[foepys]

> Why would I "waste" my precious 20s and early 30s being miserable and retire at 35? Who even wants to retire?

A few months ago I read a comment from somebody on a documentary about people optimizing for retirement in their 30s and it stuck with me:

"Live like a caveman until you are 35, then retire and live like a caveman until you die."

[gas9S9zw3P9c]

Another illusion is that these are absolute numbers. They're relative. When you're young, $100k is a lot of money. Enough to be happy and worry-free. Once you have that, you need $1M in cash to be happy and retire. Once you have $1M but realize everyone around you is making $1M/year to retire at $10M you suddenly need $10M. This will repeat itself, and you'll never have enough. You'll just become more miserable realizing how much more everyone else has. Yeah, platitudes. We all know this, right? Turns out, this cycle is totally unconscious and incredibly hard to break once you're in it and surrounded by such people. Get away while you can.

At least for me, this was one of the reasons why working at FAANG where everyone is striving for $$$ made me miserable. It gave me such a warped view of the world.

[namdnay]

> working at FAANG where everyone is striving for $$$

This really hasn’t been my experience at either Google or Facebook, in fact I would nearly go so far as to say the opposite is true. I’ve seen far more “striving” in the traditional corporate world

[nip180]

The common term for this is lifestyle inflation. As you make more money your “needs” keep increasing. It’s incredibly challenging to reserve this trend but very easy to follow it.

[RandomBacon]

I think the best way to prevent this is, whenever you get a raise, open a new bank account and have the difference direct deposited into it. That way, the main bank account that you work with regularly, always sees the same amount deposited.

[kyleblarson]

Not to mention that being able to retire at 35 is exceptionally rare, even in the SV bubble.

[luckylion]

Depends on whether you're planning to retire in a high COL area, I suppose. If you're saving 30-50k a year, that goes a long way in other areas.