> [article author's wife] Not exactly. I wanted to have kids with you and work and be like everyone else. Live a normal life. I’m tired of being weird. And I don’t want to go back to work if you aren’t. That’s weird too. You wouldn’t even be a stay-at-home-dad. You’d be nothing.

this part is confusing. it seems like she's saying she wanted to be working and have kids the whole time? hard to understand how you could get that far along the path without realizing it's the exact opposite of what you want. a more reasonable way to understand the quote is that she simply changed her mind after realizing the implications of their life path.

which leads to a more reasonable way of interpreting this line:

> [article author] And that was it. That the second big ticket problem, critical issue #2. She couldn’t get her head around the idea that we were different.

I think (or at least hope) the author isn't saying they are special people with some kind of special destiny to FIRE. if I read it as "she couldn't accept our being different [from our friends]", it makes a lot more sense. I think the author is painfully aware that working and starting a family is the "normal" thing to do.

It is ultimately his perspective but I agree, he was one layer of abstraction away from calling her a "normie". She had goals and ambitions he didn't share; that doesn't mean she "doesn't get it", it means they're different people.

What it tells me is that there are two really important and serious things you need to consciously commit to in order to be compatible with this lifestyle. 1. Set aside that urge to keep up with the Joneses, and 2. Stop deriving life meaning from employment. These habits can be deeply ingrained in someone's personality, like an addiction in remission, and may rear their heads even if you agree to deliberately try to fight it. I don't think this is genetic. It comes from a lifetime of social conditioning, from watching your parents and friends do it. I'd actually like to read more about the strategies people have successfully used to deprogram themselves and help their loved ones also move past these things, helping them make the jump to FIRE (or regular-retirement).

Yeah I feel like he has a fairly dim view of a typical lifestyle based on some faulty assumptions. He seems to think that “staying on the treadmill” would be done by most people primarily for vain or frivolous reasons. That might be a part of it, but many people want or need these things out of necessity. Withdrawing from from working life and living like an austere hermit is not going to fly for a family of 4, for example. Hell, he was not even able to make it work as a couple. Very few mothers are going to tolerate raising a family on 30k a year when they damn well know their partner can go out and make 5x that much.

I also really question the whole living on 30k thing with 950k in the bank. That could be invested into some monthly paying income ETFs that would easily pay double if not more what he was taking out. Without even touching the principal.

Yep. Author is avoiding the hardest realizations and emotions here. I don’t necessarily blame them, but they’re gonna need to confront that to have a healthy relationship in the future.