The 5 pillars to a well-lived Life: Health, Happiness, Love, Wealth and Time

As FIRE enthusiasts, there are some, for whom life only truly begins, when they step out of the 9-5 and attain FI. The aggressive savings rate and the extreme frugalities and effectively 10 or more years of the fittest times of their lives are dedicated to accelerating their path to “freedom”. I admire that tenacity, but I also don’t subscribe to that. I prefer a more slow-FI approach, where the journey is also a part of the experience. I’m thinking of a new blog post series documenting my views to the 5 pillars of a well-lived life: Health | Happiness | Love | Wealth | Time

I think FIRE mostly subscribes to that. Your 9-5 takes up minimally 1/3 of your day. Add work stresses, commute, off the cuff meetings that take place outside of hours, and you’re easily creeping over. Sleep takes up another 1/3 of the day, leaving you 1/3 to “live your life”. But we all know what that means. Chores, errands, taking out the trash, kids.

When we truly calculate the time we have for ourselves, how much of it is there, really, at the end of the day? 2 hours maybe? Imagine if you can free up 1/3 of your time everyday to do the things you truly love, will that not be a huge pillar to optimise for in life? Hell yes.

Pillars are interlinked

The pillars are all interlinked, and we need to find a good balance across all 5 of them, or at least an internal state of balance within yourself that you can live and thrive with.

Each pillar contributes to a sense of self and a sense of security, which are critical components to being able to fully embrace life and all it has to offer.

Health

Health is often underappreciated, and not given much thought, until you’re struck with a lack of health. This is why I put Health as the first point. Because it is so, so easy to ignore it, especially when we’re younger, and we don’t feel a lot of the things we feel until we hit forty.

Trust me. I’m forty.

Happiness

Another idea that sounds simple in concept, but can prove so elusive. I think happiness really comes down to a mindset. Are we in the mindset of chasing things? There are always new things to go after, new ideals to chase, new goals to achieve, before we say we’ll be happy.

The mindset needs to shift to looking at what we already have. The gamification of life requires us to nab that promotion, score that dream house, and enrol our kids into the school of our dreams. But do those things really make us happy?

We’re so caught up in these hype cycles in our heads that the unhappiness that we feel when we fail to achieve even one of those goals weigh much heavier than the momentary happiness we get as we check off most of them.

Love

There are many types of love that can fill your heart. Love is love. There’s no judgement, and often times, love can appear in more ways than we imagined. Love from friends, family, social circle, online communities and pets, nourish our souls in all the same ways.

Wealth

When I talk about wealth here, I’m literally talking dollars and cents, or if you’re a subscriber to the impending death fiat currencies, bitcoin and sats.

I like the be realistic. And the reality is, we do need money t survive in this world. Even if you wanted to get a plot of land, build your own home and farm and rear animals, live off the land and all that, you’d still need an initial amount of money to do that.

Plus, this is a FIRE / sidehustle blog, so to not talk money would be silly.

Time

We all like to think we have time on our side. The truth is, time (outside of optimising for FIRE and hoping there’s time after) is probably the factor we have the least amount of control over.

We’ve all seen cases where friends and family are taken away from us all too soon. Mortality is something that’s pretty morbid to think about, and certainly depressing, given that we literally won’t know how much time we have left in this world.

We can try to optimise it with the health element to a certain point, but the truth is, we don’t know how much time we each have left in this world. This is why I started this post by saying the journey should be as much a part of the experience as the destination.

In subsequent posts, I will explore each pillar in more depth on its own.

What are your pillars to a well-lived life? Let me know in the comments and discuss!