r/financialindependence • u/Hold_onto_yer_butts 33/35 SI2K | SR: lol nanny | GI.GO% BroFI • 25d ago
“The Great Resignation”, Walden, and FIRE - a fantastic article by Cal Newport ties it together FI Lifestyle
This got posted in the Daily by /u/Stunt_Driver, but I thought it deserved its own writeup. There was a fantastic short piece in The New Yorker yesterday titled “Why Are So Many Knowledge Workers Quitting? The coronavirus pandemic threw everyone into Walden Pond,” by Cal Newport. It’s a relatively shallow but poignant look at the stories of knowledge workers who have discovered what (to me) is the soul of the older-school FIRE themes - basic minimalism, and a grounded sense of the true meaning of “enough.”
He lays out a few vignettes that are emblematic of “The Great Resignation,” the mass exodus of knowledge workers from traditional employment during COVID:
In early June, the Labor Department released a report that revealed a record four million Americans had quit their jobs in April alone—part of a phenomenon that news outlets called “The Great Resignation.”
They share similar themes, of individuals rediscovering what is important and how little the luxuries and frivolities brought to their lives, then deciding exactly how much was enough for them. He ties that back directly to Walden, which I admittedly haven’t read in probably 15 years.
Newport calls out that Thoreau was far more quantitative and analytical than he remembered from his first read:
The first and longest chapter in “Walden” is titled “Economy,” and it features multiple data tables that catalog every expense related to Thoreau’s time in the woods near the town of Concord, Massachusetts. The cost of the materials required to build Thoreau’s cabin, in case you’re wondering, sums to twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents.
This obviously ties nicely in to this community, with our spreadsheets tracking our essential and nonessential expenditures and our focus on cutting out the unnecessary (Thoreau’s Venetian blinds and shiny copper pumps) to spare time, space, and resources for the essential.
I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the marginal cost vs marginal benefit argument, and it echoed one I frequently see in the Daily Discussion Thread.:
The key to Thoreau’s “new economics,” to use a term by the philosopher Frédéric Gros, was to demand an accounting for the implicit price of this extra effort. “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run,” Thoreau writes. Venetian blinds are nice, but if they require you to work extra acres of land, which in turn requires extra hours of labor from you per week to maintain, are they nice enough to justify all of that squandered life? Wouldn’t you get similar pleasure from walking through the woods and staring at ice?
Overall, I think this is probably the best piece of contemporary writing I’ve seen about the so-called “FIRE Movement,” and it does us the great service of not even mentioning the name.
EDIT: Y'all seem really, really focused on whether or not people are actually retiring more quickly. The author himself notes this may be a temporary trend, and this may simply be reflective of a reshuffling. The far bigger point he's trying to make is one about mindfulness - one about an intentional life.
121
u/Slammedtgs 25d ago
One interesting trend I’ve seen in my part of the world, is that this great resignation is going to be a boom for offshoring a lot of position.
In my company, we’ve had 5-10 highly paid folks leave this year. No attempt was made to hire locally, those roles have been off-shored to low cost Asian countries at comfortable US wages. I honestly feel this will bite us as a society a decade down the road, but for now, everyone basks in their stock market gains.