I don’t want to retire. 

Like so many other techies in the Bay Area, I used to be possessed by FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early). I believed that work is punishing by nature, that I must nobly suffer through it, endure just enough until I'm free to live my real, actual life.

I cannot stress enough: this mindset is bullshit.

A few years ago, I left the Bay and tech. I stopped tracking my net worth. Why was I, a naturally frugal person, obsessing over numbers on a screen? Crypto further helped numb me to wild double or triple digit swings; it really emphasized the fake nature of my obsession. Later, it dawned on me that my mental model of money was wrong, too. Money is a form of energy; it has to move, breathe, flow like water. Hoarding causes it to stagnate. Stagnant water sustains some life, but only a tepid one. A bare life.

I don't want to retire from work. I want vital work. Living, spiritual, purposeful work. I crave energy, and I’m so far away from it. My day job is Strategy & Ops, which just means I pull data for dashboards and PowerPoint slides that keep execs happy. I feel divorced from the real value and lifeblood of the business, not that I particularly care for this industry either. In the past, the dissonance would catch up to me with a fury, and I would compulsively switch jobs every 1.5 or 2 years. Always running, always trying to escape. 

Now, as I approach 2 years in this role, I’m trying to flip the script. 95%+ of people would kill to have a glorified email job like mine, but bashing myself over the head with that fact never helps. I'm leaning into some strange form of cope-gratitude: caring for coworkers as a form of value creation, making pretty slide decks as an act of service. It still feels like pulling teeth most days, to be honest. Worse comes to worse, I tell myself that this job grants me the bandwidth to write. Until I find the work I was made for, this is how I can step into the stream. This is how I can tap into that moving energy. 

In a few hundred years, people will look back at our society and condemn it as barbaric, the way we severed work from purpose. They'll wonder how we ever lived this way.