All right, so we have a question here from Erica. Erica asks, why do you think there is a lot of attention and hype on the FIRE movement, but not as much attention on other career options such as part time or contract work? You know, Erica, it's an interesting question.

There has been a lot of attention on the FIRE community. There was, I think, a moment maybe a few years ago where this reached a peak. I think it's kind of dying back down again. And I'll talk about that in a second. But for the listener who doesn't know what we're talking about, FIRE stands for Financial Independence Retire Early.

It's a movement mainly of sort of middle class, highly educated knowledge workers, so salaried knowledge workers. Where the whole notion is, if you have a good salary, like you're a computer programmer, and you bring your expenses, you get very comfortable living cheaply. You get this double edged advantage where, A, you can save a lot of money, because you're only living on a little bit of money you earn.

And B, because you live cheaply, the amount of money you have to save to then sustain your lifestyle just off of savings, the formal definition of financial independence, becomes much lower. And basically, if you do this math, if you can live on, these numbers aren't precise, but it's roughly speaking, if you can live on 20% of what you make, then 10 years of savings, more or less, will be enough to in perpetuity cover that 20%, and you'll be financially independent.

All right, so that's the FIRE movement. Mr. Money Mustache is a big player in that movement. I wrote about him in Digital Minimalism. He actually blurbed Digital Minimalism. Nate and Liz Thames, the Frugalwoods, they have a really interesting blog. I talked about them in a recent New Yorker piece of mine, and they're interesting examples of FIRE proponents.

And there's a bunch of others. This is why I think a lot of attention goes to movements like FIRE, is extreme examples are a useful way to illustrate powerful, but much more generally applicable principles. This is something that advice writers know. You give the big example that's out there because it purifies and clarifies what the underlying mechanism is, and it purifies and clarifies the aspirational appeal of that mechanism.

It's the best way to make the more general point. So the more general point that's being made by the FIRE movement is that you have way more flexibility than the culture makes clear to play around with this income expense equation. There's this cultural pressure that, you know, you get moved to whatever city that you get pushed into because that's where the job is.

And then once you're there, you take your salary and you basically spend most of it. And if you're really on the ball, you can save 15% in your 401k, and that plus social security might take care of you when you're 65. And along the way, when you're about to get married or buy a car, try to put a little bit more money aside.

And the underlying principle that the FIRE movement points out is you have way more control over that than you think. You don't have to just live at whatever amount of money you happen to make. You have to live just right there. That doesn't give you the return you think it does.

Are you really way more happier when you're 35 than when you were when you were 22? You make a lot more money at 35. You've probably increased your spending to match that money, but, you know, you lived on a lot less money when you were 22. Were you miserable?

Probably not. These are the type of questions they push. What if you had stayed at that level of spending you had when you were 22 now that you're 35? Think about all the flexibility you would have with your money. What about if you move somewhere cheaper? So this was the big point I made in my recent New Yorker article about the great cubicle escape.

I talked about Bill McKibben and his wife, Sue Halperin, how they moved to the Adirondacks. He quit the New Yorker, they moved to the Adirondacks in part because it was incredibly cheap to live there. And because it was so cheap to live there, Sue and Bill could just do freelance articles at their own leisure and live quite comfortably.

And then when Bill had a hit book with The End of Nature, he said, "This is great. Instead of trying to go ride this wave and make as much money as possible, this will buy me the ability to basically sell any book to a publisher that I want to write and I'll get a reasonable advance on it." And because we live cheaply, if I just write a book every two or three years on whatever I want to write about, that'll kind of cover all of our expenses.

I don't even have to do the freelancing anymore. They hacked the equation. Let's bring down the expenses. Now we can get by with a lot less money. That is the general point. I think that is the appeal. So, Erica, when you talk about career options such as part-time or contract work, this is actually where you get to.

Most people, once they're exposed to fire, is thinking, "I'm going to sell the 3,000 square foot house. I'm going to move over to the Eastern Shore. I'm leaving Fairfax to go to Chestertown or something like this. And I'm going to buy a house that's a fraction of the price.

And I'm going to live on half the money. And I'm going to do contract work. And I'm going to take three months out of the 12 off every year or work three days a week." That type of engineering and flexibility that you can have more options than you think to contrive what your work life works like.

You have a lot of flexibility on your expenses. You have a lot of flexibility on how you want to earn. And getting out there and actually exploring those options, that is the lesson of fire. Not this idea that you have to fully be financially independent and living on this incredibly small amount of money and it's all coming out of your savings and all of that nonsense.

That is all a distraction. That's not why fire is popular. It's not that people want to live on $18,000 a year in a trailer because they could technically be financially independent by the age of 27. It's that they want to take back control and say, "I have way more options to engineer my life than the culture is telling me." So, Erica, you're right to say fire seems a little bit extreme, but that extremeness, I think, is why it's appealing.