Originally Posted by
rickschoppers
That is because the government wants everyone to work until they die. If you drink the kool aid, that is exactly what most will do.
I'm not sure its just the government. I think most people just honestly don't consider the idea that you might not have to.
Take me for example. At 22 years old, my wife and I both set out on a career path to become tenured track professors here in the U.S. Three years into grad school, we both were working 70 hours a week on research that just really wasn't all that meaningful or fulfilling. And this would be the rest of our lives.
Feeling a little burned out, we decided to take a year off and travel. That was our first trip to Thailand.
That trip was life changing, not because of anything that really happened or in some "discover yourself" kind of B.S. way, but just because it raised this question: "What if"?
What if we didn't
have to work for the rest of our lives? What if, instead, we could do what we actually wanted to do? We had just never just never even considered the idea before.
That's how ingrained the "work, live, retire, die (shortly thereafter)" mentality is. We never even considered it.
We never went back to our old jobs after that. They weren't fulfilling, and they never offered a path or future to early financial independence.
Its been just over ten years since we left. We are currently on track to retire before we hit forty years of age.