fyr.io

This has been posted as part of Blaugust 2026!

Retirement is not an age. It is not how many wrinkles you have on your face, the greyness of your hair, a medical condition, nor is it even a mindset. It is simply a financial position.

In the society I live in, a society that heavily revolves around money, retirement means having enough resources (assets and cash) to not need to exchange my time, knowledge or effort in order to obtain the funds that allow me to live the life I choose - pay bills, purchase food, maintain hobbies. There are a few ways to get there. A cheap(ish) option is to go off-grid, grow all your own food and only partake in free hobbies, but at some point I would need to interact with society. I probably need to use money for this. I'll very likely need to "own" the land I live on (what a concept?) and taxes will need to be paid. The dentist doesn't take carrots and tomatos as payment (not that I've asked, anyway?) and I'll probably want to exchange some of my money for conveniences - pay for something or someone to do some things that I don't wanna do. For example, perhaps I can't grow all the food my family needs all year as I don't have enough land, so I will need to purchase some.

I am lucky enough to live in a place that has a retirement age - a point at which the government will pay me just because I am alive. Well, not just because of that, it's actually because I would have paid a "tax" for a period of time - national insurance. Once I have paid at least 10 years and up to 35 years, I will get some money from the government until I die. The age at which I can start getting this money (67, though this is likely to increase by the time I am old enough to get it) is a way off yet. And it is not a lot of money. It'd be a pretty frugal retirement to rely on that state pension alone, which is why I also pay into a pension. These two combined are on track to provide me with a somewhat comfortable amount of money once I am old enough to withdraw the state pension, assuming my mortgage is paid off.

It is a goal of mine to not just be in a secure enough financial position to retire at the retirement age, but to instead have the option to retire early, before the national retirement age. The cool kids refer to this as FIRE. Financial Independance, Retire Early. I am an advocate of a slightly alternative perspective. Your bog-standard FIRE has grown into be rich enough to retire, nice cars, holidays, perhaps even some frivolous spending! but I subscribe to something called LeanFIRE - have enough passive income to pay the bills and not too much more. No crazy high income, no lavish holidays every month. Just... pay the bills. If I want a nice holiday or something, I'll go work part time for the money. Or get lucky with investments I suppose, but we won't rely on that.

To FIRE, you need to maximise income and save everything and build a huge pot of money. LeanFIRE however is more attainable to us regular average and below average earners. A key facet of LeanFIRE is to minimise expenditure. Lower (or fewer) bills means less of a pot needed, which means I can either get there at a more leisurely pace without the grind, or faster with less of a grind.

When I discussing retirement, particularly LeanFIRE, I usually get two responses.

1. That's the dream! I could do anything! Or nothing!
2. That's my nightmare! I'd be so bored!

The number 1's get it. Being in a secure enough monetary position that allows you to (probably, financial market decimation aside) never again work to pay your bills unlocks the ability for you to choose what you do with your time. The number 2's, however, either live to work or it hasn't quite clicked that having enough money to retire doesn't mean you stop working and stare at a wall all day. It just means that you can stop working if you want. You don't have to work that stressful job or put up with that bonehead manager. Or you can stop working for a paycheck and start working for a cause - something you believe in. You can start working to effect change, perhaps for a charity, or spend your time in your local area helping the elderly or a local school. Or you could have the freedom to start a uni course, or even a whole new career (or start a business!) on your own timeframe without worrying about how the hell you're gonna pay the electricity bill this month or... anything. It's Choice, friends. Being financially independent gives you the Choice about how you spend all of your remaining time in this reality.

And time, isn't that the most valuable of resources?

Inevitably, I'm asked by people I talk to about LeanFIRE what I would do if I could retire - Here's what I'd do.

Obviously, family comes first. I'd spend more time with my wife and kid. I'd do more chores so they don't have to. Work on the house more, bring it closer to 'home' status. Spend time in the garden, grow more food. Make the front garden not shit. Learn about native flowers and plants and stick 'em in the ground, letting them sort themselves out (under my watchful eye, of course) and become a bastion against the curated cultivated gardens you see everywhere.

I'd travel more (assuming I had the funds) with the family, explore the area, and the wider world. With any luck my wife would also be in a position to retire (we share finances as a household so presently it would be the case) and would be able to do all this with me if she wanted.

I'd read more. I've spent the last couple months reading more - Caliban's War, book 2 of the The Expanse series, The Satsuma Complex, Three Body Problem, and The Dark Forest, as well as a bunch of web serials. I read loads already, but mainly web serials, at night, on my phone. I miss paper, hence my recent uptick in page turning. It's... not impossible, but difficult to read a book when your life is wake, wash, work, eat, chores, kid, TV, sleep, repeat. There's a bit of space in there between kid and sleep, the TV bit is optional but there's little energy available, we use it to chill for an hour or so.

If I manage to retire, I'd still be left with loads of time to myself even if I did all the reading and chores and travelling I could muster. This is where hobbies come in to play.

Wait... Hobbies? What are they again?

Hrm. I don't have many hobbies, but the first thing I'd spend my time on is... you guessed it! Web stuff!

I would add so much stuff to this site, I may even whip up another. I have ideas for fun features, web games, informational pages that would require regular curation - none of it on the /ideas page as they're all unrealistic given the time I currently have available. Maybe I should add them anyway. I'd commit to Scraps being a regular thing instead of the, well, scrappy schedule it currently idles in. I'd keep on top of the human web goings on. I'd write blog post responses to other peoples blog posts. I'd follow way more people in my feed reader. I'd email more people, message more people. Maybe even write a letter or two. I would certainly post more here.

I wouldn't just keep to myself though - There are even products I want to build. For example I have an idea for a web based kanban tool (yep, yet another kanban tool!) which works how I want it to work, because none of the ones I've tried (and I've tried loads) work the way I want, half of them are bloated dependency-laden security-hole lagfests and the other half are so convoluted or just broken that they're essentially overengineered and ineffective at doing what kanban is supposed to instil - simplicity

I'd also spend a whole lot of time focusing more on the 32bit.cafe, building more resources for the community (like the Jitsi instance is fine but there's so much more cool stuff to do!), and build them faster. I'd create resources for other people. Onboarding to the web the non-commercial way, troubleshooting guides, tutorials, competitions, giveaways. Meetups? You betcha!

Through the 32bit.cafe and this site I would advocate for the human web and the community at large, collaborate on events and help run them if I can be of use. But absolutely provide a platform for others to run their own events, host their own webrings and websites, their own podcasts.

Speaking of podcasts, I want to start one. Tentatively titled "hear the human" (alternative suggestions more than welcome lol), where you'll hear the stories of the person behind the personal websites you find on the web, both big and small. Who are they? What do they want to say? How do they do web stuff? Why? (James has actually started a podcast just like this already! Check out Wonders of Web Weaving - He's currently four twelve (this post has been in Drafts since May x.x) episodes in and they have all been fantastic! There's also Over/Under which, whilst not a podcast is a very similar concept. It inspired my podcast idea in fact!)

I want to start a second podcast! A discussion based one, think an audio version of scraps, containing general indie web stuff, current affairs and goings on, explorations of tools and tech, discussions about cool posts and projects. I'd dip into a little bit of gaming and a lot of cybersecurity, discussing top tier pwns and mindblowing exploit chains, though maybe this would be a third podcast? (note: shellsharks started this exact thing a while back, hopefully it can return one day)

I'd contribute to things like html for people, collaborate with other creators, bring experts and teachers and students and the curious together and build something that's bigger than the sum of its parts.

Of course, none of this can actually happen. Not for me. A little bit of it? Probably. I can probably sleep a little less. Read a little less. Play a videogame a little less. Sacrifice across a few places to summon an extra 30 minutes somewhere to start building out one of these ideas. But there's only so much time in the day, and I have only so much energy. At the end of the day, I am depleted. It's why I don't post anything for periods of time - I want to add content here, I want to post more, I have post drafts ready to go! I want to do scraps every Friday(-ish.) But my need to work to pay the bills requires too much of me to do it all, especially recently, and probably for a little while yet. It'll get better, but even soon feels far away.

But, can this change? Can I find time and energy to start on some of this?

A while ago I read a comment by someone, somewhere, who said something like "if I could find 10,000 people to pay me $10 a year, I could quit and do this full time." This stuck in my head, because 10,000 people is not a lot of people relative to the estimated 6 billion people that use the internet in some fashion. $10 a year is not a lot of money for some of those people. It is, of course, a lot for a lot of them. Personally, I wouldn't need that much. You could probably half the dollar-amount and it would cover my living costs. It wouldn't be enough to retire forever or for my wife to quit working, but it would be enough to take my foot off the gas. Enough to give me my brain and my time back.

So, this then becomes a problem that can be re-framed. It's no longer "How can I retire?" or "How can I save up £xxx,xxx to live off the interest?", it's "how can I get ten thousand people to give me five dollars once a year?"

...I don't know the answer to that. Does it involve this site? I can't imagine many bloggers or podcasters earn that much money, especially without cramming their output full of ads, which I simply wouldn't do (podcast sponsor? Sure! Ad-filled trash blog posts? Nope.)

What about different kinds of writing? I used to write short stories, I've written hundreds of them in the past, and a few aren't terrible! It's something I enjoy and think about often, occasionally dipping into. I wrote a couple quick ones for a blog post I did a while ago to see if an LLM could pull out the content when I explored ways of stopping them from sucking down things you write online. I really enjoyed writing them. (They're in the demo's on this page if you want to read them and can handle the awkward styling due to the quick anti-LMM tests I was doing.) I've also got a couple ideas for some books. Perhaps a web serial or two? It takes a lot of energy to do even one of these things, though!

Do I need to come up with a new idea for a product or service, build it, and hope that those ten thousand people find it and pay/contribute towards it? Something both difficult and easy to do in the modern age. It's fairly easy to build software now thanks to LLMs, but hard to have the fresh idea and get eyeballs because thanks to the LLMs, that's what everyone else is doing.

The one thing I'm certain of is that to achieve it online, in the part of the web I reside in and respect, requires community. Building a community builds trust, and people are happier to give financially to someone they trust to spend that money making the thing the community exists around better. This isn't the 32bit cafe - that exists as a free, inclusive, supportive and open space for a wonderful community that I adore. Something else will be needed, something different. Something niche.

Can I create that community? Be that trusted person? Can I build the thing, whatever it is?

I have no idea. It's a rhetorical question, but I think the answer is probably no. At least not at the moment. I lack the time to do it anyway! For now, the best option for me is to keep on keepin' on with the dayjob, and consider other avenues which don't require much time or energy.

I don't ask for money on here as I don't feel like I provide anywhere near enough content or interesting/useful stuff to warrant it. Maybe a /support page wouldn't hurt, I've considered it a few times before. I've even built one with some referral links to a couple of things I use, but I haven't published it for the same reason I haven't started a ko-fi page or patreon or liberapay or whatever the alternatives are - I doubt anyone would make use of them. Maybe I'm wrong and should just throw one up anyway?

Perhaps the best option is to change jobs, seek greater pay? It's a viable and often-recommended option. It's certainly on the cards, especially after recent events.

So, until I come up with another idea, win the lottery (that I don't play,) find a money tree, or decide to get paid more elsewhere (in this terrible job market, that seems like a big ask) I'll keep squirreling away the occasional extra scrap of money I have from the dayjob and save for some kind of retirement. And once I get there, in *checks watch* 30+ years time, I'll have some great blog posts to write, so get your feed reader ready!