I first encountered ERE in ~2017, and my immediate reaction was “interesting, but no thanks, I’m too busy doing The Work. This sounds too self-absorbed for me.” I thought it’d be a distraction from The Important Stuff I was Doing bordering on unethical self-indulgence.
I now think I was totally wrong about that.
I happened to have a crisis of belief in the efficacy of my work, which led me to seek alternative methods for showing up and being useful in the world. This search led me back to ERE. I think it’s possible for people of a similar disposition - motivated to do The Work - to find usefulness in the ERE framework without first suffering a crisis of faith.
The Work
Many people are motivated to pursue their careers not because they want more money or status, but because they are genuinely devoted to The Work.
The Work is unique to every individual. For me and a lot of my friends it has a lot to do with Climate Change, resource scarcity, environmental toxicity, and the like. Others may be focused on social justice issues, or education, or whatever.
To people like this who are motivated strongly by a sense of purpose, anything with the word “retirement” in it comes off as irrelevant at best, unethically self-indulgent at worst. I want to convince you of two things in this post:
First, early retirees are probably allies
The overwhelmingly common experience of work is that it’s a bullshit job, with psychopathic bosses, cranking out widgets that probably ought not be made anyways, in a byzantine and dysfunctional organization that is beyond any hope of reform. These jobs are sucking the very souls out of those unfortunate enough to have them, but no good alternatives are obvious. There probably aren’t enough worthy jobs to go around - not everyone is fortunate enough to be a creative designer of deep green whateverthehells for Earnest Genuine World-Betterers LLC.
Buckminster Fuller once calculated that the world and society would probably be better off if some significant percentage of the work force were simply paid to not work, because the resource consumption associated with commuting to work, maintaining offices, and the production of whatever it was they were doing, wasn’t actually a net positive to society.
In other words, there are a bunch of jobs out there that literally aren’t worth doing. It’s unlikely that people working these jobs are going to get paid to quit, so instead their next best option is to reduce their expenses, save up a bunch of money, and retire after 5-10 years of white knuckling through their BS jobs.
I’m not saying that’s an ideal scenario, but it’s certainly a reasonable strategy for individuals in that circumstance. The takeaway here for people who are committed to The Work is that people who choose to retire early are likely a kind of ally to whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish. For example, the “secret ulterior motive” of both Jacob (ERE) and Mr Money Mustache is to get the middle class to reduce their ecological footprint, in addition to having better lives and more personal autonomy.
Second, ERE is The Work
The practice of ERE, specifically the Renaissance Ideal of being broadly skilled, financially independent, and resilient, almost certainly should be thought of as a crucial component of Your Work.
Years ago, when I first came across ERE, I basically said “no thanks, too busy doing The Work.”
After almost two years of going down the rabbit hole of ERE, I see that what I’m learning — and unlearning — is folding into My Work in a really important way.
I see ERE as The Work at the private, inward-focused scale. One’s career (however creatively one wants to define it) is The Work at the public, outward-focused scale. They balance and inform each other in a really powerful way.
Imagine being an uber-green and sustainable architect, but you live in a drafty McMansion with formaldehyde coated furnishings, weak-sauce insulation, and an oil-burner furnace. That’s a hefty cognitive dissonance that will create tension in your professional and personal life. Few people who are into sustainability (say) professionally will tolerate that extreme of a dissonance, of course, but a lot of professionals have their personal lives aligned only at a superficial level. That was certainly true in my case.
A key here is that ERE is about much more than some frugality hacks. It’s ultimately about changing how you think, from a linear cause-and-effect mentality to a systems-thinking, complex and loosely coupled mentality. Your own life is the best sandbox to develop this kind of thinking because you don’t have to convince anyone else to tinker with it (well, except for spouses, but that’s a whole ‘nother series of posts), feedback is quick, and failure is cheap.
Another big deal here is that the more financially independent you become, the less beholden to The Hand That Feeds you are. If a project is pushing the boundaries of what you’re ethically comfortable doing, it’s much easier to refuse if you have 10, 20, or 30 years of living expenses saved, than if you rely on each paycheck to cover your bills. More grandly, you’ll be freer to pursue wilder ideas, take time to really think over what the best way to approach The Work is.
Modern work is rife with what Cal Newport calls the frenzied ad hoc hive mind approach to getting work done. It’s great for looking busy, but it’s terrible for getting deep thinking done, and we live in times that call desperately for some good, hard, deep thinking. The less beholden you are to swimming through such turbid waters, the more you’ll be able to take a breather and get a solid perspective on things. This could take the form of sabbaticals, long breaks in between employment, breaking off to do your own thing (since you’ll have a long personal runway), or just simply being able to take a less frantic approach to work because you don’t need the money.