Those in the Financial Independence Retirement Early community work hard. That statement on its own is not much of a surprise for those familiar with the community. Yet it’s counter-intuitive—why do insanely productive and industrious people want to retire young? I think it has something to do with two things: characteristics common to those in the FIRE community, as well as the state of our workplaces today.

Many in the FIRE community have these characteristics in common:

  • Extremely productive. Many work hard or have multiple jobs or “hustles.” If someone is a natural worker, someone who likes to produce and who has achieved and followed the rules throughout her life, why would they be leaving the realm of paid word? Many spent a decade in professional school gaining extremely valuable (and expensive) sills. People like me started out our careers making little. I could have easily ridden out another ten years making a large salary, but I walked away. The majority of active FI folks I see online are in their early 30s, actively planning to exit before their 40th birthday.
  • Highly conscientious personality types. This naturally complements the planners, savers, investors of the FI movement.The more conscientious you are the more you take your company’s issues to heart as your own. As a manager, I felt extreme stress not so much for me, but for my staff, and their staff. Unless you’re the boss, you’re effectively a middle-manager. Little control and high conscientious is a receipt for stress —and burn out.
  • Come from high earning professions such as software engineers, doctors or business executives. I also see a lot of teachers.The high-earning profession makes sense. Of course those who make a lot of cash can retire early, since they can achieve the high savings rates needed. Good luck even thinking about the future if you earn minimum wage or are close to the poverty line. But I think there is something else at work driving a cohort of high achieving, highly productive out of the workforce in their peak earning years: burn-out.

The way we’re working, especially in the professions mentioned above, is making people sick, and the ranks who come from the tech, medical and business worlds, while receiving good pay and benefits, are willingly leaving it because of the working conditions of the modern workplace.

A new book called Dying for a Paycheck shows how difficult it can be to be a worker in America today.

“In one survey, 61 percent of employees said that workplace stress had made them sick and 7 percent said they had actually been hospitalized. Job stress costs US employers more than $300 billion annually and may cause 120,000 excess deaths each year. In China, 1 million people a year may be dying from overwork.  People are literally dying for a paycheck.”

In my twenty-years of working in Silicon Valley, I found companies kept reducing work force through lay-offs, but the amount of work kept increasing. My company grew its revenue exponentially in a few short years, and only hired a handful of additional bodies. Productivity gains in the American workforce have been rising for years. This isn’t all robots. This is more work with the same amount of workers.

Of course, the type of business job I had is far more comfortable than most working-class professions. Physical strain, no health insurance, no paid days off for sickness or family caregiving: this is reality for many. And many of those people simply don’t make enough to save the amounts needed to retire at any age, nevertheless early.

My grandfather picked fruit as a teenager during the Depression, lost fingers on his hand from wood working when still a child, and then labored as a house painter six days a week. He loved work, even thought it was hard, and in fact died at the age of 93 in an accident while working. My career was in comparison a cake-walk, yet objectively it was mentally and emotionally exhausting. At least for me.

Independence

Of course there is another personality trait in the FI community—independence. I wanted my freedom. I want to be productive in the way I value productivity, not just how the market defines it. Writing fiction, making art and music, caring for others, relaxing: these things aren’t generally valued in the marketplace in the United States. I still like to work for money, but on my terms, and without the responsibilities of team members and a company’s future I felt in my corporate job. My conscientious personality-type worked against me, all while proving valuable to my employer.

If our workplaces made changes such as limiting technology requirements after working hours, forcing time-off, allowing flexible and work-from-home schedules without penalizing advancement and just plan less work, would as many of our brightest still be walking out on their careers?

A specialist in the medical field has a tremendous amount to gain by staying in her profession, but droves are “dropping out” because of burn out. Similarly, we don’t have enough software engineers. With the looming retirements of baby boomers, there will be shortages of all kinds in the labor pool.

As a society (and planet), we would be much better off if we worked less hours, but for more years, and bought less stuff. Yet companies seem less inclined to be flexible with part-time positions, job-sharing or basic work-life balance issues. We’ve gotten into an all-or-nothing world where complexity and work is piled upon a few highly skilled people, while others have limited options. Will the FI movement shed a light on this and force changes in the workplaces of the future? I believe as a society we would far better off with less extremity, and more balance. Do you agree?