Growing your tree of prosperity

My trip into the mountains to study Existentialism and what it means for the FIRE movement

2026-10-08T22:59:38.572+08:00

Something got into me during the semester holidays. After conducting my Early Retirement Masterclass and teaching a semester of both Law and Data Analytics, I told myself I needed to head solo into the mountains to study existentialism.

So last Saturday, I crossed the Causeway, took the ETS to KL, then spent a day meeting students and relatives before taking a 5-hour bus to Cameron Highlands with a book on Existentialism. In Cameron, I tried two approaches to enjoy the place. The first was an intense one-day tour of the area that covered about 80% of what I needed. The second was a day to recover from the first, where I just hung around Tanah Rata and went where my nose led me.

As a result, both extremes don't really suit me, and while I finished the book, I still couldn't really understand what Existentialism is all about.

So this article is my attempt to reflect on the few Existentialist concepts I was able to grasp in my solo travel, which I hope the reader will appreciate.

So the basic notion is that we can't really choose our circumstances when we are born. We have a starting hand in life, and we also inherit social expectations from the people around us, societal norms, and built-in behavioral biases from fields like evolutionary psychology.

But we are not bystanders; we have to live, so some of us take up careers, buy things, and pursue status, all to impress people we may not know or like, just to conform to society. People should do this; you must act in a particular way. Chinese New Year is like an audit where you are ranked in personal achievements relative to your cousins.

Conforming and being conventional is okay, until you realize our time in this world is limited. When you conform to others' or society's expectations, you aren't really taking the time to do what you really want, and existentialists see this as acting in bad faith. So does it make sense to be a walking resume and just be the kind of cousin that gets all the accolades during CNY?

So how should one live?

First, you need to understand that you are in this prison-like situation; then you need to take ownership of your life. Make choices for your life despite these societal constraints. This is what existentialists say is being authentic.

I see many of these concepts in practice as I travel solo.

When I travel alone, I don't need to consider the needs of fellow travelers, so I can do what I want, but only for the short time I have before I return to Singapore. But this freedom comes with some anxiety. So, I have to make different choices about the trip's intensity and figure out which itinerary I prefer. Like A/B testing. The intense day trip was physically uncomfortable, but I saw many things and even made new friends on LinkedIn. The day I did nothing was blissful, but I felt vulnerable to FOMO. In the end, I was just happy to see my cousin so that I could bitch about my trip over a cup of Teh Halia.

I've always had an inkling that Existentialism will play a major role in the FIRE movement.

Once you attain it, financial independence will give you a lot of optionality in life. I've dedicated more than two decades to pursuing and then teaching it. But an existentialist will laugh and say that financial independence is just a beginning and not even a person's final form.

Optionality gained from financial independence should drive more agency in life.

If you don't have to work anymore, what would you do?

Whatever you do needs to have meaning because your life is short. So retirement may be acting in bad faith because RE is already built into FIRE by definition.

Why should you retire just to signal that you've gained financial independence?

Mirroring a concept in philosophy, when you gain financial independence, you've just begun existing in Singapore society.

Existence precedes Essence.

There is fundamentally no new meaning in your life just because you can live off your investment income. I used to call FI a person's Financial Nirvana, but an existentialist will disagree.

But now, with your new financial power, you need to exercise your agency to break away from the notion that you are working for money.

Life is too short to work for money after you have money.

Without a clear definition or meaning of life, existentialists believe that people now have the freedom to choose a life path that gives themselves meaning.

So this is the glide path for folks who gain financial independence.

First you can get enough income without work. Since you are no longer confined to the social expectation of having a career, you might need to find what kind of work, or non-work, gives your life meaning.

Then you do it.

You gain authorship over your own life.

If, after much introspection, you still want to retire early, so be it!

So I'm at the tail end of my trip now. I hope to get back to my mundane existence in Singapore tomorrow. I think I've gone too far bringing such a dry philosophy book with me into the mountains.

I will limit these projects to perhaps just once a year.

The phenomenology of Financial Independence

2026-10-06T21:44:37.692+08:00

Before arriving in Cameron Highlands, I took a 5-hour bus to Kuala Lumpur and pushed through a book titled At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell, which made a valiant attempt to explain existential philosophy. I found a section on the eccentricity of philosophers interesting, after struggling to learn anything.

I guess if I can understand just a tiny part of the book and can apply it to my work, it's a small win, and I can come back from the mountains a satisfied guy.

So the concept I struggled with was phenomenology. It is a particular way of looking at something from a viewpoint other than facts. So when you practice phenomenology, you describe a phenomenon. Take, for instance, coffee. Phenomenology is not about the chemical composition of coffee or how many stages coffee beans need to go through to become the cup of coffee you have today. The phenomenon of coffee is more like its rich aroma filling your nose just before you drink it, and the feeling of drifting out of your stupor as you get your first caffeine hit.

So naturally, I have to apply this newfound skill to understanding what financial independence is; it's certainly not about the current yield of your investment portfolio, but what freedom means for people whose passive income exceeds their expenses.

But...Who am I kidding... AI can do the job better than me.

This is what ChatGPT said:

Financial independence is not merely a numerical condition in which passive income exceeds expenditure; it is a transformation in how a person experiences time, work, risk, and choice. Before financial independence, time is often structured by economic necessity: work schedules, income requirements, debt obligations, and career incentives shape the horizon of everyday life. Financial independence loosens this structure and creates greater temporal autonomy.

Phenomenologically, this shifts from constraint to optionality. Work is no longer experienced primarily as an obligation imposed by financial need, but as an activity that may be chosen, modified, or abandoned. Decisions can be evaluated less by their immediate monetary consequences and more by whether they are meaningful, interesting, or consistent with one's values.

Yet financial independence does not automatically produce fulfillment. Removing financial necessity can also expose questions that employment previously concealed: What is worth doing when one no longer has to work? What provides structure, identity, recognition, and purpose? The experience can therefore contain both liberation and disorientation.

The deeper significance of financial independence is consequently not freedom from work, but freedom from economic compulsion. Its value lies in expanding the individual's field of possible action—the ability to decide how one's finite time should be spent rather than having that decision largely dictated by the need to earn an income.

Wow !

That blew my mind.

Even if you think it fundamentally states the obvious, phenomenology allows the user to isolate intuitive, human emotions from something, which I think can apply to marketing, or at least to motivating people to achieve financial independence. This is certainly consequential because I'm more than happy to couch financial independence in such terms when I create content.

Of course, to leverage AI at this level, you need to put in the effort to understand phenomenology—that is a tall order.

I also find that in Cameron Highlands, I have to study every single influence on existentialism. Now I'm grappling with Martin Heidegger's ideas, and I'm so lost that even AI can't really take me very far. I know it has some utility in the FIRE movement, but it remains too abstract for me.

Maybe I'll be more enlightened tomorrow.

Does agency matter?

2026-10-05T21:38:26.204+08:00

I'm currently on a solo adventure in the Cameron Highlands. Between tours, I should have some time to blog.

I have interesting discussions with my young students that aren't always about technology, and there's certainly a lot of anxiety about job availability because of AI. One area I suggest the students develop is agency. At that time, I defined it sociologically — what kind of constraints society places on a student and how they can overcome them to be successful on their own terms. My logic is sound: for most of my students, adopting the same success standards as their JC peers would do them little good, regardless of what their parents might think.

But a smart guy in my class has a valid counterpoint. If everybody exercises agency, then the spoils will go to those who exercise the most agency, so the competition remains fierce, and it's back to square one.

I'm a sporting guy; I'm happy to concede the point, although I'm not convinced by his argument yet, but I'm glad he put serious thought into this matter, which itself is an exercise of agency, as the lecturer is not always right.

Fortunately for me, Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, later published a thorough perspective on agency from a psychological standpoint. According to Seligman, agency is comprised of three parts:

Efficacy - You must believe that you can be the author of your own fate.
Optimism - You must believe your future will be better than your situation today.
Imagination - You are creative enough to solve problems your way or envision a better life for yourself.

Surprisingly, most of the book isn't particularly useful to me, as Martin's work reads like a history book, showing that periods of great human flourishing correspond to words in the era's literature that reflect great human agency.

But for me, now I have a new tool to debate agency in class. As it turns out, a diploma program will ideally level up a person's efficacy by improving their skill set, making them more employable, etc.... But a certain proportion of optimism is genetic. Imagination is also a function of personality, like openness to new experiences.

So, in practice, few folks have the capacity for agency. In fact, I can imagine progressives trying to paint agency as something that has links to race, social status, and social capital. Some might say that tolerating agency will magnify inequality, which the political left and sociologists fetishize.

I've got one final point about the book.

The best part about the book has nothing to do with agency.

As it turns out, Martin Seligman can lucid dream.

So, as his colleagues begin to die of old age, he can summon them back in his dreams to discuss the topics that he is working on. He admits that these dream colleagues can only answer based on what he knows of their work, and that it's not too different from using AI.