No, You Don't Need to Retire at 35 to Be Happy

When I was young, and stuggiling with my financial life, I was quite into the Financial Indepdence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement.

The loudest voices in this space share a very specific, aggressive worldview about how you should spend your life.

It usually goes something like this: “Working a 9-to-5 until you’re 65 is for suckers . To live a truly rich life, you need to hoard every penny, live out of a van, and permanently escape corporate life by your 35th birthday.”

I completely get the appeal.

When you are buried under endless emails and commuting an hour each way, the thought of handing in your two weeks’ notice and never looking back sounds like absolute heaven.

It feels like the ultimate victory over the system to reclaim your time from a boss.

But here is my lukewarm financial take: Quitting the workforce decades early is a drastic lifestyle experiment, not a guaranteed ticket to happiness.

When you treat your career purely as an obstacle to be eliminated, you ignore the invisible benefits that working actually provides.

And when we dig into the research, the dream of a forty-year weekend might actually do more harm than good to your brain.

To actually hit that magic early retirement number by your 35th birthday, you have to save an absurd percentage of your income.

That means spending your twenties and early thirties—arguably the most energetic, vibrant years of your life, counting every single penny.

• It means skipping your best friend’s destination wedding.

• It means living with four roommates instead of getting your own apartment even if that is not what you want to do.

• It means treating every single joyful purchase as a direct threat to your master plan.

Itcan be an incredibly miserable, restrictive way to spend your youth.

And the worst part? Extreme early retirement relies on a massive delusion.

It assumes your expenses at 25 will be your exact expenses at 45.

But life rarely works out that way.

Your thirties and forties are spectacularly, unpredictably expensive.

You might decide you actually want a family, which introduces the massive costs of childcare, buying a house with an extra bedroom, and eventually saving for college.

Even if you avoid the traditional family route, life has a brutal way of finding your wallet.

Your aging parents might suddenly need expensive long-term care or financial help.

You might face a random personal illness that forces you to drain the reserves you spent a decade hoarding.

When you build your entire life around a hyper-lean, perfectly predictable timeline, you are building a fragile financial plan that shatters the moment your life gets complicated.

You caould argue that FIRE really only makes sense for most people if you could spend your entire life living like a care-free 23-year-old.