Do the impossible

teacher: “Why are you here?” students : “so we can graduate high school” teacher: “Why do you want to graduate?” students : “so that we can get into a good college” teacher: “why do you want to get a degree?” students : “so we can get a high paying job!” teacher : “if you want a high paying job I’m just going to tell you straight — that’s a roundabout and expensive way of getting there — you could whore yourself out or sell weed today and that would get you to the same endpoint much quicker and less upfront investment” - self-reported conversation from my cousin and clergyman David Taylor (the teacher in the story)

As I passed several financial milestones -- net zero assets, paying off student debt, recovering my income level to close to what it was before the move, I wasn’t prepared fully for how I would respond once I got to within striking distance of the goal. As the anxiety faded as to whether I would reach the goal or not, a new anxiety started to emerge. I felt restless and less satisfied with what I was doing with my life than I had been during the precarious but enjoyable college years.

What would I do with this new free time in retirement?

I found it difficult to see a clear and motivating vision of my future self in this new post-retirement world. As I sat with this question it led to other questions, such as

What good would it be to have so much free time without any capital to combine it with?

I’ve asked other people recently what they would do if tomorrow they could retire. A number of them list projects that require additional capital like starting a farm or a charity. I understand this desire. Similar ideas came to my mind during that period in 2017. For me that surfaced a new set of questions around how much and where that capital would come from. If you also need capital then you need to further delay your retirement point so you aren’t retiring tomorrow. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. What would be the point of all of this free time if I felt confined at home limited by the constraints of a fixed income budget? During one of my internships I lived with an old retiree and while we shared a common hobby interest in investments and living on a budget - I could see that to him it was much more salient obsession than when you have a comfortable buffer that comes with a salary income and savings. He didn’t look free. His life did not look appealing to me. What is all of that free time worth if I am unable to put it to use in combination with social opportunity or financial capital?

I was slowly becoming aware of a vulnerability that I had overlooked.

I didn’t have a compelling conviction as to why I wanted to reach early retirement.

Waking to the challenge

It has been a placeholder, a heuristic that had worked up until this point but an incomplete strategy with a key missing motivation component. My marriage in 2013 had a similar milestone effect that quieted the usual demands that drove me into romantic relationships and also shaped the course of my life path. With that voice now much quieter I could begin to listen to a new, critical yet inspiring voice that interrogated whether this is really who I am all about and what I have to contribute to the world? Here and there I was developing a clearer sense of what makes me who I am by looking at which accomplishments I was most proud of at work and in my reaction to things I read about in books and absorbed in movies.

What I have learned about myself is that I enjoy responding to a challenge. The thing that I am the most passionate about is solving complex problems. The idea of coasting comfortably subsisting on my retirement income seemed antithetical to how I wanted to live my life. I am perpetually restless, hungry and searching for a way to use the time that I have to enrich my life experiences with meaning. So the idea of retiring, of stopping, slowing down is the opposite of how I want to live my life. I embrace discomfort when it has a strategic and purposeful end goal and feel fulfilled when I am pushing myself to new limits. One influence that resonated with how I was feeling was the 2013 convocation speech to the incoming cohort of new Georgia Tech students by mechanical engineering student Nick Selby.

The Sophmore

We chose Georgia Tech because we want to

do the impossible

and this school is equipped with the resources and faculty to help us do just that. In the words of Sir Isaac Newton - “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants'' […] Our mission as students at Georgia Tech is not to follow in the footsteps of astronauts, Nobel prize winners and President that have graduated before us but to exceed their footsteps, crush the shoulders of the giants on whom we stand. - Nick Selby Georgia Tech convocation speech 2013

That is it. It is a more satisfying response for how I should structure my life than simply to retire as soon as possible. Retiring early is not impossible nor is it an inherently complex challenge as I had made it to be. There is a little more to it than that since Nick also mentioned that his speech that for him “doing the impossible” meant building an iron man suit in lieu of solving climate change. So it’s good that he said that to help me add more clarity to this answer.

Leave the world a better place than it would have been otherwise if it weren't for your contribution

So together these two mission statements to “do the impossible” and to “leave the world in a better place” were enough for me to understand what my life purpose is about.