30-second summary: I built a tiny life-countdown website that turns the abstract idea of “the future is long” into a timeline you can actually see. That made me revisit a question that the past few years of pessimism and FIRE-number-crunching had quietly replaced โ not “how do I retire as soon as possible / avoid getting hurt by this era,” but “what do I actually want to trade the next several decades for.” This post doesn’t have an answer; it’s just a record of starting to ask that question again.
I recently built a very simple website: Life Countdown.
It just converts a person’s life expectancy into an intuitive timeline: the life already lived, the present moment being lived right now, and the future that hasn’t happened yet.
It was meant to be a small program, but it got me seriously thinking about a question I’d rarely really thought about before:
If a good chunk of my life has already passed, what am I actually going to do with the time that’s left?
A Hundred-Year Life Link to heading
When I first started my undergraduate degree in 2018, in an Econ 101 class, the dean said something that stuck with me:
Our generation, born after 2000, might have a life expectancy as high as 100.
At the time, that sounded like a very optimistic number.
What does 100 years mean?
It means there’s still an enormously long stretch of life ahead.
It means that in your early twenties, the future feels almost endless. You can switch majors, switch cities, start over, make a lot of mistakes, and slowly figure out what you actually want to do.
Back then, I probably did carry some kind of unspoken optimism.
Not that I knew exactly what the future held, but a default assumption that things would keep getting better.
Then the Era Suddenly Changed Link to heading
After 2020, everything started to feel different.
The COVID pandemic was obviously one of the most direct dividing lines.
By the time I finished my master’s in 2024, the young people in the same cohort at the same school were no longer facing the future full of possibility that had existed just a few years earlier.
The job market worsened, economic growth slowed, and real estate, the internet industry, and many opportunities once taken for granted all changed.
More importantly, a certain pessimism about the future became widespread.
We gradually came to realize:
Individuals don’t actually have as much power to push back against an era as we’d imagined.
The phrase “a grain of sand from the era, landing on one person, becomes a mountain” became so widely shared precisely because it captured how a lot of people actually felt.
So more and more people started looking for a defensive way to live.
Studying for civil-service exams, chasing public-sector jobs, joining big platforms, seeking out stable organizations.
There’s nothing wrong with any of those choices.
But I slowly realized that my own understanding of the future had also been quietly reshaped by this environment.
I had started shrinking my life’s goal down to just:
Don’t let the era hurt me.
FIRE Is Also a Form of Defense Link to heading
After working for a year, I started seriously considering FIRE.
If income is limited, then lowering your desires, raising your savings rate, and stopping work once you’ve accumulated enough assets seems like a very rational path.
Ideally, work remotely.
Ideally, freelance.
Ideally, get away from the sluggish domestic economy.
Ideally, live long-term somewhere with a lower cost of living, or even travel the world as a digital nomad.
From an economics standpoint, none of this is wrong.
Geographic arbitrage, low spending, high savings โ these are genuinely effective strategies on their own.
But recently I suddenly realized something:
Had I mistaken “how to avoid a terrible life” for “how life should be lived”?
If the ultimate ideal state is just:
Have enough money that you don’t have to work. Have a low enough cost of living that you can keep going indefinitely. Not want much, so you don’t need much either.
Then sure, that can add up to a fairly comfortable life.
But it only answers one question:
How do I minimize the pain of living?
It doesn’t answer a much more important question:
What do I actually want to experience?
The First Time Time Became Concrete Link to heading
Before I made that life-countdown website, “the future is long” was just an abstract phrase to me.
I knew I was only in my twenties.
I knew that if I lived to be eighty or ninety, there were theoretically still sixty-plus years left.
But an abstract sixty years and a real sixty years are completely different things.
Once a number gets drawn on a screen, time suddenly becomes something you can actually observe.
The years that have already passed will never come back.
Elementary school, middle school, college, grad school โ stages that once felt endless are now all in the past.
One day it hit me:
My life isn’t “about to begin.” It’s already been going on for a while.
I’ve already lost part of an irreversible stretch of time.
And what’s left isn’t infinite either.
What this brought wasn’t simple anxiety.
Quite the opposite โ it was the first time I felt:
Maybe I should start taking “the future” seriously again.
Being Handed Bad Options Doesn’t Mean Life Has to Stay That Way Link to heading
Over the past few years, I’ve grown increasingly willing to accept a default premise:
since the macro environment is bad, and since ordinary people have no way to change the era, the most reasonable choice is to lower expectations.
Find a job that’s good enough.
Stay as stable as possible.
Don’t take on too much debt.
Don’t spend too much.
Save cash.
FIRE if at all possible.
Spend whatever time is left reading, drinking coffee, traveling, playing games.
That can certainly be one way to live.
But it’s not the only way to live.
Being handed a bad set of options doesn’t mean the rest of your life can only be spent picking the least-bad one from among them.
Likewise:
Mainstream society calling a certain way of life “ambitious” doesn’t mean that’s the ceiling of ambition.
Most people choosing to join some kind of organization doesn’t mean joining one is the only form of “engaging with the world.”
Being unwilling to follow a predetermined career path doesn’t mean life can only degrade into consumption and early retirement.
A person can refuse the life template someone else is offering and still take their own life seriously.
I May Have Understood “Freedom” Too Negatively Link to heading
I used to want freedom desperately.
Not having to sit in an office.
Not having to report in every day.
Not being tied down to one fixed location.
Being able to work remotely.
Being able to live in different cities.
Being able to live in Chiang Mai, Kunming, Ningbo, or anywhere else I liked.
None of those desires have changed.
But I started to wonder:
What is freedom actually supposed to mean?
If freedom just means “not being forced to do things you don’t like,” then it’s really a negative kind of freedom.
It can only tell me:
What I don’t want.
But the truly hard question in life is:
What do I want?
I can escape the office and still not know why I get out of bed every day.
I can leave a city and still not know which city to go to next.
I can stop working and still not know what to devote the remaining decades of my life to.
I can even have enough money and still find that it hasn’t given me a future worth looking forward to.
So the real question probably isn’t FIRE at all.
It isn’t being a digital nomad either.
It isn’t even about work.
It’s this:
Do I have a future worth investing my time in?
Seeing Who I Was Before Twenty, Again Link to heading
Recently I started going back through my social media posts from before 2020.
I hadn’t started seriously keeping a Simplenote diary yet at that point, so not much writing survived from that era.
But strangely enough,
from those scattered fragments, I caught a glimpse of a self that had already grown somewhat unfamiliar to me.
Back then I didn’t have a particularly complete life plan.
I hadn’t carefully calculated a FIRE number.
I wasn’t thinking about macroeconomics every day.
I wasn’t nearly as aware of how much mutual harm, competition, and structural constraint exists in society.
I didn’t even have the strong sense of “self-protection” I have now.
And yet, back then, I seemed to carry some hard-to-describe anticipation about the future.
Not a clear goal.
Not “I want to achieve X by 35.”
But a vague sense that:
Some interesting things were probably going to happen in the future.
I didn’t know what those things were.
But I believed they would happen.
Maybe What’s Really Disappeared Isn’t Opportunity, But Anticipation Link to heading
This is the thing that’s been weighing on me the most lately.
I don’t know whether the social environment has genuinely gotten worse, or whether my understanding of society has just become clearer.
Probably both.
But I’ve grown increasingly suspicious that:
over the past few years, I haven’t just lowered my expectations of reality โ I’ve also, without quite noticing, lowered my imagination for my own future.
When I say:
“As long as I don’t have to work anymore, I’ll be fine.”
it sounds like a kind of freedom.
But at the same time it also means:
“I no longer expect myself to do anything worth pouring decades of my life into.”
When I say:
“I’ll go find somewhere cheap to live, read some books, drink some coffee, and that’ll be enough.”
it sounds like a kind of ease.
But it might also mean:
“I no longer know of anything worth pursuing seriously.”
Between these two, the difference is only a very subtle one.
So What Should the Rest of My Life Be For? Link to heading
I don’t know the answer right now.
I even think I probably shouldn’t find one too quickly.
Trying to draw up a complete life plan for the next several decades in your twenties might itself be another form of arrogance.
But for now, I at least want to let myself ask again some questions that had quietly been ruled out by default:
What do I really want to create?
What do I want to study?
What parts of this world do I want to understand?
Is there anything worth investing ten years in, rather than ten minutes?
Is there any relationship worth tending to seriously?
Is there any place worth living in for a long time, rather than just passing through?
Is there a way of living that doesn’t need “escaping work” as its central goal, and still has enough freedom?
Is there a form of “ambition” that doesn’t need to copy the success template mainstream society offers?
Is there anything that, looking back at sixty, I’d think:
I’m so glad I spent ten years of my life on that.
None of these questions have answers right now.
But I think simply starting to ask them again already makes things a little different from before.
Life Isn’t a Consumption Plan Waiting to Be Optimized Link to heading
If you describe life entirely in the language of economics, it’s easy to arrive at a seemingly reasonable model:
Income โ savings โ investment โ FIRE โ freedom to spend โ retirement.
Given limited resources, that’s certainly a valuable optimization problem to solve.
But a human life may not be a consumption function.
Time itself is the most irreversible resource there is.
Money spent can be earned again.
A job quit can be found again.
A city left can be returned to.
But the twenty years that have already passed don’t come with a “chance to experience it again later.”
So I’ve started to feel that:
What’s really worth optimizing might not be how to get the most leisure for the least money, but how to use a finite life to obtain something only you yourself can define.
That doesn’t mean I have to go back to embracing so-called mainstream success.
It doesn’t mean I have to prove I can change the era.
And it certainly doesn’t mean I have to force myself to become “positive” or “driven.”
It just means:
I don’t want to sentence the future to death in advance just because this era has disappointed me.
Letting Myself Feel a Little Anticipation for the Future Again Link to heading
In 2018, I believed the future would be good, without knowing exactly why.
After 2024, I increasingly believed the future wouldn’t automatically get better, and so I started working hard to find a way of living that could protect myself.
And now, I seem to want to land somewhere between the two.
I no longer believe the future is bound to be good.
But I also don’t want to default to assuming it can only be bad.
I can acknowledge the limits of the era.
Acknowledge that an ordinary person’s power is limited.
Acknowledge that the economy may stay weak for a long time.
Acknowledge that many social structures won’t disappear just because individuals try hard.
At the same time, I can still hold on to a very personal, even somewhat out-of-step, anticipation:
My life doesn’t have to strictly obey the optimal solution these conditions offer.
I don’t know what will happen over the next several decades.
I don’t know where I’ll live, what work I’ll do, or who I’ll meet.
I don’t even know whether the things I think matter now will still matter in ten years.
But maybe that’s exactly what makes the future genuinely interesting.
If everything were already determined, then the rest of life would just be executing a plan.
But if there’s no fixed answer, then I still have the possibility of exploring.
The Countdown Link to heading
So I built this website.
Not to remind myself how much time I have left to squander.
Not to manufacture some anxiety about “how many days are left.”
Quite the opposite.
I wanted to make an originally vague fact concrete:
Time is happening.
The past has already passed.
The future hasn’t happened yet.
And this present square only comes once.
If I calculate based on a hundred-year life, I probably still have a very long stretch of time left.
Long enough to relearn a great many things.
Long enough to change direction many times.
Long enough to fail many times.
Long enough to start over.
But it’s also too short to justify spending decades of it waiting for some moment when “life truly begins.”
So rather than asking:
“How can I retire as soon as possible?”
what I want to ask now is:
“If I have several more decades of life, what do I really want to trade it for?”
I don’t have an answer to that question yet.
But I think it’s time to start looking for one again.