The FIRE Movement is Great - If You're Neurotypical
How financial independence favors those with functioning brains.
In the past decade, there’s been a lot said about the FIRE movement. For those unaware, FIRE stands for Financial Independence/Retire Early, and it’s a whole thing.
Basically, the whole thing revolves around retiring as early as possible — like, in your 30s. You’re supposed to work your tail off — sometimes working two full-time jobs — while spending as little as possible.
To be clear, this isn’t a bunch of people being entrepreneurs — this is people working regular jobs, often tech or other high-paying jobs, and just saving as much as possible.
Adherents to the FIRE movement have been known to make a solid six figures out of college thanks to numerous jobs and side-hustles. Then, while they’re making bank, they’re also saving bank. We’re talking 50–80% of their income, which again, often falls in the six figures. Thanks to ten or fifteen years of compounding interest and stock market returns, this can add up very quickly to over a million dollars, which they then use to retire in their mid-30s.
This is made much easier these days, since a lot of jobs are remote and you can hold down two full-time jobs with only 50 hours a week of time, if you play your cards right. When you’re drawing two paychecks during the same working hours, it’s much easier to do.
There are a lot of problems with the FIRE movement. For one, a lot of people who started it back in the 2000s and 2010s are now retiring to discover that they wasted their youth working and living like college students while their friends made memories. It’s a bit weird to spend your 20s declining every social invite, so a lot of the FIRE folks don’t have many close friends.
Then there’s the whole notion of “retiring” in your 30s. Many people who do that find that they thrive on the high-stress life of constantly working, so they hold down a side hustle or two in order to keep from being monumentally bored. Plus, it has become abundantly clear that a million dollars isn’t enough to live comfortably for the next 50 years of your life, so having some income is important.
Everyone talks about those things, though. What I want to talk about here is how much privilege goes into people taking a crack at the FIRE movement. Not necessarily privilege in the normal sense, although having a college degree helps a lot since it offers access to a lot more high-paying jobs.
(What’s classy when you’re rich but trashy when you’re poor? Working two jobs and a side hustle for 100 hours a week.)
No, I’m talking about the privilege of being neurotypical.
A lot of this is coming from my own experience, but I also know that a lot of people share my experiences, at least to some degree, so I am by far not alone in this. Just be warned, there will be some generalizations here.
When I was fresh out of college and learning about finances, I found the FIRE movement. I am not a good candidate for it, since I work at a nonprofit job and didn’t have any good side hustle options right away, but it was a fascination of mine for a hot minute.
I also have bipolar disorder, and while my mood swings are kept fairly level thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, I am still prone to bouts of depression and anxiety. Too much stress is a good way to send me into a depression spiral, and that never ends well.
That said, my first career job out of college was 16 hours a week, so I held down my grocery store job to make ends meet. And sometimes, one of my coworkers would go on vacation and I would pick up their shifts. It was good money, and having a week of extra shifts was a nice way to pad the ol’ bank account.
Toward the end of my time at those jobs, though, I wound up picking up quite a few extra shifts over the course of a few months. For three or four months, my standard working week was twelve or thirteen days, followed by one day off, followed by another twelve or thirteen days of work. If I was lucky, I’d get two days off in a row, but mostly I only got one day off at a time.
Yeah, I had a nervous breakdown after a while of that.
They say that you’ve never worked until you’ve spent two minutes crying in the walk-in cooler at work because you’re tired, stressed, and a customer yelled at you, but once you’re done, you just stop crying and go back to work with a smile. I’ve had my two-minute cry in the cooler, and let me tell you, it’s no fun.
While I made a bunch of money (to me, at least) during those hellish work weeks, it wasn’t worth it. My anxiety and depression were flaring really badly, and while I was able to pay down my student loans with the extra cash, I don’t think my sanity would’ve taken that sort of schedule all the time.
Neurodiverse folks work all sorts of jobs, from formal office jobs to retail and food service to craft businesses. We may face challenges with our day-to-day lives, but we’ve been making it work for centuries.
Many of us are fairly successful at those jobs, too. I make good money these days because my particular brand of neurodivergence makes me really good at writing tens of thousands of words in a given month. I’m probably pushing two million words in my time here, and this is just a side hustle.
Still, the FIRE movement definitely favors people who have more neurotypical traits. People who don’t succumb to depression and anxiety attacks when their stress levels get too high. People who can focus on a long-term goal and not get distracted by the latest shiny thing. People who have the energy and capacity to dedicate most of their time to work without having a nervous breakdown.
Neurodiversity is often characterized by people who would be considered weird or quirky by most standards. We may have mood swings, get distracted easily, be unable to focus on work (or hyperfocus on work to the exclusion of everything else), or simply not have the mental energy to dedicate to work all the time.
Us neurodiverse folks have a diverse set of symptoms and experiences, and while that makes us great at many things, for most of us, the FIRE movement isn’t something we can just do. That’s why it’s frustrating that a lot of FIRE folks insist that anyone can do it. No, no they can’t.
Plenty of people already work multiple jobs because they have to in order to just make ends meet, never mind the notion of saving 50% of their income. Now, add into that the number of people who might have a college degree and a decent-paying job but don’t have the capacity to do more than their 40 hours every week for any number of reasons. It’s a lot of people who just can’t do it.
I am not built to work two full-time jobs for the sake of making tons of money to retire early on. I am happy to work my regular 40-hour job, write here a bit, and maybe pick up ten hours a month of side-hustle work. If I tried to work two full-time jobs, I’d probably have a nervous breakdown in short order.
And, quite frankly, a lot of other neurodivergent folks would too. Many neurodivergent folks struggle to work one full-time job, which is probably why a lot of them wind up going into creative lines of work that (a) have odd hours and (b) don’t pay great. Selling crafts at craft fairs and online isn’t for everyone, but a lot of neurodivergent folks excel at it.
Lots of us work office jobs as well, but we generally put in our 40 hours and go home to work on our hobbies, which is where a lot of our energy goes. For us, our jobs are the thing that pays for our passions, the weird little hobbies and interests that don’t make us money but are what we live for.
Other neurodivergent folks have the kinds of traits where the FIRE movement is great for them. A lot of us (me included) can eat the same thing every day for ten years and not get bored of it, so eating ramen, rice, and beans for every meal isn’t a problem. Many of us (myself included) can also buckle down and hyperfocus on work for long periods, which means that putting in 80 hours a week isn’t that tough.
However, these neurodivergent folks tend to not have issues with depression or mood disorders like bipolar disorder. That helps them excel at the FIRE movement — assuming it interests them at all.
Then there’s all of the associated costs of being neurodivergent. I take meds that, let me tell you, are expensive. I have to pay for good insurance just to be able to afford the copay, and that insurance is expensive itself because we live in America. There are other costs as well — things that make our lives easier, like ear plugs to avoid overstimulation. It’s a lot.
What it all boils down to is that FIRE is not for everyone, particularly those of us with brains that go against the grain. I can respect someone with the dedication to work two jobs in order to take control of their lives and retire early. Just don’t shove it on me and say that I could do it if I just tried harder.
No, I couldn’t. No amount of trying will allow me to overcome my bipolar disorder, no matter what people will say. I can’t just “power through” my depressive episodes because that’s not how depression works, and I can’t necessarily direct my hyperfixations onto work on a whim. Don’t try to tell me that we just need to try harder, either — that doesn’t fly with me.
You’re welcome to go FIRE and burn bright, but a lot of us neurodivergent folks would burn out within a year at best. You’d be better off just leaving us to our offbeat jobs and random hobbies. Enjoy your rice and beans for the next ten years.
Be well out there.