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.
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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? The mystery nagged at me but I just couldn't take it seriously. From the extreme austerity the movement espoused to the passive-income side hustles that sounded kind of scammy, everything about it seemed unrealistic. I assumed FIRE would flame out.
Five years later, I couldn't have been more wrong. The movement has only grown more popular: The main subreddit now has 2.4 million followers. Half of millennials list financial independence as a life goal of theirs. And Business Insider has even assigned a reporter to cover the movement, my colleague Kathleen Elkins. No one has helped me understand why more than Laura Sonday, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a leading researcher on the movement.
For her doctoral dissertation, Laura Sonday spent years conducting in-depth interviews with 55 devotees.
Jeremy M. Lange for BI
For her doctoral dissertation, Sonday spent years observing FIRE meetups and retreats and conducting in-depth interviews with 55 devotees, some of whom had achieved financial independence and some of whom were still working toward it. When I first stumbled on her findings in 2024, I began to see the movement in a different light — as a deeply philosophical response to the broken state of modern work. She's since built on that research for a new paper that was just published in one of the top management journals, Administrative Science Quarterly.
At its core, Sonday argues, FIRE is a rejection of the dominant way we view work in American culture: that good workers demonstrate an unwavering dedication to our jobs. Sociologists have given this belief a variety of names — the ideal worker norm, the work-devotion schema — but most of us know it more colloquially as hustle culture. The standard emerged in the postwar boom of white-collar jobs, back when the vast majority of corporate professionals were men with stay-at-home wives and companies promised their employees lifelong job security. But over the decades, the economy changed: Women flooded into the workforce and layoffs became the norm. In this new world, it became harder for workers to give so much of their lives to their jobs — and that kind of loyalty also no longer came with the guarantee of a stable career or a pension. So what's a modern worker to do? FIRE answers that dilemma by offering a whole new way of thinking about work.
That new ideal centers around the idea that work should be optional. It's not that work is bad per se, FIRE followers told Sonday — it's that having to work is bad. To them, financial independence — the movement's lingo for saving up enough money to never need to work again — was about freeing you to live the life you actually want. For some, that meant escaping work entirely as an early retiree. But a surprising share of the people Sonday interviewed intended to keep working. Many saved up so they could switch into an occupation that was less lucrative but more fulfilling, or work a more flexible schedule that would allow them to take a random Tuesday off for a beach outing with their kids.
"Am I just studying a really privileged group of people," Sonday wondered, "or is this actually a means to economic mobility?"
Jeremy M. Lange for BI
The most telling anecdotes came from the people who reached their savings goals and not only kept working, but chose to keep doing the same jobs. One guy Sonday spoke to kept a letter of resignation at the ready, a reminder to himself that he had the freedom to leave his job if his company did something he morally objected to. He eventually presented it when his employer pressured him to lay off his employees. Another person said achieving financial security gave her the confidence she needed to disagree with her boss. From the outside, it may have looked like financial independence changed very little about their lives — they were still in the same jobs — but to them their freedom meant everything. It changed their relationship with work itself. No longer dependent on their paychecks, they didn't have to compromise themselves anymore for the sake of keeping a roof over their heads. "They said, 'I had the courage to stick my neck out and stand up for things that were important to me,'" Sonday tells me.
For years, I've been puzzling over one of the great paradoxes of white-collar work: There are so many things we like and even love about it — building relationships with colleagues, solving hard problems, feeling competent, helping a customer or a patient or a student — but so many of us end up resenting our jobs anyway. Why? The answer, FIRE would suggest, lies not so much in the work itself as in the coercion that too often comes with it. A boss can demand we do something we know is wrong, and still we stay because we need the paycheck. Sonday's interviewees had found a way out of that bind. By achieving financial independence, they gained the option to walk away — which meant they could keep the elements of work they liked and reject the parts they didn't.
If hustle culture's long hold over America ever seemed to be breaking, it was in the aftermath of the pandemic. People rage-quit their soul-sucking jobs. They moved into remote roles that allowed them to spend more time with their families. They quiet-quit, refusing to go above and beyond. An entire country of frustrated employees finally rejected a norm around work that had grown wildly outdated.
But it didn't last. Our ability to escape hustle culture was ultimately contingent on an unusually hot economy that gave workers an upper hand. Once the job market soured, people had no choice but to go back to working long hours, return to the office, and stay silent in the face of mistreatment. They couldn't afford to get fired. The people who achieved financial independence were some of the only people who could.
The difference was that FIRE not only offered a new philosophy around work but also a practical toolkit to allow its followers to live that new philosophy. It taught people how to be frugal, how to earn a little extra, and how to invest their savings — so that they could be free regardless of the state of the economy. Quiet quitting came with no such manual.
That's not to say that FIRE is an achievable goal for the vast majority of Americans. One of the common criticisms of the movement is that it's doable for only the well off, even though it's cloaked in an anyone-can-do-it optimism. After all, you need to earn enough to even think about saving; the median household income in a 2018 survey of FIRE devotees was $109,402 (about $145,000 in today's dollars) and virtually all had a college degree. Sonday found that her interviewees were split on how attainable FIRE actually is. Some believed it was just a matter of tenacity. Others not so much. One person in a low-paying public-service job found that the community's success stories often glossed over the advantages that made financial independence possible, like having wealthy parents and being in a high-earning career. He didn't have those advantages, and he eventually stopped going to the meetups. Sonday wrestled with this question too. "Am I just studying a really privileged group of people," she wondered, "or is this actually a means to economic mobility?"
Another criticism is that FIRE is a hyper-individualistic response to a problem that actually calls for a collective solution. In Sonday's research, people felt so precarious that, even if they had jobs they liked, they still pursued FIRE. "Anything could change at any time," one corporate employee told Sonday. "My boss could leave. I could get a new boss that I hate. There might be an acquisition, changes to culture… or even something simple as my headquarters is moving in two years." The popularity of the movement seems to me a reflection of the intense cruelty of the economy we live in today — of the yearning we have for a sense that we're going to be ok. In a better world, we wouldn't need to build our own private escape hatches; we'd have laws that actually protect workers from being treated like disposable machines. But I get that FIRE followers don't feel like they can count on that.
Kiersten Essenpreis for BI
Despite the individualism of FIRE's solutions, one of the things that surprised me was how important the movement's social elements are. There are plenty of books and podcasts and blogs about FIRE that teach you its philosophy and its methods — the most foundational one being the 1992 book "Your Money or Your Life" that became the movement's original bible — but Sonday saw the power of the community the movement fostered. For many of its followers, the hardest part about FIRE wasn't just the penny-pinching lifestyle it requires but the isolation that lifestyle leads to: losing friends because you don't want to eat out, looking poor driving a beat-up car when all your coworkers drive brand new Teslas. It's lonely going against the grain. That's why its followers found so much solace in finding other like-minded "frugal weirdos," as some of them called themselves. One person told Sonday that FIRE gives them "a sense of belonging to something — knowing that there are others out there that care about this and it's ok to not feel a part of the mainstream culture."
Perhaps that feature of FIRE — that it's so far outside the mainstream — is also why it's so often misunderstood. Even a few of Sonday's colleagues were initially skeptical when she told them she wanted to study the movement back in grad school. Why would she want to study a group of people who didn't want to work? But Sonday sensed there was something deeper there. She says she hasn't become a total convert, but she does feel more attuned to her own relationship with work and money and happiness. "I probably save more money than I would have if I hadn't met the group," she tells me.
During the pandemic, I resolved to form a different relationship to work from my previous overworking days, and I've been searching for the right approach for me ever since. The thing that I've come to realize, though, is just how hard it actually is to quit hustle culture. I no longer put in 60 hours a week, but I feel guilty about it. I'm scared of losing my job in a media industry that gets smaller by the year. In difficult moments, I still catch myself burying myself in my work, clinging to my old belief that writing bigger stories and winning awards will help me feel fulfilled. As my sister often tells me, I'm a bad hustle-culture defector.
I'm still not convinced FIRE is the right path for me. I've already spent a lot of my life forgoing the present for a future reward and FIRE would require me to do even more of that. But I admire the community's search for an alternative approach that, for some, has brought a kind of freedom few of us ever stop to imagine. There's a reason I've kept writing about movements like quiet quitting and search funds and the overemployed: They all reject the American Dream, of toiling for 30 years in the hope of one day becoming a senior vice president.
That dream is dead for so many of us, and we're desperate for a new one we can actually believe in. For all its flaws, FIRE is the most robust alternative we've seen yet, and I'm hopeful there will be more in the years ahead.
Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.
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