You can enjoy your job and pursue FIRE. FIRE just gives you options. You can either stop working, do other work that doesn't pay as well or at all, or keep working and live at a much higher standard of living. Maybe the company you like working for only gives you a few weeks off per year and you want to take 1-2 months of unpaid time off. Maybe you don't want to care about layoffs or market changes or bad management. Maybe one day you wake up and decide you want to spend time with your kids and productive work can take a breather for a while.
It's foolish to focus just on enjoying your job right now, finances be damned, without planning for the future. For what it's worth, I think it's also foolish to despise your job every day for years and years just to retire a few years earlier. But that's not what FIRE is, that's just one group of people taking it to extremes, as is common in any endeavor. For most people, it just means diligently and consistently setting money aside that will give them a level of freedom that those who don't will never achieve.
Yep - this is my take, financial independence gives you freedom.
It's not about hating your job (or even loving your job) - it's about buying your own independence. For those without family wealth it's building your own safety net and bringing money related anxiety to zero and making it easier for your children to take bigger risks too.
This lets you take more risk (like doing a startup) with the downside risk contained. There's a reason startups are more often started by people with family wealth, they're ultimately risking a lot less.
Americans work hard in part because there's more upside potential than in Europe, but there's also more downside risk. I think we could do more to protect the lower bound which would be good for entrepreneurship and society, but we shouldn't put restrictions on the upside (I'd argue restricting upside disincentives risk taking and wealth creation).
One of my main 'contrarian' opinions is that wealth inequality isn't actually a big deal, and as long as you protect the lower bound is desirable in a society. You also need to control how that wealth is leveraged into political power though (and that can be a problem).
Maybe we are talking past each other. By “FIRE” I mean the ability to live on investment income, exclusively and permanently, decades before a typical retirement age.
Retirement on a normal schedule and security for a few months of rest here and there are, I would say, baseline financial responsibility (if you can afford them). These are marginal sacrifices, not a lifestyle/subculture.
It's foolish to focus just on enjoying your job right now, finances be damned, without planning for the future. For what it's worth, I think it's also foolish to despise your job every day for years and years just to retire a few years earlier. But that's not what FIRE is, that's just one group of people taking it to extremes, as is common in any endeavor. For most people, it just means diligently and consistently setting money aside that will give them a level of freedom that those who don't will never achieve.