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Yeah. It has been very helpful to me once or twice in my adult life to get uncomfortably close to having no savings and negative cash flow, because it has taught me that I hate that. And that there are things I truly value - like living near amenities, traveling to see family, having a coffee and pastry in a coffee shop, going to a sandwich shop for lunch, buying books, going to the movie theater - that are costly, such that I am not nearly as happy living an ascetic as I am when I can afford those things. It has helped me feel a lot less guilty, a lot less like all the compensation I receive and ask for is just greed. What I have landed on is that achieving "financial independence" is important to me because it buys time, but beyond that point I don't care. Or maybe a better, though jargon-y, way to put it is that it buys optionality, and that I value that very highly (and I think most people do). I really like working. And I really like spending time with my family. What I really dislike is when I have to spend more time working, rather than being with my family, than I want to, in order to avoid that asceticism that I hate. And, having not yet achieved financial independence, that's pretty much always the case, because I need to work full time, and that's more than I want to work. Financial independence also buys optionality in what kind of work I can do. Right now there is some stuff I'm really interested in that I would love to be working on in an academic setting, rather than a commercial setting. But I can't afford to do that, because the pay would not be good enough. And at other times, I've really wished I could afford to do work I would find valuable but which is just not well compensated; teaching, tutoring, community / public sector work, etc. But I haven't been able to afford to, thus far. But of course the problem with all this is that "financial independence" is a very fuzzy line, and is a function of spending, and spending is often itself a function of income. So avoiding that trap is also important to me, and I'm not as good at that as I'd like to be. |