My Existential Crisis

Looking through the windows of my 2nd story German apartment, I watched a gentle fog roll out across the grain fields below.  The snow had melted a bit, but it was a long way until planting season, and the earth was still and peaceful.

I lived in a beautiful part of Bavaria working on a military base and traveling throughout Europe almost every weekend. I was a contractor-dentist, newly married to an active-duty service member, and pregnant with my first child at 33. 

Life should have been pretty good.

But I was a total wreck. 

My insightful German OB had asked me to take a day of bed rest to decompress a bit. As much as I tried to oblige his request, it felt impossible to calm my racing mind.

I was sat on my couch feet propped on a cheap IKEA coffee table (Shout out to the 5 Euro LACK holla!)  alone in my apartment, drowning in anxiety. 

I wasn’t just worried about my pregnancy. I was worried about, well everything. 

I mean, everyone was talking about the Mayan calendar and how this somehow meant the end of the world, so there was that. Then there were my astronomical student loan debts. Of course, my salary with which to pay my loans stagnated owing to the slow recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. 

And then there was this feeling. One that I did not want to acknowledge. I can say what it was now, but at the time, the very thought of it terrified me.

I had chosen wrong.

I had spent time, most of my twenties, in fact, earning my degree in dentistry. For the privilege of acquiring said degree, I had incurred north of $200,000 in debt. I had spent the last 7 or so years cutting my teeth in one corporate and one private practice and was now working as a military contractor overseas. 

And I hated it. I hated all of it.

I was depressed knowing that I couldn’t get all of that time or money back and I was anxious about whether or not I could keep doing this job. I didn’t know if I could keep getting out of bed, putting one foot in front of the other, and faking that everything was alright.

But, because I wasn’t in the state of mind where I could accept this yet, I was obediently sitting there on my couch, willing myself to relax. To pass the time, I opened my laptop and popped up Google. I sat staring at the blank search box, hoping that something would come to me.

I searched for hours before stumbling upon the words “early retirement” in an article I was reading. 

Quickly, I typed those words into Google.  It was in that moment that I discovered what some were calling the FIRE movement. 

Retrieving a pen and a legal pad, I proceeded to take notes from sites called Early Retirement Extreme and Mr. Money Mustache. By the time my husband returned home, I had outlined a 10-year game plan to make my job optional. 

After recovering from the onslaught of information, my husband came around to the idea.

Over the course of the next ten years, we implemented the strategies to get me to retirement. 

We paid off our small car loan and immediately began saving as much cash as possible.

I cold-called a public health clinic at our next duty station in Kansas and was hired. This made me eligible for student loan repayment from the National Health Service Corps. My loans were paid off two years into our plan to FIRE.

We bought a duplex that we could pay for with my husband’s military basic housing allowance, and we rented the other side. We lived on my husband’s income, the lower of our two incomes. We invested the money we saved and watched the dividends begin to grow.

Several years later, when my husband finished his military service, we moved back to Indiana, and I got a high-stress, high-paying job in order to reach the finish line to early retirement. 

And then, just like that, when I decided to be done with my job, I handed in my notice and lived happily ever after. 

Except…

I still had that same feeling. In fact, I realized I had this feeling in college, dental school, during my almost existential crisis on the couch in Germany, while reaching for FI…but why did I still have it now that I had finally made it?

Even after I had been able to admit to myself that I didn’t love my job (the last three years were a slog), why did I still feel depressed and anxious? Why wasn’t I deliriously happy? Why didn’t this feeling go away?

After all, I had done all of the steps that I was supposed to do, the whole way through. Good grades, good college, professional school, then the FIRE Playbook. And yet….I felt no different.

Now what?

After a good two years of reading and meditating, I realized that most people looking for financial independence and early retirement aren’t actually looking for those things at all.

In writing this blog, I want to give a voice to this. And while it sounds simplistic and possibly a little “woo” for many of us (I know, I thought so too), I think it"‘s time we started talking about it.

The fact is, we don’t want to be financially independent, we want to feel the feelings that we think financial independence will bring us. 

We want to feel free, and we want to feel happy. 

I invite you to come along as we explore these things together. This is tricky territory, a strange new world, the unknown, if you will. Here, there is no more logical playbook. There is only you, getting to know you. And we all need community for that.