Spectrum of Suffering

-Or how I learned to deal with lifestyle inflation-

Like every FI blogger and their mother, I submitted something for JL Collins’ new book project called Pathfinders. Because hey, on the off chance they actually pick this, maybe it will lead more than two people (and 18 Chinese bots) to read my blog. It was actually kind of fun writing something within the loose constraints and deadline associated with the project, so that was cool. Anyone else out there write something for the Pathfinders project? If so, please link below in the comments. It’d be sweet if we all shared our submissions, I bet there’s some good stuff that won’t make the cut.

Here be what I submitted:

Like many, I remember the happiest moments of my life vividly. My top two are quite conventional:

Tied for number 1: The birth of both my kids.

Number 2: My wedding.

I legit cried at each of these, the joy was so intense. Nothing abnormal there. But when we get to number 3, things get a bit unconventional:

No shit, there I was; sitting on the freezing ground in the dark, covered with my army issued poncho, leaning against my rucksack. Though it was winter, the cold had broke, and it was just warm enough to rain instead of snow. The pitter patter of raindrops played a beautiful melody as I tore open a pouch of prepackaged chili, my only meal for that day. Machine guns suddenly interrupted the musical downpour. I smiled and felt a warm glow of contentment. This was the third most happy moment of my life.

That moment was years ago, when I was deep in the mountains during a lengthy army training course. At that point I’d been in the course for months. Soldiers such as I were sent to learn the finer points of leading and fighting in austere conditions, and we played war games against other soldiers who worked at the course, whose full time job entailed their constant harassment and ambushes of our meager force. Both sides were armed with blanks; the course’s instructors refereed the notional battles, determining who was a casualty and the severity of the wounds.

There were some constants to the course:

We were never allowed to sleep more than four hours, and usually less than that. Of the nearly five months I spent in the course, I spent a few days sleeping inside heated barracks. The rest of the time we slept outside on the bare ground. We were only allowed to use sleeping bags if it was below freezing, the rest of the time we wrapped ourselves in ponchos. We were allowed one prepackaged meal every 24 hours, but sometimes went days between meals. We carried everything we needed on our backs; water, sparse food, but plenty of ammunition, weapons, night vision goggles, and communication gear. Our packs weighed at least 65 pounds, not counting the weight of our rifles that we had to carry everywhere. We rotated through carrying heavy machine guns and their associated equipment every few days. When functioning as a machinegunner, our packs weighed over 80 pounds, and instead of carrying an 8 pound rifle, we had to lug around a weapon weighing more than triple that.

That was my life for months. When I left the course I weighed 50 pounds less than when I started. I was in phenomenal shape at the start of the course, when I left I could see each of my ribs and all of my joints ached constantly despite being in my early 20’s. I distinctly remember smelling ammonia in my sweat the last few months as I trudged up yet another mountain. The medics explained the scent was an indicator that our bodies had burned all of our fat, and were now eating our own muscle.

These conditions became my normal, and at some point during that training I accepted it was currently my job to be miserable. Which leads to why my number three most happiest moment in my life was hearing machine guns and eating cold prepackaged chili in the rain.

I knew the guns firing meant that the instructors had caught our machnegunnners nodding off as we took a ten minute break in the middle of the night to quickly scarf down our daily meal. As I’d been in the course awhile, I knew the instructors would then follow a set script, where they would start by turning around the machine gun loaded with blanks, firing it at all of us( to drive home the point that the enemy could have snuck up and done the same, thanks to our understandably sleepy comrades), and then they would start working their way around each group of soldiers to make sure we were all awake before they made us grab our stuff and have us run up and down a nearby mountain as punishment. I smiled because I knew my position was the furthest from the machine gunners, so it would take over 20 minutes before the instructors got to me. My break time had just doubled! And I was relatively warm, dry, and on my way to being fed. I figured I could eat in less than five minutes, and get a solid 15 minute nap in. Knowing this, that smile spread across my face, and I was happy.

That moment in time represents the cheapest my cost of living has ever been. Though the Army provided me with everything I needed, if I were to replicate such a lifestyle using backpacking gear and living in public forests, I could live in relative comfort for less than $8k a year. Hell, I could sleep more and eat triple what I was given in that course, plus since I wouldn’t be dragging a bunch of weaponry around, my pack would be under 40 pounds. In comparison to the life I lived for months in those mountains, that sounds like pure luxury. Of course my lifestyle has inflated since then; almost in lockstep with the other happiest moments of my life.

A few years after leaving that Army course I became a cop, and my standard of living shot up. At first I was amazed at the abundance my higher paying career provided, and enjoyed that I no longer was training or deployed for months at a time. I fell into the standard pattern most young professionals do; eating out constantly, going out for drinks a few times a week, and generally not paying attention to money. 

A few more years later I met my then girlfriend/now wife. Shortly thereafter I got on the SWAT team and also became a detective, both roles increased my spending considerably. Previously as a street cop I patrolled an inner-city neighborhood and wasn’t allowed to drive outside its confines during my 8 hour shift. This restricted my restaurant choices to either McDonalds or a local BBQ joint that was worse than the golden arches. I brought my lunch most days. When I became a detective, I was then allowed to go to any restaurant I wanted, as we investigated crimes all over the city. 

The detective job included lots of overtime, and I was constantly getting called out for SWAT incidents. This meant I was working over 12 hours a day, and sometimes would be gone for days with just a few hours off in between. I started eating out twice a day, somewhat out of necessity but encouraged by the plethora of delicious restaurants all over the city. My bank account didn’t seem to notice; though I wasn’t tracking my spending at the time, I imagine the increase in spending was balanced by the extra income from all of the overtime. 

I did notice a strange effect though. Back when I was a street cop, I used to look forward to eating at my favorite burrito joint on my days off. Once I could eat there three times a week as a detective, my enjoyment waned. This was the first time I consciously noticed my lifestyle inflating but not bringing about an increase in happiness. 

My then girlfriend was introduced to the Dave Ramsey stuff through an amazing coworker, and she passed his book on to me. A few years later I paid off the 1100 square foot house in an inexpensive working class neighborhood I’d luckily bought right after the great recession. In the midst of the paydown we discovered the FIRE movement.

We went hard core, and started tracking every expense. Our records don’t go back that far, but I remember our pre-FIRE food costs were steep. I began prepping a week’s worth of meals on my days off, and started bringing my lunch to work everyday, along with a healthy stockpile of snacks for when I worked late. We made some tweaks and my monthly expenses hovered around $1K a month. Per the 4% rule, my FI number was $300K, and my projections showed I was just 4 years away from getting there. I went back to eating at my favorite burrito joint on the occasional day off, and suddenly I started savoring it again. Oddly I noticed that a little lifestyle deflation seemed to have increased my happiness.

We got married two years after finding FIRE, and as stated above, I cried tears of joy at the ceremony having wed the love of my life. We had been dating for years, and married when we felt ready for kids. Both of us were committed professionals, my wife an engineer moving up at her company, while I continuously took on more challenging assignments. We wanted to make sure we had a good footing professionally before kids were on the table. With both of us finally feeling secure at our jobs we got hitched. Then our lifestyle inflated.

The neighborhood we lived in, the one I described as inexpensive, working class? Others might have different choice words for it. Vandalism increased, and the occasional robbery happened. The SWAT team I served on was called to a house a few blocks south of mine to deal with an armed barricaded shooting suspect. There were a lot of good people that lived there, but it was not the type of place we wanted to raise kids. A year after we married, we moved to a nicer neighborhood. We bought one of the smallest houses there, but the added costs brought my monthly average expenses to $1250 a month. Just as my net worth was more than halfway to my previous FI number of $300K, my new FI number became $375K. And we hadn’t even started having kids yet. 

Though we got used to the slightly larger house pretty quick, I noticed that I felt much less stressed coming home to our new, safer neighborhood at the end of a shift. This feeling has stuck with me over the years, and occasionally I’ll drive by our previous house and thank my lucky stars our kids aren’t growing up there. This was probably the first time I realized that spending more money in certain, deliberate ways could actually improve our lives.

A couple years after moving, we finally had our first kid. Tied for first place on happiest moment ever. Looking at our financial tracking spreadsheet, the expense needle didn’t move immediately. But it sure did when we started daycare a few months later. Like many parents, we were conflicted about handing our kid off to unknown people and didn’t love the high cost of full time child care, so we started off with half day daycare. With me working night shift and my wife working normal hours, we arranged it so our son was in daycare less than four hours a day. My wife would drop him off around eight, and I would pick him up before noon. I would get 5-6 hours of sleep if I hadn’t had to work late, and then go straight into taking care of our son until my wife got home at 5pm. We’d see each other for maybe 20 minutes, then I’d rush into work.

We did this for almost a year, and the dent part time daycare put in our expenses was minimal. Mine climbed to near $1500 a month, making my FI number $450K. In addition to our young son getting up at all hours of the night, we were compounding our sleep deprivation by my working night shift and our refusal to keep our son at daycare longer. With me working half of the weekends, and my wife and I essentially parenting in shifts, we rarely saw each other. 

Part of our rejection of more daycare was my motivation to keep my expenses low. Though my wife and I tracked our finances together, we evenly split the household bills and costs associated with our son, but had separate tracking for our income, expenses, savings, and net worths/FI numbers. My wife, being the reasonable one, had lowered her savings rate after giving birth to accommodate eating out with her coworkers more frequently and indulging in purchases related to her knitting and crochet hobby. This kept her sane despite the increased stress of parenting. I went in the opposite direction.

I watched with fear as my FI number grew first when we moved, then when we became parents. I went uberhardcore, barrelling past frugality into deprivation. My coworkers made fun of my rice and bean meal habit, of which they observed frequently because I completely stopped eating out and volunteered for even more overtime. I had no hobbies, and in my rare free time obsessed about how to lower my costs. Afterall, if I can be at my happiest eating cold chili on the side of the mountain, I thought I could surely maintain my sleep deprived pace while I sprinted to FI with no ill effects. 

I was wrong.

My wife’s savings rate went down to 60%, mine neared 80%. My numbers looked great on our spreadsheet, but my misery approached the level of back when I trudged up and down those mountains years ago. Going from work to parenting to work, with no sleep or break in between was a different kind of suffering. Though I was well fed and not constantly freezing, it sucked in a new way that was just as unenjoyable. As I flirted with burnout, I finally admitted we needed to deliberately inflate our(mostly my) lifestyles if we were going to maintain sanity. 

We realized it was ridiculous to not keep our son in day care for a few more hours; he’d just be napping in the afternoons regardless if he was at home or daycare. Shelling out some more cash would buy me a few extra hours of much needed sleep. At the same time we were getting fed up with the way our parenting shifts were working. I was spending more time with our son, albeit sleep deprived, and my wife was feeling left out. Between parenting and my crazy job, I had no time to myself, let alone with my wife. 

We decided to make some drastic changes that would intentionally inflate our lifestyles and push our FI date back. We did the following:

1. Paid for full time day care, with our son going from 9am to 3pm.
2. My wife went down from 40 hours to 30 hours a week, which also reduced her pay by 25%. This gave her 10 more hours a week with our son, money well spent. I also passed up a promotion, and instead volunteered for a slower paced administrative position which kept me off of night shift. 
3. I sought out a hobby that would get me out of the house once a week. I bought a new mountain bike for $1300. This purchase hurt, but I needed a relief valve. Before we became parents I’d tooled around the local trails on my twenty year old mountain bike a few times. This crazy use of $1300 increased my enjoyment of those nearby trails considerably, and became a great way to relieve some stress. 

All of this upped my monthly average expenses to just over $1700; new FI number being $518K. I was bummed seeing the new average on our FI spreadsheet. The month my average expenses hit their new high, my net worth hit my old FI number of $300k. This hurt, but the sanity our new (and more expensive) lifestyle bought was worth pushing back FI even further. After getting over the bigger number, I marveled at how some deliberate, well thought out lifestyle inflation had increased our quality of life.

And then we decided to have kid number two.

Looking back to when we started thinking about having our first kid, we were more than a little optimistic about how we’d be able to keep expenses down despite adding a new member to our household. With a few years of parenting behind us, our eyes were wide open with how our FI goals would be affected when number two joined us. Thankfully both of us had been saving well over half of our income despite our constantly inflating lifestyle.

We received progressive salary bumps and my salary was pushed higher due to lots of mandatory overtime (a side effect of working in a violent city with an understaffed police department) . We kept the big three expenses low; stayed in our 1800 square foot house, drove used priuses(prii?), and most of our food is sourced from Aldi. Any spending outside of that was deliberate. All of this effort meant that right before our daughter was born, I coasted past my FI number. Of course that changed soon after she arrived. Again, it was worth it given that her birth was tied for number one happiest moment ever. Man, I cried a lot on that one. Actually knowing what I was getting into probably made a big difference.

I suppose economies of scale helped with kid number two; even with two kids in daycare my average spending only increased to $2250 a month, my FI number going to $675K. I’d love to say we surpassed that new FI number a year after we met our daughter because of some great investing skills, but really we just benefited from the crazy bull market which everyone else who stuck with indexing through the pandemic experienced. After reviewing Karsten Jeske’s work over at Earlyretirementnow.com, we realized that our inflated portfolios were nice, but a corresponding reduction in our assumed safe withdrawal rate was necessary. After running the numbers again, we realized I had amassed enough with a decent buffer to retire early from police work.

We had started thinking about me leaving my job in late 2019, but with all that was going in 2020 it just felt wrong to leave my fellow officers in the middle of that. That’s a whole other story, but in early 2022 I felt that I had more than done my time and could leave honorably. Despite several iterations of inflating our lifestyle, I was comfortable as I was ever going to be with leaving. 

In March of 2022 I left behind a pension worth over a million dollars, but would have required me staying on the force another 6 years to vest. Being able to spend more time with my family was my primary reason for walking away from that golden albatross, as working nights and weekends was a constant drag and the sleep deprivation of such a schedule made it difficult to be present as a parent. Six more years of being half asleep while our kids grew up just wasn’t worth it, especially since I had enough money to make work optional.

A big reason I was OK with leaving before I vested in my pension was drawing on the experience of having dealt with lifestyle inflation, and feeling the full spectrum of corresponding hedonic adaptation. In reviewing the happiest moments in my life, I was amazed I could be nearly as happy with a cold meal under a poncho on the side of the mountain as I could be in a nice climate controlled hospital meeting the most important people in my life.

This taught me one of the truisms of hedonic adaptation: suffering does not seem to exist on a spectrum, and neither does the height of happiness. I had thought miserable experiences like freezing and starving in the mountains for months or serving in a combat zone would make every other minor inconvenience afterwards seem trite. I wish that were the case, but years later I still get annoyed by little things like getting stuck in traffic. Sure, sometimes I’ll remember to put the little stuff in perspective, but I’m far from perfect.

Correspondingly, happiness is relative to the amount of suffering at the time, not relative to life overall. That’s why ten extra minutes under a poncho can be almost as amazing as meeting a new human. If life is a living nightmare, any minor improvement will be cherished. But in the amazing first world life I’ve been lucky enough to live in, it takes something truly awesome to bring about the same amount of increase in happiness. Realizing this made me understand that any extra spending on frivolous things was never going to move that happiness needle. Better to spend on the things that matter; like time with family, freedom, and mental health.

Following the hard lessons our experiences taught us, we’ve tried to only grow our lifestyle deliberately. I vividly remember feeling the minor pain of modeling new expenses in our spreadsheet and seeing our FI goalpost getting pushed further back. All those increases ended up doubling my original projection of four years to FI, but they were conscious decisions to build an enjoyable life in the present instead of white knuckling it to FI. The minor pain of number fluctuations was greatly outweighed by the joy of our family, and the alleviation of stress by improving our lives and reducing work.

Though we don’t know what the future may hold, I know we’ll draw on our past experiences to adapt to whatever comes next. We’ll follow the same process as we have so far: spend less than we earn, keep investing, and spend only on what we think will bring lasting happiness. 

What’d you think? As I mentioned before, I liked writing in this more constrained, assignment driven fashion as opposed to the normal meanderings that frequent my blog. Maybe I’ll do more stuff like that in the future. Again, if you submitted something, please feel free to leave a link to your work below.