mr money mustache the shockingly simple math

#Mr money mustache the shockingly simple math how to#

I don’t know whether it has to do with the hormonal response to stress, or with the disordered eating patterns that come along with high-stress jobs (e.g.

I’m convinced the rat race plays a prominent role in the obesity epidemic. Unfortunately one of them is gaining a bunch of weight while being chronically stressed. You get the dreaded “falls short.” The Rat Race Makes You Fat and SickĪmerica is the world leader in many arenas. If you’re getting a good performance review, the goals will be used to justify why you’re getting a “meets expectations” instead of “exceeds expectations.” Yes, you seemed to go above and beyond this quarter, but really you just met the written expectations we had of you. They don’t come up again until it’s time for performance reviews, where they are used as a weapon against you. Of course, everyone forgets about these goals five seconds after we log them because we just did it because we were told to. My boss gets to determine if the goals make sense for the company and change them if he wants to. I have to structure them to fit certain categories that my company has deemed important. I come up with goals not because I want to, but because I have to. This might actually be my company pretending to care about my autonomy, but if it is they aren’t pretending very hard. When you have autonomy, you get to determine when you work, how you work, and what you work on.Īt work, you are robbed of your autonomy.Įvery year (or every quarter, or every half year, depending on what my company is doing at the moment).

#Mr money mustache the shockingly simple math how to#

The Rat Race Robs You of AutonomyĬoming up with your own goals and determining how to best achieve them is a critical part of well being. We used to distinguish meeting in person from corresponding from a distance by talking about “meeting face-to-face.” Except now we can see faces on the computer but not in real life. But is there really a benefit if you can’t see their face? We’ve always imagined that there’s some intangible benefit of being in the same room with someone instead of on a Zoom call. Of course, people wear masks all day but then gather in the cafeteria, maskless for lunch. But the desire for productivity + the desire to avoid liability = mask mandates. It would give people the option to work from home if you really believed the workplace is dangerous. Common sense would dictate letting adults assess their own risk levels. Of course, my boss (and his boss above him, and all the bosses above him), don’t want us working from home because they’re worried we won’t be as productive.īut wait, don’t they think we’re all going to spread diseases to each other and die if we’re in the same room? Surely that’s more important than productivity right? If they care about safety, it should be the top concern.Įxcept they don’t actually care. If a company really believed that you were all going to pass diseases around and kill each other, the best defense would be working from home. However effective you think masks are, they aren’t as effective as working from home. I’m going to use an example that you might wish I stayed away from: Mask mandates in an office setting are stupid. Nothing crushes your spirit more than being told you’re being unreasonable for protesting the minor dictates of petty tyrants. The worst part is when someone tells you that they aren’t a big deal. It’s not so fun when your freedom can be stripped by a corporate memo.Īll these minor rules and regulations are stifling. This is probably a lot of fun if you’re part of the bureaucracy. The company has decided what sorts of sacrifices you should make, and you just need to obey. You’ve passed the point where everyone is voluntarily making minor personal sacrifices for the sake of the group.

Yet when you work in an office, you can’t escape the notion that you are being controlled by a bureaucracy. The Rat Race is Dehumanizingįollowing a dress code. Let’s look at what makes the rat race so miserable, then talk about three possible escape routes. Toiling away in dehumanizing conditions is the problem. While I believe that work is good, I have no such romantic attachments to the rat race.

So what’s the point of even trying to retire? Why am I so desperate to walk away from a job if I plan on leaving work to do more work? I will be producing, not merely consuming. In fact, if everything goes according to plan, sometimes it will be indistinguishable from play. This work might not always look like work. Personally, I plan on working for the rest of my life. Anyone who pulls it off isn’t going to be happy sitting on a beach sipping frozen margaritas for the rest of their life. You need a lot of planning and discipline to make it happen. One of the great ironies of the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movement is that anyone capable of retiring early is incapable of enjoying it.