It’s Getting Better All The Time, It Can’t Get No Worse, And Nothing Really Matters: Integrating Enlightenment, Romantic, and Post-Modern FIRE
It must have been around 2001–2002 when I read a book by Richard Tarnas called The Passion of the Western Mind.
I believe it was in conjunction with a year-long development program I enrolled in to learn how to coach people.
At the time, most people didn’t know what Life Coaching or Executive Coaching were. The field was relatively young, and so was I, but that’s a tale for a different article.
It was one of my favorite books of the ten that were required assigned reading for everyone in my cohort of 20 students.
It is a very well-researched and comprehensive perspective on the development and evolution of Western philosophy.
Evidently, it has been widely and enthusiastically used in thousands of philosophy departments.
Fast-forward several years, and I got the chance to meet Dr. Tarnas in person. He is a graduate of the same PhD program I completed and was present for an alumni event.
He was a fairly young guy, fit, very thoughtful, and a nice man. I was a bit in awe, as I was amazed that he was such an accomplished philosopher and writer.
He had released a book called Cosmos and Psyche in 2007, but I had yet to buy it or read it. So, I got the chance to buy it, talk to him a little, and he signed my copy.
Fast-forward again, and I am now finally going to read that sucker.
It’s Partly fascinating because he wrote and published this right before the release of the first iPhone/smartphone. And it reads a bit like something from a different era.
In the foreword, and in the first couple of chapters, he sets the stage for what he will be addressing.
Essentially, he wants to address what he sees as three of the most significant issues of what we might call the “crisis” of modernity:
Groundlessness: a lack of a unifying and significant purpose across humanity.
Alienation: the deep sense of alienation that afflicts us moderns (now being discussed as “loneliness,” but it goes much deeper than that).
Unconscious forces: the need for individuals and societies to see and understand the relatively or completely unconscious forces and tendencies playing a role in shaping human lives, as well as the planet in general.
You see, he proposes that there are three large mythical narratives at work in the background that are banding us about:
Enlightenment: belief in continuous improvement and an almost teleological movement towards perfection; i.e., It’s getting better all the time kind of thinking.
Romanticism: rejection of pure reason as the only way of “knowing” and a belief that we have lost what was most noble, pure, and beautiful about humanity in the march towards progress; i.e., It can’t get no worse … (except it can, and it will … The Lord of the Rings is written from this mythical narrative).
Post-Modern Deconstruction: belief that there is no pattern independent of human subjectivity. All history is interpreted through the non-empirical and subjective forces of culture, politics, economics, sociology, and psychology; i.e., Nothing really matters, anyone can see, kind of thinking.
Tarnas makes the assertion that all three have a justifiable “truth” to them, but also blind spots.
And, just as a new epistemological framework was needed to move from an earth-centered view of the universe to Copernicus’s heliocentric view of reality, he is proposing we must grapple with this divergence of centers, and are now at a similar juncture in time as humanity was then.
This is heady, nerdy, deep stuff.
It’s going to take me awhile to finish this book.
So, I thought I would take a shot at bringing it down to a more immediate level of reality.
It struck me that our views of what FIRE is meant to bring about and the lifestyle we might live post-FIRE can fall under the sway of these three types of mythic narratives.
Most views and proponents of FIRE, including myself, are coming at this from the “it’s getting better all the time” perspective.
A world of possibilities is opened to us when we finally reach the ultimate time freedom of FIRE.
And yes, we can even try to find a deeper why and actually do something to contribute to the march of progress towards a utopian outcome somewhere out there on the horizon.
The romantic nostalgia case is there, too.
After achieving FIRE (or even better, while working towards it), we want to recapture what was lost in our earlier enculturation and reverse the traumatic subjection we experienced traveling through a Dantesque 7 levels of cubicle hell and coming out on the other side.
This is what all that inner child stuff I have been writing about is pointing towards.
Somewhere along the way, I (or we) lost our child-like enthusiasm, openness, friendliness, and curiosity.
Now we must be assuaged and numbed in order to keep plodding through the hell in front of us.
We are doomed as we march towards the Go-Go years into the Slow-Go years, and finally into the No-Go years … unless, of course, we’re The Rolling Stones. They always seem to be Going to a go-Go.
Then there is the Post-Modern view that all this is up to subjective interpretation.
Our psychological freedom, our emancipation, is likely found here.
Here, it is not only what we say and what we do that matter, but how we interpret it.
True, integrity results from matching the two, say and do, as closely to equally as possible.
But whose view of integrity are we marching towards?
Is it our own authentic and heartfelt integrity, or is it the enculturated stance of “doing what one does because that is what one does” type of integrity?
This is where the infighting around what it means to be FIRE can be found.
Take the feud over working for pay after declaring oneself FIRE, as Mr. Money Mustache has pointed to when he makes fun of the “retirement police.”
Post-Modern philosophy gets a bad rap, and there are good reasons why,
but at the core, it does offer up a new type of truth that is useful.
It is the realm of narrative psychology and philosophy, just as Tarnas is doing in calling these three epistemological frameworks “myths.”
So, which framework to apply to FIRE?
I think all three make sense.
But for me, the juice of a post-FIRE lifestyle will be found by understanding our own narrative psychology, our own relatively unconscious ideas and symbologies, and meshing these into a useful and helpful personal myth.
This is what I am doing.
The shorthand is that I am working to integrate the two parts of my Bilbo Baggins personal myth: the hermit with the fool.
But I contain multitudes.
I am not just one of The Leavers, a former corporate executive, a teacher that does not teach, or a post-FIRE lifestyle design strategist.
I am all of these, and that is where another of my larger-than-life personal myths is located.
Bilbo integration first.
then I’ll focus on the integration of the two parts of my Aragorn myth.
Dave Ramsey has it right. Always take important change in Baby Steps.