I’d hate to offend anybody out there trying to quit work for a living, but the FIRE movement is nothing new. You’ve simply given it an acronym and Instagram page. How do I know it’s nothing new, you say? We’ll, I read books. If it’s in a book, it’s generally not new.
This particular book describes things that certainly are not new. In fact they’re ancient. Unsurprisingly, the human impulse for freedom transcends time, place, language, socioeconomic status and even gender fluidity to inspire me today.
Let’s get to the good stuff. I came across the OG FIRE acolyte while reading Mary Beard’s survey of ancient Roman history, SPQR:
Cicero turned his scorn on those who worked for a living: “The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentleman.” It became a cliché of Roman moralizing that a true gentleman was supported by the profits of his estates, not by wage labour, which was inherently dishonourable.
I’ve had to work for a living my whole life, so I’d never turn up my nose at somebody who did the same. In reality, Cicero had to work too. In fact, he had to work harder than most because he was a Novus Homo, or “new man,” who came from the laboring classes and had to work his way into the elites. As a young man, Cicero’s family washed clothes for a living. These Roman laundromats used animal urine as part of the cleaning process. You can imagine that poor Cicero could never quite scrub this singular working class stench from his person despite his later successes. Cicero’s potentially snobbish comments, then, should be read with the following context in mind:
Latin vocabulary itself captured the idea [of not selling your labor]: the desired state of humanity was otium (not so much ‘leisure,’ as it is usually translated, but the state of being in control of one’s own time); ‘business’ of any kind was its undesirable opposite, negotium (“not otium”) (441).
Having labored in the putrid reek of animal piss, Cicero was in a unique position to cast scorn on the working class once he achieved success as a lawyer. Many of our greatest American success stories were forged in a similar crucible. What’s more, the Romans captured the essence of our modern FIRE movement more poetically than we ever could. When asked if you’re a FIRE adherent, react in disgust and reply haughtily, “absolutely not! Otium is the state I seek.”
Let’s return to the above excerpt and continue unpacking Cicero’s definition of a desirable state of being. In contrast to our facile and uninspiring notion of “retirement,” a word saturated with industrial notions of productive decline, redolent of death, implying banishment to a nursing home, “otium” has positive connotations associated with controlling your time. Our uninspired modern assumptions put forth retirement as the antithesis of work. In this reductive binary of work/not work, retirement carries negative connotations and offers no nuance of the newfound unrestricted time freedom engendered by its achievement. “Being in control of one’s time” puts a better spin on it. You’re free to work. You’re free to lounge. You’re free, period.
The problem with not having a precise word for a specific condition is that you can’t express the thing you want to express because the word doesn’t exist. Some might even argue that the thing can’t exist without the word, or vice versa, that the word can’t exist without the thing. Either way, it’s a brutal Catch-22 that means we’re all working til we’re 67 ½ then living miserably off of our meager social security check.
To investigate why English does not have an “otium” equivalent is beyond my philological capabilities. I could probably blame capitalism, the protestant work ethic, or maybe even the Federal Reserve. Rather than blame, however, I prefer to create and educate. This site, and indeed this post, is a shrine to otium.