What I got wrong about FIRE
A workplace reporter reflects on her initial skepticism toward the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement, which she once viewed as a fringe trend. She now acknowledges its widespread popularity and cultural significance among millennials.
Why it matters
The mainstreaming of the FIRE movement reflects shifting attitudes toward work, savings, and long-term financial planning in the modern economy.
Kiersten Essenpreis for BI In 2021, when I joined Business Insider as a workplace reporter, I noticed something strange about my new readers: They were obsessed with the Financial Independence, Retire Early movement. Week after week, I watched them flock to stories about people who stopped working in their 30s and 40s. Having spent much of the 2010s in San Francisco, I had occasionally heard about high-earning tech workers sharing tiny studios with multiple roommates and subsisting on instant ramen so they could retire young. I never understood why they were killing themselves just to escape what seemed like perfectly good jobs. FIRE, as I understood it, was a fringe movement — just one of many eccentricities in a city full of people devoted to odd things. So why, as the economy was emerging from the depths of the pandemic, were all these articles about FIRE suddenly going viral?
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