5 Years in....
I walked away from a pretty lucrative tech career a little over 5 years ago - every now and then I do a little retrospective for myself and sometimes a Reddit post. You can check my profile if you would like to read any of them.
The FIRE stuff: net worth now about $10M, wife is still working (she loves what she does), we draw down about 2.5% per year, but thanks to this massive bull market our nw has grown pretty steadily even though I am a fairly conservative investor. I've enjoyed managing our money/financial affairs and have done reasonably well in minimizing tax drag, and efficient spending etc. I'm 57 now with kids all out of the house. Spend most of the year in the PNW and an increasingly large chunk of the winter in southern Europe. Net, I've finally arrived at a spot where I both feel financially secure and permanently retired.
The journey: Looking back from 5 years on is an interesting view. It's definitely taken time to build this version of my life, but I'm in a pretty great place (knock on wood). Would definitely advise peeps to go into any kind of early retirement being patient and knowing that to some degree you need to slowly reconstruct your life, and to be prepared to work on yourself as well. Our society isn't really built for people retiring at 51, you walk away from a big chunk of your social interactions/meaning construct when you stop working and perhaps most importantly, those around you may not feel as "finish line" as you do.
That said, I'm really appreciative of where I am now. Here are some of the big themes in my life:
Service - this has really started to ramp up in the last 18 months and am now doing ~1/2 day a week. I do hospice companionship and volunteer at an organization for undocumented workers. Not about quantity, just quality. The hospice work has been a total perspective reset for me.
Hobbies & learning - a lot of how I fill my time. I love to garden, grow food/flowers, cook for the family, make bread, pizza etc. I started learning spanish when I quit and that has been a multi-faceted journey - most of my reading is now in Spanish (which is a whole new world). I love seeing live music and go to a couple of festivals and see 20-30 additional shows a year. I'm a european football fanatic and go to matches when I'm there (and watch in Spanish when I'm not). I've always been fitness oriented, but in the last year joined a crossfit gym and absolutely love the community there. I didn't have most of these hobbies when I was grinding and definitely didn't have a ton of time for them either. I've just slowly added and leaned into the things that light me up.
Relationships and community - spans all of these. When I walked away from my job, I left a lot of stress and gained a lot of time. I've tried to use that to work on myself and my relationships. BTW, it becomes pretty evident the state of your relationships when you have time to observe. Relationships and community for me has a different meaning now than just my friends - I'm really appreciative of the communities I've entered through volunteering and now crossfit as well as some of my other hobbies (e.g. wild mushroom foraging). I really like connecting with people, which honestly has meant leaning into new things and away from of the superficial (e.g. country club) environments from before. I try to engage with everyone - I'm the weird guy who says hello to everyone at concerts.
Here's some of the "tooling" I use:
Relationship counseling - saved my marriage, and we continue to check in when we get stuck.
Insight meditation - just in the last ~2 years, wish I had started earlier.
Psychedelics, especially MDMA - profound tools for seeing things from different perspectives
Introspection - writing, and now sometimes even with AI
It's all about meaning. Good luck out there!