Thanks @1000000CHF for creating this thread, this was needed on the forum 
A lot of good stuffs have already been said. However, I feel that there are many questions involved, and sometimes people try to answer one while actually answering the other, namely:
1. What makes me happy?
2. What will FIRE bring me? (Or more generally, what will money bring me?)
3. Why am I pursuing FIRE?
Of these three questions, the second one is by far the easiest to answer:
- money solves your money issues (if you are really poor, having more money will remove any unhappiness related to not having enough to live, however I bet it does not concern anybody on this forum)
- money buys time. And indeed FIRE allows you to buy a lot of time that you would otherwise spend working for your employer. Note that it does not say anything about how you can fill this time, this is totally up to you. If you have an interesting life (by your own standards), you can fill it with more interesting time. If your life is void, you will have a lot of time getting bored.
From this, you can see that FIRE is only loosely coupled to happiness: if you are already happy, FIRE will provide you with more happy time, but if you are currently depressed, being FIREd won’t be a lot of help.
That means you need to figure out your answer to question 1 (What makes me happy?) before reaching FIRE. This is an individual quest, but the below elements may help.
-
I’d focus first on removing all elements that are sure to make you unhappy (“Tell me where I am going to die, so i’ll make sure i don’t go there”), whatever else happens in your life. So make sure to remove these first:
- alcoholism and drug addiction
- chronic stress
- noise
- poor health
- a lengthy commute
- a job you despise (more about this later)
- a dysfunctional marriage
- stupidly high expectations
- loneliness
- spending too much time with people who are always complaining
- over-reliance on external validation
- constant self-comparison with others
- thinking like a victim/self-loathing
- chronic sleep deprivation (+1 with @ElMago on this one, and +1 with Why we sleep, by Matthew Walker. This book had the highest impact on me this year)
- anxiety
- depression
- rage
- envy
-
Once all the negative elements have been removed, focus on what really makes you happy. This is obviously personal, so I’ll share what works with me, which may or may not work with you…
- Being in the nature
- close relationships and family
- learning new skills and new concepts, and apply them to my life
- performing a task that is neither too easy (so i don’t get bored and it keeps me challenged) nor too hard (so I don’t fail or feel discouraged). This keeps me in a state of flow, where i am in focus, time is irrelevant, and i forget about everything else. For more about flow I would suggest reading this book, which introduced the concept.
- having the mindset that i am responsible for my life. I am not responsible for what happens to me (shit happens) , but i am responsible with how I respond to what happens to me. Whatever life throws at me, I can always choose my answer. This is part of stoic philosophy, i can give more references if someone is interested.
- physical activity (sports and co)
You will note that none of these elements involve money. I would argue that as long as you don’t live in abject poverty (when you cannot provide for your most basic needs), you don’t need money to focus on happiness. What money will bring you is more time to do what makes you happy (provided that you already found it).
In my case for instance, looking at the above list, I realized that if I reach FIRE, even if i don’t officially work, I will need for sure an occupation, else i will be likely to be extremely bored.
I want now to talk about the third question, namely “Why do I pursue FIRE”. I can see at least two categories of reasons why people usually want to FIRE:
- To do more of what make them happy (this is obviously fine, see above)
- To escape their current situation, very often a job they dislike
If the reason is the second one, the endeavor is flawed: FIRE looks like freedom, but a freedom from, not a freedom to. And this is very comparable to the mechanisms that people without money use to escape their reality: alcohol, drugs, mindless spending to get a rush, going to the night clubs to feel important… The process is the same, but when it fades off people realize they are still not happy.
And I guess this is exactly what the Mad Fientist went through in the article linked by @1000000CHF.
To finish this lengthy post on a better note, I tumbled by luck this morning on an article that is very relevant to this topic: Jakob, from ERE, shares as a guest post what he has been up to in the ten years since he has FIREd. The article is available here. Very cool to see how interesting a retired life can be, without spending much money (and yes, this includes boat racing…)
My 2 cents!