One of the reasons I want to live close to my parents is to help with the little things they don’t feel urgency about. Back in 2023, I visited and asked why there was a hole in the kitchen ceiling with a rag on the floor beneath it. A leak, he said, though he wasn’t sure if it was coming from the roof or the upstairs bathroom.
A year later, the rag and the hole were still there. Talk about patience. Mine would’ve snapped within a week. He’d had a plumber out, who changed the main water line, opened a wall downstairs, and patched a spot on the roof. No luck. So my parents kept the rag on the floor and let the hole slowly grow, undisturbed.
Finally Had To Fix The Darn Leak
I let it be in 2024. But when I returned in the summer of 2025 and the rag and hole were still there, I decided to get to the bottom of it. I had six weeks, so I had the time.
I got the plumber who was replacing a water heater in the in-law unit I was remodeling to check it out too. He cut open the ceiling, found the leak immediately, replaced the pipe, and that was that. No more leak after two and a half years. My handyman patched and textured the ceiling so it looked normal again.
He also fixed two light fixtures at the entrance that had been fused shut. My parents had been fine with only one light working for 11 years. Their tolerance for broken things was incredible. I don’t have that power.
I got a lot done for my parents, but at the cost of my own leisure. I’d imagined six weeks of reading and relaxing at Oahu beaches, hiking, boogie boarding. Instead, it became a remodeling and fixing job, something I dislike tremendously.
At first, I thought their ability to shrug off a crumbling environment was weird. Then another incident happened, and I realized maybe I’m the weird one. Not being OK with letting things be might be the actual cause of unhappiness. Because if you feel compelled to pull every weed you walk by, will you ever be free?
The Refrigerator Stopped Working One Evening
It was about 8:30 pm when I opened the refrigerator and noticed the lights didn’t turn on. I asked my wife whether she’d noticed, and she nonchalantly said no. “Maybe it’s just resetting after the temperature spiked while I was cleaning up spilled yogurt earlier.”
It was the kids’ bedtime routine, and she was occupied. I felt an incredible annoyance grow inside me, cursing the fridge for breaking, then a little more annoyed my wife didn’t share my urgency. All I could think about was the food spoiling and having to transport everything if we couldn’t fix it in time.
She sensed my annoyance and came to help. I got on ChatGPT, inspected the fridge, flipped the circuit breaker on and off, and eventually paid someone $100 to come out at 10:05 pm. He said the fridge itself was fine. The breaker still tripped when he flipped it, so I needed an electrician. Sigh, wasted money.
The thing is, I’d already called an electrician first, who said I probably just needed a new breaker after I described what happened. If I’d had the power to not fix it immediately, and just sleep on it, I would have saved $100 and had a much better evening putting the kids down and watching a show.
Lack Of Patience Cost Me $120,000
This incident reminded me of a far more costly event, also due to my inability to sit still and do nothing.
In early March 2025, I closed on selling my home and got about $1.65 million in proceeds. I transferred $50,000 to our joint checking account so my wife could pay some bills. Then we agreed I’d invest the rest.
The S&P 500 was down about 3% at the time, so I decided to start investing. I told myself I’d invest about $1 million (60% of the proceeds) over the next three months. But as soon as the S&P 500 was down about 5% a week later, I invested $500,000. Then I invested another $700,000 over the next couple of weeks as the market kept dropping.
So instead of investing $1 million over three months, I invested $1.2 million over three weeks. And of course, on Liberation Day a couple weeks later, the S&P 500 was down about 20%.
Essentially, I lost around $120,000 (-10% on $1.2 million) by investing too soon, all because of my inability to patiently wait for things to get worse before they got better. Luckily, I had $200,000 left to invest near the bottom and the market has since recovered.
When it comes to buying the dip, don’t get trigger-happy. Buy too often, too soon, and you’ll run out of firepower right when you need it most, like I did.
This summer, I’m determined to live a more relaxing life in Hawaii. We’ll only be there for four weeks this time, but I plan to unwind by 60%, versus not unwinding at all last year. We’ll get to enjoy the spoils of the in-law unit remodel and focus on our health while we’re away.
FIRE and Impatience
During this time of self-reflection, I’ve realized there’s a strong correlation between the desire to FIRE and impatience. FIRE people may be more sensitive about the passage of time. We feel a greater urgency to save aggressively and get out earlier, just in case our lives are cut short or we’re hit with illnesses that lower our quality of life.
The Sensitivity Of Time
If my 15-year-old friend hadn’t died in a car accident when I was 13, I’m not sure I would have had the urge to retire by 40. But his death has stayed with me, which is why I’ve been writing about retiring early since I launched this site in 2009. It’s also why I’m so opinionated about getting people to stop working a job they don’t love once they’re close to or have already reached their FIRE number.
I also find it risky to keep grinding when you’ve got a $10+ million net worth and your kids are still at home. I know this viewpoint can be annoying to those who enjoy their jobs, or who want to break free but somehow won’t. But our kids won’t give a crap if we have another million in our bank account.
Most middle-school kids aren’t traumatized by a friend dying on them. So perhaps most people aren’t as sensitive about the passage of time as I am. But I feel like I’m experiencing time move 50% faster than the average person. In high school, I remember hoping I’d be lucky to live until 60, while my peers were all thinking 90 and above.
If something happens to me, I want my wife and kids to be completely fine without my income. I locked in my own term life insurance policy through Policygenius because they let you compare real quotes from top carriers in one place. I felt so much better after.
How To Develop The Power To Do Nothing
Being more sensitive about the passage of time can push you to work harder, save more, take calculated risks, and live life to the max now. But that non-stop, go-go-go attitude where you always need to finish the last mile ASAP can’t be good for sustained happiness. The stress adds up.
It’s also not good for your relationships with your spouse, parents, and children. If you’re always the one who wants things done and the day packed with productive tasks, you’ll be exhausting to be around, and you’ll start viewing your loved ones as less motivated, or just unadventurous.
So here are the six tips I’m working on to get better at sitting still and doing nothing.
1. Impose a waiting period, then sleep on it
The bigger the dollar amount or the higher the stakes, the longer I force myself to wait before acting. A broken appliance, a stock purchase, an angry email to a contractor. None of it needs solving in the next ten minutes. Patience has a price. So does impatience. The difference is that impatience hides the bill until it’s too late to dispute it.
A full night of sleep helps more than working harder ever does. The subconscious is a quiet little employee who keeps grinding long after you’ve clocked out. A walk or a soak in the hot tub brings a ton of new post ideas too. Some of my best decisions have come from doing nothing but waiting until morning.
2. Do things in the right order
Diagnose before you operate. Get the free opinion before the paid one. Read the instruction manual. Ask Claude or ChatGPT to diagnose first. Try the cheap fix before the expensive one. Most expensive mistakes don’t come from doing the wrong thing. They come from doing the right things in the wrong sequence.
3. Separate what feels urgent from what is actually important
A dark fridge at 8:30 pm feels like an emergency when you want to stuff your face. In reality, food stays cold for hours and the world keeps spinning. My wife understood this instinctively. I treated it like the house was burning down.
Before springing into action, ask what actually happens if you wait until tomorrow. Nine times out of ten, the honest answer is “nothing,” which means you’ve manufactured an emergency just to justify your need to do something.
4. Pre-commit to a plan, then tie your own hands
I knew the right move with my home sale proceeds. I wrote it down: invest $1 million over three months, dollar-cost average, stay calm. Then the market dipped and I overrode my own plan within three weeks.
The lesson isn’t that I had a bad plan. It’s that I didn’t trust it. Automate your investments, set the schedule, and make it annoying to deviate. The entire point of a plan is to protect you from yourself in the moment your emotions are screaming loudest. Be Odysseus and tie your hands to the bow.
5. Schedule doing nothing like it’s an important meeting
Rest doesn’t happen by accident for highly motivated people. If it’s not on the calendar, the go-go-go instinct fills the empty space with a project. So this summer in Hawaii, “do nothing” is a scheduled activity. World Cup at 6am. Beach at 10am. Boogie boarding at 4pm after a nap. A book with absolutely nothing to do with money.
Treat leisure as a deliverable and you might actually deliver it.
6. Learn from the calmest person in the room
The calmest person in the room is usually seeing the situation most clearly, because they’re not flooded with adrenaline. Maybe they’re just more experienced. Find that person and copy them. Often, it’s the one who looks like they’re doing nothing.
Need To Better Enjoy The FIRE Life As One Ages
I retired from my day job in 2012 to buy more time. Fourteen years later, the challenge isn’t earning the freedom anymore. It’s remembering to actually use it, instead of filling it with the same urgency I was supposedly trying to escape.
FIRE was never the finish line. Learning how to enjoy the freedom, without constantly optimizing it, is now the harder skill, and it only gets more important with age. My kids won’t remember whether the fridge got fixed at 10pm or 10am, or whether the leak took two weeks or two years to patch. They’ll remember whether dad was present or pacing.
So this summer, my only real goal is to do less, on purpose. I’ve even set up a Summer YOLO Fund so I have permission to actually spend without agonizing over it. Sometimes the most valuable thing FIRE buys you isn’t more money. It’s the ability to do nothing and spend freely without guilt.
Reader Questions And Suggestions
Readers, do you have the power to do nothing, or are you cursed with the same impatience I am? What’s the biggest impatience tax you’ve ever paid, where waiting a day, a week, or a year would have saved you money, stress, or both?
Part of what makes it possible to do nothing this summer is knowing the big stuff is already handled. I locked in my term life insurance through Policygenius years ago, specifically so my wife and kids would be fine without income if something happened to me. That’s one less thing to lie awake worrying about, and one less excuse to stay in go-go-go mode “just in case.” Once the real risks are covered, the small stuff, like a dark fridge at 8:30 pm, doesn’t deserve the same adrenaline.
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