Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

How to pass, fit in, eventually set an example, and ultimately lead the way.
Summer
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Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by Summer »

I heard a peculiar concept yesterday from one of my immediate family members especially regarding ERE. He said, no one respects someone without a job. Worse, don't want to have children. People without jobs don't know anything according to him. That when they say something regarding anything from politics to jobs he thinks that why can't they too do that instead of just saying to do it. This of course is bullshit excuses on his part for having worked all his life. He probably has a midlife crisis at the mention of the word ERE. I didn't care much when I first heard it from him. But now since it had stuck a cord with me it seems to annoy me every time I remember him. What are your thought patterns when this kind of bullshit comes through.

dalralmi
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by dalralmi »

I quit a job I hated last year in my quest for ERE which is more of a sabbatical. I still have a few more years before I am at FI, but I had plenty saved up for a year or two off with part time work. I faced a few friends who were super jealous who seemed to consider me "lucky" to have this opportunity because not everyone can just "do what I did" (I could probably find my post about it on this forum somewhere).

You really have to try to not let those mindsets get to you. Just because you are ERE doesn't mean you aren't necessarily working. You just are working on your own thing. I know people on this forum do odd jobs, are tinkerers for profits, and other various part time work every now and then. They just do those jobs more for hobby than need. There are certain people in this world who have to be working. Sitting still too long eats at them.

Unfortunately being against the grain causes people to be untrusting. Most likely it's a form of Jealousy. I've learned over the course of this past year that some people are just not worth associating with and only bring you down. People for some reason don't see that they too can do this and don't want to hear they are doing things wrong or incorrectly. The fact that you come along and suddenly don't have to "suffer" like they are makes them rationalize that you are crazy as a defense mechanism.

Summer
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by Summer »

I was looking for more of a one liner that will shut them off for good and let them see how foolish they are. I have a lot of those for other areas of life I am interested in but not ERE. I think that is particularly because I am not well versed in its subjects yet.

IlliniDave
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by IlliniDave »

I tend to keep quiet and let my actions do my talking. I won't be retiring extremely early, but likely somewhere between age 51 and 53. I will (presumably) be happy with myself, and if folks look down their noses at me if I come into town on a weekday dressed casually and slightly unkempt to spend a couple leisurely hours at the coffee shop to use wifi to take care of personal business, I won't even notice. And in reality they will not even notice me either--I am just not that important and I won't be going out of my way to get in their face about my lifestyle choices.

No one-liners from me. If you're going to live a lifestyle that is different from the norm, you should expect criticism, and should learn to politely ignore it. Best case is no one pays any special attention. Don't expect adulation. And don't be foolish enough to think that everyone who goes about life in a different way than you is foolish.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I generally say that I am a self-employed slacker, which is true since I do work sometimes because I am not FI. Of course, it is pretty rare for people to cast judgment on a 50 year old woman sitting in a cafe in the middle of a weekday. My lifestyle/income was only embarrassing for me when I was living with my much wealthier partner because then everybody assumed he was keeping me. One of the men I am currently dating jokingly/nervously used the word "gold-digger" in conversation with me recently (this is the 4th time this has happened to me in the last 8 years), and it made me so angry I just used him for sex and then dumped him.

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GandK
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by GandK »

7Wannabe5 wrote:One of the men I am currently dating jokingly/nervously used the word "gold-digger" in conversation with me recently (this is the 4th time this has happened to me in the last 8 years), and it made me so angry I just used him for sex and then dumped him.
I just laughed so hard I woke up G, who's down the hall! :lol:

I have a "Get Out of Judgment Free" card on this issue at the moment because I have a small child at home. But otherwise, G and I have decided to just say "We retired early" if anyone asks. This will likely be easier for us than for many of you, though, because we're in our 40s. Not too extreme.
Last edited by GandK on Mon Sep 14, 2015 6:53 am, edited 1 time in total.

vexed87
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by vexed87 »

If you are FI, you are effectively an entrepreneur investing in business, property or whatever you want to obtain financial rewards. I'm not sure who wouldn't respect that in capitalist society? You need to ask this relative to define work. I haven't seen anyone on the forum who doesn't dedicate some time post-FI produce things. Producers by my definition do work.

Does someone like me who still has a career deserve more respect when sitting in an office for 37 hours a week and earning ~$40,000 per annum, vs someone who earns $7,000 per annum without lifting a finger? I would be more impressed with the investor to be honest. At what point does the investor move from lack of respect to works hard [earns] enough? $10k, $20k, $40k a year returns? Being part of the investor class rather than hyper-consumer class will make a producer very wealthy in time. If someone doesn't agree with that lifestyle, to hell with them!

Thankfully for me, my loved ones and close friends are mostly the frugal types so they are happy I am saving and wouldn't care if I got to enjoy the fruits of my labour by quitting my job. However I've all but given up talking to others about ERE/frugality as they think I'm arrogant and/or nuts. Most consumers would rather put their head in the sand when it comes to finances and worry about their next mobile phone upgrade or car or house vs buying their own freedom. They have not got the intellect or motivation to see beyond their debt serfdom, or wage slavery, I initially feel sad for these individuals, but then realise they are hopefully quite happy in their own way, so tend not to worry too much about what they think about me or my choices. There are no right or wrong answers to which lifestyle choice is best. Ultimately people pursue what is important to them at the time.

The statement that people who do not work do not deserve respect would irk me, not because it's a slight on me or my plans to be FI, but because it is a statement founded in ignorance. I would be tempted to educate this individual about their misconceptions about freedom and the 'responsibility' we have to work to help others. If someone I don't consider a close friend chooses to engage in conversation about wage slavery or hyper consumerism and they go on to balk about how [ERE] can't be done, or why their circumstances make it impossible, I just close the conversation down and get on with my life. I'd put the effort in to discuss this with my brothers and sister but not some random person at work. Most negative comments are rooted in jealousy or ignorance. I pity these folks.

bradley
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by bradley »

Well said, vexed87. Personally it's hard for me to respect someone who toils away at a job they hate in a place they hate simply because it's something they "ought" to do. There is much more respect to be found for the person who achieves his goals and finds joy in life even if it goes against the grain.

In any case, if work = making money then certainly you are "working" in ERE; if work = creating something by yourself or with others (with or without pay) then most people work in ERE. But if work = being a slave to a salary, then, no, you don't work during ERE, and that's great.

Your immediate family member is obviously thinking of a certain kind of person when he says "people who don't work". Are they without work because they choose to be or because they have no other option? Are they sitting around watching TV in their mom's living room and eating her food?

You'll probably find with ERE that eventually it becomes pointless to engage people who disagree with it. You may find that the other person is too ignorant or stubborn to listen, and you may find yourself trying to convince them of something they probably have to come to on their own.

almostthere
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by almostthere »

As someone who is FI and took the last two years off. Yes, there is an issue. Jobs are associated with status. Some jobs have higher status than others. When you are not working that status is missing. Part of being ERE is figuring out how to deal with that, and I have personally found it very challenging. Unfortunately, there is no easy one liner.

@Bradley I like your thought:
You'll probably find with ERE that eventually it becomes pointless to engage people who disagree with it. You may find that the other person is too ignorant or stubborn to listen, and you may find yourself trying to convince them of something they probably have to come to on their own.

Summer
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by Summer »

Let me elaborate. It is great to ignore them lifetime workers but it is superb to use a one liner to get in their heads and mess them up. So that they can't worry you every time they at least try to contradict you with useless words of theirs. For example, when a stupid person says I have to get married or I won't be complete or whatever nonsense I say this one liner which shuts them up completely. "If you want milk do you have to keep a cow inside your house?" That works all the time. No one with half the brain will ever argue or contradict me with their stupid arguments about why marriage is a virtue anymore. Sure there is gonna be a idiot. But at that stage I will just brush him off. Same with Charity. My one liner against charity is fund raisers is "I am from the mother Theresa do it yourself school of charity! not the tax everyone else Liberal school." Works like a charm. For why I am an atheist. "I will start believing when I find the wrong religion!" Shuts them traveling evangelists like a rock fall. The cow one liner is self explanatory. I think the second one is also so. But the third one is a bit hard to understand at first. But it is super genius. Of course people respond to them but I just brush them off because its easy brush someone off when you have said something witty and filthy.

Tyler9000
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by Tyler9000 »

My initial reaction if someone ever said anything similar to me:

"I respect you for working hard to provide for your family. Just as I respect others for working hard to earn investments that now provide for their family even while they do other things."

But nobody has ever said anything like that to me, mostly because I don't flaunt my ERE and am actually pretty evasive when people start asking me about work. I talk about what I used to do and what I'm interested in now, and don't dwell on current employment status. If you don't define yourself by a lack of work, people tend not to judge you for it!

SilverElephant
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by SilverElephant »

Summer, it seems like you are still in the "holier than thou" phase of a mental paradigm shift. I know you are because I've gone through it as well and I've seen tons of people go through it for similar things.

It's the feeling of superiority you get because you (think you have) finally figured out something big and everybody else is simply too daft to see it. It's human.

Just remember that you (probably) thought likewise at some point and also that most religious people feel exactly the same when they preach to you. How do you feel about them? What you now know might be "more correct" from a logical point of view... probably. Or not.

At some point I just let it go. I put more into my savings accout each month than most people I know do in a year. That feeling of warmth is worth oh so much more than a witty one-liner that, in the end, will mostly make that person dislike you.

George the original one
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by George the original one »

Summer wrote:I was looking for more of a one liner that will shut them off for good and let them see how foolish they are. I have a lot of those for other areas of life I am interested in but not ERE. I think that is particularly because I am not well versed in its subjects yet.
One-liners do not generate respect, whether you are FI or not. Respect is earned.

If you expect a one-liner to shut someone up, it may well do so, but it will not make them see how foolish they are. Rather, they are more likely to seethe and seek suitable retribution.

Edit: And then there's the other response... why do you care what other people think?

Summer
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by Summer »

This is the last post for a long day I have spent researching on this area.

Most of you have got entirely the wrong idea about one liners. They sure aren't about feeling superior like one of you suggested. They at the core are about shutting other people off from bringing negativity to your life. Don't look at it as trying to being superior.

I am forming a one liner for ERE. Which currently goes like this. For the imbecile that said to me he wouldn't respect me if I don't have a job because I would know anything without on the job experience of forty years (it doesn't even makes sense!) is to ask him if he is happy working, and say it seems like he is happy regardless of what he says. But I have to tweak it a bit. So then I can't take him out of my mind and kill that thought.

Ignoring everything contradicting is great if you can do what ever you want regardless. In cases that you can't easily and in some cases you want to mess-up the mind of the other person for being a contradicting monkey.

vexed87
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by vexed87 »

Summer, it sounds like you might benefit from learning a little about stoicism. People can only bring negativity into your life if you allow them to do so.

As others have said, a one liner would not make an ignorant individual change their mind. There are better ways of dealing with personal conflicts. It doesn't sounds like you have a high opinion of this relative, perhaps you could avoid the topic entirely in future, or cut them out completely if it is having such a negative effect.

Failing that, learning about stoicism will help you deal with violence, verbal or otherwise.

tommytebco
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by tommytebco »

My favorite one liner is "You know, you may be right."

For your friend, maybe "That's too bad. I'll miss you."

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C40
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by C40 »

If you're talking about your immediate family here, you should be willing to explain your thoughts in detail and not just try to come up with some one-liner to sting them and make them leave you alone. (that, or you should not be telling them about it).

If/since you do seem to like talking about it, I recommend you work on your "ERE elevator speech" - or, a way to explain FI/ERE in a POSITIVE way in a minute or so. The speech should be at least 50% about what you would/could do instead of having to work. That is where you illustrate the worth of becoming ERE.

I fully agree with SilverElephant's post and with Vexed's most recent one. Read those again with a more open mind. Try to become able to genuinely smile and wink at someone when they say these kinds of things that currently cause you stress.

jacob
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by jacob »

It's been my experience that very few people have given much intelligent thought to retirement and financial independence not to mention a completely different lifestyle perspective like ERE. Hence, you'll mostly encounter only the most rudimentary/scripted/axiomatic opinions on this. For the record, here they are

* Your identity is your job. ("Hey, how are you? So what do you do for a living?")
* Your purpose in life is either "your career" (middle class and up) or "paying the bills" (middle class and down).
* A million dollar is enough money.

Your clever one-line retort has to defeat all these strongly held notions. Let me know if you come up with one!

I promise that I will use it responsibly!

For a more nuanced perspective, these opinions have been personally questioned/valued depending on
1) Personality temperament: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/perso ... tance.html
2) Age: http://earlyretirementextreme.com/three ... usion.html
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/what- ... to-me.html
3) Vocation: For example, I have never heard a single negative word from any trader I've ever talked to about ERE. They totally get it. I have never encountered such singular grokking from any other group though.

Since I suffer from staircase wit, my approach has been to deflect the question.

A: "What do you do for a living?"
B: "I'm a writer" ... or whatever I currently spend most of my time on ... e.g. I work in finance. I'm trying to become a professional sailor... I'm trying to become a pro-gamer ... ) --- What's important here is to demonstrate that you're doing or attempting to do some work that could pass for a source of income (which is how most people think money is made). If you don't, traveling is also perfectly okay. Just don't say that you spend all day following the news or puttering around or trying to learn how to program your Arduino (I made that mistake once). IOW, pick ONE thing that could potentially generate income. Don't say you're working on ten different things, because most people will see anything but a specialist's focus as 'puttering'. Don't say you're focusing on something with zero potential income ... like I'm focusing on my yoga. Again, travel(*) is acceptable. (*) Or anything that everybody wish they could take off a year doing before getting back on a treadmill.
A: "Can you make enough money doing that?"
B: "If not, I got some savings." ... Most people understand savings. Few people understand "living off of investments" so I recommend not complicating things. Mentioning SWRs will make most people think you're running some kind of scheme. Mentioning how little you life off will make most people think you live in poverty. If you point out that you're very good at stretching dollars, you'll make them feel stupid. See first paragraph. Most people are clueless. The alternative solution is to have a million dollars. Then you can say "I have a million dollar investment account". However, you can't say "I have a 600,000 inv. acc." because people will think you're just about halfway there.

In case of family, these issues may come up repeatedly, so whenever you hear something like this, do the following:
A: "I pay $150 every month for my cell phone data plan"
B: "I set it up so my telecom stock dividend so it pays my phone bill. Clever, huh?"
A: "I gotta pay rent".
B: "I saved up enough so I could buy a cheap house in cash, so all I pay are RE taxes and insurance".
Repeat this conversation 4-5 times and it'll sink in.

Summer
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by Summer »

vexed87 wrote:Summer, it sounds like you might benefit from learning a little about stoicism. People can only bring negativity into your life if you allow them to do so.

As others have said, a one liner would not make an ignorant individual change their mind. There are better ways of dealing with personal conflicts. It doesn't sounds like you have a high opinion of this relative, perhaps you could avoid the topic entirely in future, or cut them out completely if it is having such a negative effect.

Failing that, learning about stoicism will help you deal with violence, verbal or otherwise.
Stoicism, I'll look into it. Thanks.

jacob wrote:It's been my experience that very few people have given much intelligent thought to retirement and financial independence not to mention a completely different lifestyle perspective like ERE. Hence, you'll mostly encounter only the most rudimentary/scripted/axiomatic opinions on this. For the record, here they are

* Your identity is your job. ("Hey, how are you? So what do you do for a living?")
* Your purpose in life is either "your career" (middle class and up) or "paying the bills" (middle class and down).
* A million dollar is enough money.

Your clever one-line retort has to defeat all these strongly held notions. Let me know if you come up with one!
Nice to know you post on the forum. The best one-liner is actually to say "I have a million dollars!" like you said. The only loophole in that they can try can install the virtue of working an dead end job to you but then you can ask them are they happy and end it there. Get rid of that person from your life if need be. The problem is in lying. About the million dollars until it comes in another lets say five to six years due to the inertia of compounding. The worst part is if I say I have a million dollars in my garbage hole of a country (although foreigners say it is beautiful because they can get cheap here) they will immediately produce a charity request of some kind. So my one liner that was intended to hurt their feelings and shut them off more so than not is better although it won't defeat all strong held notions.

bryan
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Re: Do others Respect you if you don't have a Job and ERE

Post by bryan »

One liner to shut people up? Hmm. I don't think I've had a problem with people pestering me to that degree. I'm pretty good at reading people and communicating so It's not hard to steer the conversation (adopt certain body language they are receptive to etc). A one liner to shut people up doesn't sound as interesting or productive.

One issue I do hit sometimes is that some people read into what I'm saying and assume I'm way more wealthy than I am.

@jacob have you met many readers in person? Regularly? These days? I've been really curious what you're like in person..

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