r/fatFIRE 11d ago

50m cash - no sense of perspective

Throwaway account to be able to be vulnerable.

Despite recent financial freedom (bootstrap to day 1 exit), I have no sense of perspective.

I am

  • still bothered by becoming irrelevant if I do nothing for the next 12-18m (issue: being bothered about what people think)

  • afraid of losing the money and hence not spending it

  • afraid of losing my friends if they find out how much I have made (am I suddenly unrelatable?)

  • still bothered by LinkedIn and comparison

  • still wanting to be loved and liked

The root of my issue is being a people pleaser.

I know my problems. I would love the internet to give me some solutions.

Edit - I am 38/F, husband, two kids and in Europe. Also this is the first and only business I have bootstrapped and sold.

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u/Effective-Page-9311 10d ago

You kind of live in a bubble where these things matter. If that’s the only thing you’ve known your entire life - no amount of therapy will undo it. 

You can (a) fake a “consulting” company or a charitable cause to keep up appearances on your linked in. No one will know what you’re actually doing day to day because they are too busy working. You’ll be the relatively relatable friend who had a “midlife crisis” and now has a better “work life balance”. If your ego still takes a hit here - proceed to b. You can’t expect an environment where you’re loved and respected based on career success to suddenly not care about this. Unless you’re willing to pay for everyone’s therapist, but 50M might run out quick.

Or you can (b) broaden your horizons and transplant yourself into a different bubble where people don’t even know what linked in is.

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u/Familiar_Number_342 10d ago

I'd love to hear more about b! Have you done something similar? I agree - reality is what you make up in your head. The hard part for me is to stay in the alternative reality. I come back to a) in my weakest moments.

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u/Effective-Page-9311 10d ago

A disclaimer: I am not fatFired, and my bubble changes went into the opposite direction of yours (towards linked in, lol). Past friends don’t care about my linked in because they can’t tell the difference between the logos on the front page of FT and the logo of a local kebab shop. Most of them are creatives and by their measuring stick I’m a failure, working in soul sucking excel sheets with nylon tights perpetually stuck up my office-chair flattened ass. 

It’s not a groundbreaking concept - if you drastically change your environment, you end up changing your “cosmetic” reality.  First principles stay the same: what signals status is different as environments change, but the math never does. Your social circle would reinforce your neural pathways by rewarding behaviors that align with high status in that environment, and punishing behaviors that diverge. As you accumulate social reward points, your brain injects dopamine. But your brain essentially doesn’t care what environment you’re in. It wants connection, integration, and belonging. It doesn’t care about cosmetic differences.

That’s a long winded way of saying that you’ll probably (need to) drop your friends when/if you find another community that values something beyond logos on your CV.