FIRE is boring
And what I'm doing to combat it
Hi!
Here’s the thing with long term goals - exciting things happen slowly. It’s slooooooow. I’m working on running 5 km in 30 min, and progress has been at a snail’s pace. The first milestone was running continuously for 30 min, which took me a good four months. Now I’m working on getting my pace up from around 8 min/km to the 6 min/km I need to get to the 30 min time. God knows how long that will take me.
It’s the same with pursuing Financial Independence. I remember the excitement phase I had when I had just learnt about FIRE. I gobbled up content faster than folks snapping up new real estate in my city right now ( rant on sky-high housing prices in Indian cities for another day). But as I got started and put my investments on auto-pilot, the content started to get repetitive. There’s only so many times you can bear reading about being frugal, creating an emergency fund and investing in the trusted PPF. This is the “boring middle”.
Now for the bitter pill:
Working towards Financial Independence is not a hobby
This is something I’ve had to grapple with for a while. During the first couple of years into my FI journey, I’d open my financial tracker spreadsheet and look at how much my corpus changed every day. It wouldn’t change by much, but I’d still look forward to it once I came home from work. It took a lot of convincing from my wife and becoming busy with life to get that down to once a week.
Now onto finding something else to do with my life.
How I’m handling my boring middle
1. Working on my health
I’ll admit it - I was a slob, and I still am. I like variety, which means I quickly get tired of having the same food for more than a couple of meals. This combined with my love for pizza and other fast food meant I’d frequently order takeout. I also barely worked out, which led to a weight gain of 15 kg of mostly fat. This lack of fitness culminated in me almost passing out in a trek I took with my friends due to fatigue.
I’ve slowly started bringing running into my daily routine. It’s better than nothing, and successfully integrating that into my life will give me the confidence to add other forms of training to get into shape. Like I mentioned above, I have been slowly improving, which is a great boost.
I’ll write about my running journey up to now in another post, and keep you updated on how I do. Hopefully that inspires one of you to get started if you haven’t yet!
2. Spending time with my kid
My daughter was born a couple of months ago, and spending time with her has been a great experience.
I’ll admit, it has been frustrating too. She’s too young to appreciate my dad jokes. Sometimes she doesn’t sleep however much I rock her, and her cries keep getting louder. Combined with lack of sleep for both me and my wife, it becomes challenging to keep our cool. But when I see my kid stare at me with those big eyes and smile at random times, that frustration melts away and makes it all worth it.
The advice I see everywhere is that kids grow up fast; you blink and they’ve grown up, so make memories. Although sometimes it feels like a never-ending cycle of feeding her, changing her diaper and getting her to sleep, I can see the change from just a few weeks ago. Hopefully I’ll make good use of my smartphone camera and record these memories for when my memory forgets them.
3. Writing and reading
This blog is another hobby I’m trying to build! I’ve always wanted to share my thoughts with the world, but wouldn’t do it because “what if they don’t like it?”. I also couldn’t think of what to write about. Finally after deliberating for too long, I decided to take the plunge and start writing about something I was doing anyways. I could write about my journey, and even if nobody read it, it would at least be a journal for me to look back on. But I have a few readers now and it is an amazing feeling to see others read what I want to say! This has been a great motivation to keep writing each week.
I’ve also set a goal to read a book each month. I liked to read when I was little, but studies got in the way and I stopped. Bringing that habit back will keep my mind active even when I get old and frail. I’m more of a non-fiction person, and recommendations are always welcome :)
Wrapping up
I think I have picked up some hobbies which should be evergreen. My hope is that when I eventually decide to retire, these hobbies will keep me occupied and productive. I don’t want to be retired and then look for hobbies - it’s a sure-shot recipe for me becoming a couch potato in front of the computer. My hope is that I can build on them and look back on a fulfilled life when I eventually kick the bucket.
Until next time!