u/Complete-Regret-4300

I realised after working in corporates for 22 years and achieving FI, one thing. I had aced the corporate fakery game. In those 22 years I had slacked most of the time in various companies. Only 2 companies where there was real stressfull work and I quit them in 6 months. Rest of the time or couple of decades I slacked and yet managed to create a pretence of doing important work/useful work. I was often in managers good books and I knew how to do just enough and get good ratings and hikes and promotions. Although I always had the imposter syndrome because of this fakery, so I chose the FIRE path and couldnt wait to get out of corporate life.

Then enter Real World: I pulled the plug returned back to Bangalore and said enough of the fakery let me be myself and do real things. I realized the real world is brutal out there. I pretty much failed in everything that is real.

1. I joined badminton, used to play horribly but I was a beginner so it was okay. But after 6 months, I was still playing horribly and there is no faking it here like in corporates. If you are a bad player in doubles, you will know it and everyone knows it. You can't be a bad player and play for long.

2. I took up riding. I used to go for groups rides solo rides, I even did a ride to Kannur from Bangalore which is 320kms. That particular long ride I realised, my back really hurts, I cannot ride for more than 2hrs, after that I needed to take a break every 10 mins. What should have been a 7hr ride became a 12hr ride.

3. I decided to take up mutual fund distributor certification from AMFI. The exam itself was easy peasy. I thought I accomplished something for all my knowledge about financial planning I had practiced all this while. But then when I tried to get clients, I couldn't even get 1, not even 1Rupee or AUM. Not even from people who were close to me, relatives, friends, none.

This is when I realized, it was so easy for someone like me to fake it in corporates and be a winner. But post FIRE, I wanted to do something in the real world, things that were of genuine interest to me, badminton, riding bikes, being involved in financial industry. But I realized it is very hard work to make it work even in things that you love. I didn't have the motivation or the willingness to put the effort to become successful in any of these pursuits.

So now I am back again in a corporate job that pays 1/4th of my previous fulltime pre FI job and this time again as always, I am slacking, I resolved one issue yesterday, worked total of like 2hrs in the entire week and I got this sense of accomplishment/achievement without really doing anything impactful or material.

My previous post seems to have confused a lot of people especially on the concept of time.

Most people think of time in absolute, they think when you are 20 you have lots of time and when you are 60 you have no time left. Most of the consumption or experiences discussion is focussed on this.

However, there is lot of nuance in this. Time is a relative concept. We wake up every day and then we go to sleep in the night. In between these 2 events what we get is the time for our actual usage. Different people value it differently. You can be in your teens or your 20s and be a very busy person and you have no time at all. Time just passes. Whether you are enjoying that time or you are not is a different question, but basically you have no time.

Where as the opposite can also be true, you could be a teen or your 20s and you are whiling away your time sitting on a couch. You don't know what to do and you have abundance of time.

So from FIRE perspective, this discussion is driven mostly by people who are busy and make the most of their time, they always feel a shortage of time and hence the quest to buy back time to do most of the stuff they love.

However, this doesn't apply universally. Most people take their day one day at a time and may not have any ideas on what to do with their time. They might just get bored and hence they need a job and an identity to kill that time. So FIRE doesn't help such people, infact it creates new problems related to questions around purpose of life and existence.

I was part of the original Fire India community, there used to be lots of discussion on SWR, ERN rising equity glide paths etc. This was 4 years ago, when Indian markets were roaring and the experts here kind of extrapolated everything that applies to US also applies to India.

Those days Indian mutual funds were allowed to invest in global equities. Yet, experts here would say max 10% should be invested in global equities, even people like Pattu and Handa who was considered like God here would stick to some bog standard Indian active funds, but never consider single country risk.

But fast forward 4 years, Indian rupee is tanking, Indian equities are tanking, Indian bonds also are tanking. The entire premise of asset allocation has gone for a toss, because we were all playing in a small well, ignoring the ocean of global markets. The well is now drying up and it is impossible to jump out of this well, if you want to buy anything dollar denominated now, good luck.

All those people who hated NRI posts few years back, well another reason to envy them even more now. If you just kept your assets in USD bank account, you would have outperformed Indian assets, in the last 4 years. Does that sting?