the occasional heartbeat post? I suspect it would be a very short list!
Your point about turning a hobby into a job removing the joy is worth consideration. That was my experience a million years ago when I started coding for money instead of just for fun.
Ben Hoyle 19 September 2020
Me and the kids are with Pharrell on school reopening. However, now there is the ever-dangling Damoclean threat of a mini-lockdown return if anyone has a temperature (note: the body’s natural response to any kind of infection).
I think I’m with Fire & Wide’s approach of 50/50. Our brains seem to struggle with anything that isn’t a dichotomy (see also: politics). Yet balance is often best. Maybe it is also the dark cultural gift of Western European thought (Asian philosophies seem much better at change, flow and mixtures).
I quite regularly have crises of faith – the upper echelons seem only reachable through complete dedication. They promise both meaning and money. But a quick look around space and time shows that this is classic “bigger yacht” syndrome – those that reach the “top” in any field don’t stand there marvelling at the view, they still compare themselves unfavourably with others, and discover there is yet another higher peak that was previously obscured. Or are then faced with the inevitable descent.
I’m also with Weenie in being sceptical of pricing pastimes. It’s almost like the criteria for monetary value naturally exclude much of what I value (e.g., see: Amazon fiction bestsellers). Many of my favourite works of art (TV, film, books, music etc.) were commercial flops, a lucky few only very slowly making money by a small word-of-mouth grind. But people still create, and still create great things, which gives me hope.
There is still an open question as to whether it is the very inefficiency of pastimes that makes them special. Would you write a better novel if you used agile methods? Do those hours, days and years wasted on the side projects with no deliverables mean they are useless and should be stopped? Is it solipsistic to play at creating when you could be volunteering at a local charity? I don’t know.
I guess if you are at a loss you could use your new continuous integration and virtualisation knowledge, plus one of the BERT/GPT-x families, to create a side project blog where you give the world what it values in monetary terms. I’d be interested to see what that unearths!
{in·deed·a·bly} 19 September 2020 — Post author
Thanks Ben.
I’ve done some experimenting with the “downshift” approach, trading earnings for increased perceived value or personal interest. Usual caveats apply: small sample size, anecdotes aren’t evidence, etc.
A stint plying my trade to help a charity with noble ideals, a worthy mission, and (as it turned out) poor execution.
Another with a regulator, building systems good at detecting skulduggery, only to learn they had been captured by the industry they were tasked with regulating and consciously chose not to investigate what was discovered.
In both cases I made the faulty assumption that I could do the most good by applying my hard won professional skills (that these organisations would not ordinarily be willing to afford) to their chosen mission.
In hindsight, this was probably a mistake, as it meant I viewed their operations through my professional lens and for the most part found them wanting. The same way we might view the “Mickey Mouse” operations of our local primary school front office or a Rotary club. Well meaning. Inefficient. For the most part, acceptably incompetent.
Morgan Housel had a great story about this, observing that a billionaire former CEO of Goldman wasn’t even the tenth richest person living in his apartment building!
That is a novel idea!
I think one thing that gets lost in the hype around the magic of AI is that it is essentially a vast mechanical turk, with the only real difference being the speed and scale at which it is able to iterate.
There was an old urban legend that went something along the lines of “if you had enough monkeys tapping away on typewriters, eventually one of them would write a Shakespeare play“.
What gets missed is that we would only recognise it as a Shakespeare play by comparing it with the original, and until that comparison takes place the monkey’s work would remain just a haphazard collection of characters in a random order.
I think a slightly easier approach would be to ape Elon Musk (without the dubious accounting practices). He built cars to create hype, establish a fanbase, and generate demand for batteries. He built a business making batteries to create a cashflow. He then used those cashflows to fund the building of his spaceships.
I could write a blog to build an audience. Sell that audience a monetised newsletter to generate an income stream. Use that cashflow to subsidise the creative endeavour, writing a novel.
Is an interesting idea. Certainly seems to be flavour of the month, the new generation of blogs are substack newsletters rather than wordpress websites.
Update: Two “Dad jokes” in a single comment response means that is enough internet for me today! I’m off to torture my children with humour, wit, and a long walk along the river.
John Smith 19 September 2020
I enjoy your style/ sections about FIRE community evolution.
Regarding income (from work) in retirement, I plan for ZERO.
I like to believe that my family predecessors had a good life. Even with their pensions 3-5x lower, and their net-worth (house price + savings) 5-10x less. If my pension+ savings will not be enough, then I will cut taxes (change location), lower life style. But I not sell my limited time on this planet for worth-less unlimited fiat money (printed from thin air by all / any country).
Even more I am happy to have a [minus] -1.40 gbp/h income (spend 1000 eur/month renting) for the mobility / freedom to escape [pandemic, dictators, revolution, war, etc] catastrophic events. No money can pay for my health / life / happiness.
{in·deed·a·bly} 19 September 2020 — Post author
Thanks John Smith. It is great that you have learned you greatly value flexibility, and been able to construct a lifestyle that supports and enables that.
When comparing ourselves to our ancestors, we must take care to examine their relative standard of living rather than the absolute multiples. For example, my current part time earnings would be in the region of 4x my father’s best ever earning year (largely due to inflation), yet his standard of living in retirement far exceeds my own today.
The measure of how wealthy we feel is the size of delta between our earnings and our cost of living. He got that right by living in a paid off house located in an affordable locale, then using that delta to live his life to the full.