In Praise of the Beach…

I was listening to a podcast the other day—Earn & Invest.

The host mentioned he spends about 30 hours a week working on the show… and earns maybe $10,000 a year from it.

That stopped me.

Not because there’s anything wrong with that, but because my mind immediately went where it’s been trained to go:

How much would that be at minimum wage…30 hours per week?

This isn’t a hobby podcast. He runs ads. He’s part of a network. He uses it to support other ventures. He’s written books, does speaking, has done coaching, runs groups. And he still works part-time as a hospice doctor.

This is a very busy guy.

And he openly talks about how much more he could make if he just leaned back into being a full-time physician.

But he doesn’t.

My first instinct was to turn it into a math problem. Thirty hours a week… $10,000 a year… what’s the hourly rate?

That’s the conditioning. Time = money. It runs deep.

I see it in myself all the time. I’ve thought about doing something like seasonal bartending—not because I need the money, but because I remember how much I enjoyed it. The rhythm of it. The built-in social life. The idea of doing it somewhere interesting for a few months. It could be an adventure.

But even there, the calculation shows up.

Is it worth it?

And that question—right there—is the trap.

It sounds practical…but it quietly pulls you back into the same game.

Because what this podcast host is doing isn’t about optimizing income.

He’s building an identity.

He used to walk into a room as a physician. He had instant credibility. He had status. People immediately listened to what he had to say. There’s a certain weight that comes with that role.

And now? He’s reconstructing that in a different form—writer, speaker, creator, entrepreneur.

That’s the payoff.

Not the $10,000.

The identity.

And I don’t say that as a criticism. I get it. Completely.

But it’s worth seeing clearly, because this is where things can quietly go sideways after FIRE.

You leave one identity behind… and immediately start building another one to replace it.

You stay busy. You stack projects. You make sure your time still “counts.”

You recreate the same structure you were trying to escape—just dressed up to look better.

That’s the identity trap.

And it raises a question that I think is far more uncomfortable than it sounds:

Could you just sit on a beach?

Not for a week. Not as a vacation.

But for a good long while… a year or more.

No agenda. No project. No outcome.

Because if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I could do that as easily as I’d like to think.

And that’s interesting.

Because when you’re on the other side of FIRE—when you’re working toward it—that idea matters a lot.

It’s part of the dream.

We’re told, over and over again, that FIRE or retirement is not about sitting on a beach. That it gets old. That you need purpose and structure and meaning.

Maybe.

But I think there’s a subtle danger in dismissing the “dream” too quickly.

Because that is the dream for a lot of people. Not literally the beach—but what it represents:

No obligations. No schedule. No need to justify your time.

Freedom.

For me, it wasn’t the beach. It was the idea of riding my bike across the country.

Would that be a vacation? In some ways.

In other ways, it would be hard, uncomfortable, repetitive, even risky.

But it would be mine.

And that’s the point.

I think once you reach FIRE, it becomes very easy to forget how powerful that original vision was. You start filling your time again. You start creating new expectations, new responsibilities, new identities.

None of that is inherently wrong.

But losing sight of the fact that you don’t have to do any of it?

That’s a miss.

Because the ability to take a year—or more—and do whatever the heck you want without asking permission…

That’s not a side benefit.

That’s the whole thing.

That’s the point.

That’s the part we should never forget.

So yeah… I am not dismissing the beach.

I think it deserves more respect than it gets.

Not as a permanent lifestyle.

But as a symbol of something we worked very hard to earn—and something we shouldn’t be so quick to replace with another version of “productive.”

A couple things to think about:

If you had a full year to do anything you wanted… what would you actually do?

And more importantly—would you allow yourself to do it without turning it into something “useful”?