A person needs space and bandwidth to try new things.  To explore.  To play.  

My life has filled up with habits, good and bad, and adding new things in your 50s isn’t as easy as it should be. Any time I try to add a new hobby, I almost have to give up something else to make room.

Want to exercise more? Okay, give up your lazy mornings before work. But I like my slow starts; I need my two hours before the day begins. Okay, give up doing chores at home—Padme, what do you think? Maybe give up on sleep? Wait, I hear that’s a bad idea from my new fitness podcast.

To gain a new hobby or live a different life, I need to identify waste and find a habit I can eliminate or drastically reduce.

What takes up too much space for me right now? FIRE consumption.

I don’t mean blogging, as writing is a new hobby. Creating content forces me to think about life while passive consumption keeps me stuck in place. My habit for the last 15 years has been reading FIRE blogs, scanning finance news, and listening to money podcasts. I can easily spend 20 hours a week on this single topic.

And now it’s an issue.

The main reason to let go of an obsession is to try others—to move on and find the next thing. Really, that is the true purpose of being Financially Independent. Having enough money is about building the next chapter, exploring new adventures and new parts of yourself. That all takes time.

To do that, I need to downsize the FIRE consumption hobby. Yes, it’s ironic for a guy writing about FIRE, but consuming more content takes up too much room, too many thoughts, and too much entertainment bandwidth. This would be no different if I were obsessed with fitness blogs, fantasy books, or horses.

Pick any obsession—left unchecked, it grows to consume all your space and time.

A perfect example of FIRE consumption for me is when I compare it to the self-help book genre.

With self-help, we read about change to feel good, convinced we are taking action. The majority of the time we make no actual changes, then go read the next book to feel good all over again.

Nothing new is being said; it’s just repackaged core ideas for a multi-million-dollar industry. If people actually took action, the self-help industry would collapse. It becomes passive entertainment—a dear old friend stopping by—rather than a tool for learning.

like he needs to read that

It’s the exact same story with money content for me. It’s entertainment. I feel like I’m doing something productive, but I’m not. I find podcasts and listen to every episode just because I like the host. “Listening” makes the content easy to consume passively, which makes actual learning harder.

Listening to someone talk about their freedom on a podcast feels like I am experiencing freedom. And I am not

Lately, I find myself in a much better mood when I consume content completely unrelated to finance. It’s new, so the “processor” has to think a little harder to understand the material. It’s fresh. It’s a new chapter.

Yet, you naturally gravitate back to what you know. It’s comforting. FIRE media is like a warm blanket. I miss it when I step away, but it’s getting in the way.

I think life is richer when you maintain a broad spectrum of interests. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, we played multiple sports year-round as the seasons changed. Today, kids often stick to one sport year-round just to optimize for performance, and it feels like a lot less fun.

I don’t need to abandon my FIRE warm blanket entirely; I just need to trim it down to an appropriate size. For my own good.

The most successful FIRE content creators seem to pick up the torch for a few years and then naturally drift away. Their blogs stop or taper off to sporadic posts. Producing content served a purpose for a period, but eventually, they put it down to go live their lives. Carl from 1500 Days is a classic example. In his heyday, he published two to three times a week, hosted podcasts, and did the interview circuit. Eventually, his blogging slowed, he stepped away from his podcast, and his overall output dropped way down. I’d bet his consumption dropped just as much.

Today, he’s building a house, getting heavily into fitness, traveling, and following tech news for investing. He simply didn’t leave the same room for his FIRE hobby—and that’s great, because his life expanded and is likely better because of it.

For me, 20 hours of FIRE media a week is pure passive consumption. I need to commit to spending more energy building my next chapter than reading about other people’s.

If I reclaim even 10 of those 20 weekly hours, that’s over 500 hours a year—the equivalent of 12 full workweeks returned to my life. That isn’t just a slight trim; that’s enough bandwidth to build an entirely new skill or explore a completely fresh obsession.

The goal isn’t necessarily to optimize that new space, but simply to leave room for curiosity—whether that’s diving into a new book series, taking on a hands-on project, or just letting the mind wander. To ultimately grow.

Instead of treating FIRE as the final destination, it’s time to view it as a landing strip. You don’t buy a plane ticket just to hang out in the terminal. The runway was built to get you somewhere else. It’s time to step outside the airport.

But where to next ?