From these plain origins, many offshoots of FIRE have sprouted up — some much more brazen than others.
It’s rare to find anyone these days who actually wants to get to early retirement by living off beans;
those people, with their stringent penny-pinching, are largely known in the community as #LeanFIRE.
A lot more people aim for #CoastFIRE (a more measured approach that involves front-loading your retirement savings and “coasting” on compound interest and working lightly until you’re ready to quit)
or #BaristaFIRE (quitting your job but buttressing your retirement with a side gig, such as that of a part-time barista, to receive health-insurance benefits)
or #FatFIRE (a luxurious, no-sacrifice approach to retirement, the polar opposite of LeanFIRE — and the subset to which Allen Wong belongs).
You might be tempted to regard early retirees as layabouts, soaking up sunshine while everyone else toils.
But why not see them as brave maniacs, daring to build an entirely new vision of the world?
Retirement has long been framed as a reward for a job well done
— social reformers started pushing for mandatory post-work benefits in the early 20th century,
and policies like Social Security later codified the tipping point between labor and leisure
— but if FIRE’s incredible popularity of late (the r/Fire subreddit alone boasts nearly half a million members) is a defiant reaction to economic hardship,
then it’s also a plea to re-evaluate the centrality of work to modern living.
Maybe, the movement suggests, we should have always been in it for ourselves, and nobody else, from the start.
(2/N)
