[TheCapeGreek]

Sure, waste a decade or two and then live your real life.

FIRE is a nice idea, but in the pure sense it is really just the idea of deferring the life you really want to live. You might die before you get there.

The fisherman and businessman story come to mind here.

[tock]

1. The life I want to live doesn't involve optimising for a salary. I want to fish for fun. Not fish for a living.

2. High earning SV engineers can easily build a substantial corpus in under 10 years.

3. Most people don't know what they want to do. That means experimenting till you find it.

4. Its the safest way of figuring out and following your dreams I can think of. Of course you may die before 30 but thats statistically less probable. I am optimising for the case where I do live to the median age. Optimising for the worse case scenario seems too pessimistic.

[dwedge]

Trouble with the fisherman story is there's a modern version where the businessman comes back with AI and steals your lunch.