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If you asked a group of random FI enthusiasts to name the movie that best encapsulates the spirit of the Financial Independence movement, I bet a huge percentage of them would say Fight Club. This movie is a major cult classic, and one of its most powerful messages is that stuff does not, cannot, and never will make you happy. Hmm, that sounds an awful lot like the mindset you have to adopt if you plan to retire super early.
In fact, the characters in the movie are so anti-stuff that they blow a whole heck of a lot of it up. And the insidiousness of consumerism has left them so unfulfilled and frustrated that they resort to beating each other up just to feel alive.
So … basically just your typical light and fluffy film!
this movie is so happy-go-lucky!
Yeah, it really isn’t for the faint of heart. Fight Club – true to its name – packs a punch. But it’s one of my favorite films. Unlike so many other movies, it doesn’t promote a lifestyle of glossy, magazine-ready perfection. Everyone in this film looks like they could use a shower. Their houses and apartments are dirty and gritty and infested with roaches. The grout in their bathrooms hasn’t been scrubbed in decades. And their clothes sport last night’s blood stains. And they like it that way.
It’s extreme. Like, really extreme. In real life, we certainly prefer not to have cockroaches, stains, or rust-ridden grout. BUT, by turning the griminess up to 11, the movie gives a giant middle finger to the idea that your life has to have a fine sheen of consumerist perfection to it at all times. And that message is not extreme. It’s absolutely dead-on.
Every now and then, Robert and I like to throw the essentials in our trusty packs and head out into the mountains for a backpacking trip. In 2019, we did it for a few months in a row. And every time we get out there, we’re reminded just how freeing it is to walk around with literally everything you need to survive on your back, and just how tiny that amount of stuff really is. Before our first backpacking trip, I thought I would hate not being able to shower every day and miss all my things. But turns out … it’s kind of awesome. You give approximately zero thoughts a day to how you look or whether you get dirty and sweaty. Instead, you just focus on the challenge of climbing the mountain in front of you and enjoying the beauty all around you.
AND, you meet lots of incredible other people out on trail who just want to talk about life, the outdoors, the trail, and … pretty much anything other than boring stuff like what furniture you have, what car you drive, or what clothes and makeup you wear. As soon as you get away from the “real” world into the actual real world, it becomes clear in the blink of an eye just how unimportant all that other crud is.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have a house with furniture in it. And it doesn’t mean we don’t scrub our grout. And I’m pretty sure that even the movie’s main character would agree – by the end of the movie – that those things and lots of others are pretty darn great luxuries. And there’s nothing at all wrong with enjoying this amazing age of abundance we live in today. But the movie is also about how ridiculously careful we have to be not to let these luxuries become our masters. Because an existence beholden to anything – even something shiny and clean and beautiful – is no real existence at all.
At the beginning of the movie, an endless parade of meaningless consumerism has its hooks deep into the character’s psyche, and he’s struggling mightily to free himself. But by the end, he’s swung so far to the other end of the spectrum that he’s wriggling at the end of a different hook. He’s become famous and beloved for his message of rejecting modern society and all the meaningless glitzy crap that comes with it. But that message has become so much bigger than he intended, and he realizes he’s become an advocate for real destruction and even hurting people he cares about. He’s gone too far, and he’s created a movement filled with hate and blood-thirst.
Put another way, the main character of Fight Club has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Instead of just rejecting a Martha-Stewart, everything-must-be-perfect approach to life, he’s saying no to basic self-care (let alone healthcare), cleanliness, safety, and any semblance of comfort.
Personally, I think the guy would have been a lot happier if he’d just found the FI community. Because the FI community is basically fight club without the fighting. We agree with Tyler Durden that modern society is way too focused on working jobs we hate to buy sh*! we don’t need. We agree that we need to find purpose in life beyond accumulating more items from the IKEA catalog. But we also y’know … enjoy being alive and healthy. And we think it’s possible to enjoy having clean, pretty things in our life without letting them rule our lives.
Turns out, Fight Club, just like life, is ultimately about finding balance. The main character – just like all of us – has to walk the high-wire between being:
AND
I think somewhere in there lies a happy medium. If you find the perfect sweet spot, let us know.