Why FIRE is for Idiots: The True Playbook for Building Wealth in 2025

There is a community on the internet called FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early).

I commend these people for taking an interest in finance, but I’m sorry to say, these guys are spiritually and financially cucked.

The FIRE community can be summed up in a single sentence:

Eat two minute noodles every night for 15 years and invest all the money you save by being a basement dweller into index funds, until you can eventually retire by drawing down anywhere between 3-5% of your portfolio each year once it reaches a certain size.

At this point you might be thinking

‘RA, what’s wrong with that? Sounds like a good idea? They’re saving and investing, what’s the problem?’

And look, I get it.

I get the appeal of this strategy.

I get that it can be tempting to just spend your life saving and investing.

But there’s a big problem I have with it.

Retirement is a stupid concept.

It’s stupid now, and it will be even more stupid post-AGI.

My beef with the FIRE movement is these guys never actually live.

They never show an intention to live.

The whole movement is about delaying gratification so you can begin living in your ‘retirement’.

Like, really?

That’s really what you want to do with your one life?

Eat two minute noodles, get the pleb mobile (bus) everywhere, and never go out?

What are you retiring into?

They are spiritually devoid of meaning.

They are falling for the same psyop as the boomers:

Work a job you hate your entire life and one day you will enter the goldilocks zone called ‘retirement’, where you will be free and happy and magical - and almost dead.

Life has to be lived with meaning.

Otherwise it’s completely pointless.

You need something worth suffering for.

These guys suffer so they can make it to the ‘end’ (retirement), but then what?

What are they going to do all day?

Sit around eating doritos and moderating Reddit forums?

And yeah, you can make the argument ‘RA, surely that’s still better than them working some corporate slopjob though?’

And yeah, you might be right.

But it is their entire psychology of life I have a problem with.

You see, winners win.

They generally don’t adopt frugality for extended periods of time to ‘retire’, they instead find a way to make significantly more money.

And in the process, they develop a skill.

Maybe they’re good at writing, or selling, or building things.

But the process - the journey - of trying to make money, develops them.

Which is why I am a huge advocate of increasing your income, and not bothering to reduce your spending (assuming you’re not buying stupid crap already).

I get this sounds counter intuitive.

Some may even think it’s brass.

And yeah, I can see that.

But I am trying to instil in you the psychology of winners.

Winners do not give a single shit about saving - they care about making more money.

No matter the cost.

Because they have an abundance mindset.

You have to have a deluded sense of your own ability to learn and achieve anything, else you’re going to fail and end up like these FIRE guys - psychologically weak.

So I’d like to propose an alternative acronym.

SILE: Sovereign Independence Live Early.

SILE embodies what you actually want to aim for: a life worth living now, not tomorrow, and one where you are sovereign - earning your own money, spending time with the people you want, doing the things you want, when you want.

How do you achieve SILE?

This is the general playbook (not financial advice):

1. Maximise your pro rata income, i.e. your income to effort ratio. For example If you earn $150K but can work 100% remotely, you likely have a high pro rata income because you can pretend to work all your hours whilst actually doing something else. If you’re in a profession where this is hard to do, perhaps consider working for the government. We all know how useless they are, and how much of our money they steal in return for making our lives worse. The rules of the game are broken - they broke them. So why not just go ‘work’ for the government? Go collect $100k from them a year, work from home 24/7, and see step 3.
2. Save in bitcoin. Bitcoin is money, everything else is credit. Bitcoin will have superior gains to incel index funds.
3. Spend all your hours outside of work building an audience on social media. Human beings are very unique. All of you have specific, unique, lived experiences. All of you know something about the world that others don’t. Maybe it’s related to your job or maybe it’s not? But you are unique.The question here is, what are you going to do with that uniqueness? My suggestion is, you start creating content online.Pick one platform and go deep. Do not diversify. One platform only. Then pick one topic you’re going to talk about. Not 2, not 15. Just a single topic. Write about it for 90 days straight. If you’re on Twitter, post a minimum once a day and interact with others also posting about it by replying to their content. Learn to write. If tweets are not getting engagement, mix it up. Attack it from a different angle. Think: what makes people emotional? Emotions sell, logic does not. Tap into their emotions then layer in the logic - this is how you actually get people’s attention - not with data and graphs per se (boring!). Learn to write. Vary your sentence length. Ask rhetorical questions. Are you paying attention? I hope so.
4. Monetise your audience. You’ve now spent 90 days creating content. Hopefully you’ve gained some traction. If not, pick a different topic and try again. Now it’s time to sell. What good or service relating to this content can you sell to your audience? Are you going to sell information, or ecommerce goods, or software? It’s usually one of these three you want to target. Why should they trust you? Do you understand what a marketing funnel looks like? Do you have a genuinely good offer for them? Do you understand the psychology of sales?
5. Once your income from step 4 approaches a number that covers your expenses, or is close to your day job’s normal income, quit your day job and live early. But don’t retire - double down on what is now making you money. Now that you’ve got your own income, start thinking about what other revenue streams could come from it. Expand. Keep trying new things until something hits.

This is the new playbook for building wealth in 2025.

But the window to even try this strategy is closing very quickly.

Why?

Because AI is going to severely disrupt the market for content.

If AI can produce text, images, video and sound as realistic as humans, how are you going to stand out?

It’s going to be a lot harder to get people’s attention.

So you have a limited time to build distribution (an audience).

The world we are heading towards is one where distribution is all that matters, because knowledge work is going to be commoditised by AGI.

If most knowledge work can be automated eventually, all that’s left is sales.

And sales is about authority.

You can build authority by building an audience.

White collar jobs are heading for serious trouble (I wrote about this here).

Even if it takes a while for them to disappear altogether, you can’t rely on the stability of a corporate job anymore.

Layoffs are everywhere, and these jobs are not coming back.

Even exceptional people are taking much longer between jobs to find something.

And besides, the salary you get from climbing the corporate ladder is capped, and too low - it’s not even nearly keeping up with house prices nor the cost of living.

The corporate slopshop does not have a ladder worth climbing.

It’s a complete dead end.

There is no downside to at least trying the strategy I am recommending here. Just spend an hour a day on it. Stop being a consumer of social media content and start being a producer.

Why not bet on yourself?

What do you have to lose?

Action produces information.

At least try to escape the rigged fiat financial system they’ve thrust upon us - what is the alternative?

FIRE is out, SILE is in.