Every Sunday, I send a 5-minute email documenting how I'm escaping my 9-5 with simple "ugly" emails that sell—the wins, the mistakes, what's actually working—so you can do it too (it's free)
My dad told me to save for retirement.
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My dad told me: But to me it sounded abstract, distant, and completely unreal. I obviously knew in my head I'd get old eventually. But I couldn't feel it any more than I could feel myself dying or swimming on Mars. He was describing a destination I had no interest in reaching. So I ignored him. For 17 years. Why "save for retirement" fails young menThe advice asks you to sacrifice now for a future self you can't imagine. It sounds like deferred obedience. "Save for retirement" = be a good boy and hope the system takes care of you later. It has no identity attached to it. And no man has ever felt inspired contributing to a pension fund. The consequences of this are visible everywhere. The Federal Reserve has documented that nearly 4 in 10 Americans (across all income levels, not just low earners) couldn't handle an unexpected $400 bill without borrowing or selling something. That's not a retirement problem. That's a right-now problem. Ask yourself honestly: if you lost your job tomorrow, how long could you survive without asking anyone for help? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, you already understand why the retirement frame was never going to work on you. It was solving the wrong problem. How my older brother changed my mindThen years later I watched my older brother (twelve years ahead of me) do something I couldn't stop thinking about. He'd been consistently investing a portion of his income for years. Then one day he just stopped working. Took a year off. Lived on his investments while the rest of us commuted. He wasn't rich in a Hollywood sense. He'd just started earlier and been consistent. Same mechanics my dad had described to me close to two decades earlier. Completely different image. That's when it finally clicked. "Save for retirement" = be a good boy and trust the system. "Stack optionality" = become the kind of man who can walk away, move countries, start things, and say no to other people claiming his time and labor as their own. Same mechanics. Completely different identity. And that was what was lacking in the retirement conversation all along. My dad gave me the vehicle. My brother showed me what you could actually do with it. The time horizon fixThe framing was also wrong. 40 years is abstract. 18 months is real. It doesn't take decades to feel it. Do 6-18 months of auto-stacking and your nervous system notices. Less anxiety. More options. The low-grade financial dread that sits in the background of most men's lives slowly reduces. Not gone, just less loud. It's not "invest and maybe you get something at the end of the rainbow decades later." It's more like going to the gym: you start to see and feel the benefits in months, not only in years and decades. My brother didn't wait 40 years to feel free. He built enough financial density over time that the option appeared. Then he took it. What financial density actually looks like in practiceIf you're anything like me, you don't want to spend your life reading annual reports like Warren Buffett. You look at the market and logically realize you don't know which companies will outperform over the decades. You'd rather focus on building something great. So investing has to be simplified and mostly automated. You don't try to pick winners. You look at the last 50 years of history and see that global index funds have tended to grow at 7-8% per year on average. Here’s why that’s not laziness but rationality. Over any 20-year period, roughly 95% of actively managed funds underperform a simple index fund after fees. These are professional fund managers — people whose entire career is picking stocks, with research teams, Bloomberg terminals, and decades of experience. 95% of them still lose to the index. If they can’t beat it consistently, the idea that you’ll do better by picking individual stocks in your spare time between commutes and bedtime routines isn’t ambition. It’s overconfidence. The index doesn’t require you to spend your evenings reading annual reports. It just requires you to be consistent. And it beats almost every alternative once you account for the hidden costs. Unlike real estate (where you become a part-time landlord worrying about clogged toilets at 2am and tenants not paying) your money is liquid. Easily sold within a day or two. The mechanics are simpler than most people think. Auto-transfer 10%+ of your take-home pay the day after your salary hits. A portion builds your 6-month cash buffer first — so you're never forced to sell investments at the worst possible time. The rest buys a global index fund automatically. That's it. No stock picking. No timing the market. No watching charts. Month by month you own a slightly bigger piece of 1,000+ major businesses on earth. When the world economy grows, you grow with it. When it dips, you stay in. The only thing you need to remember when the market drops 30%+ is what you actually own: a share of the factories, buildings, machines, and intellectual property that run the world. That doesn't disappear because the mood gets hysterical for a while. The system isn't the point. The automaticity is. Because the goal isn't to become a sophisticated investor. It's to remove money decisions from your daily life so your financial position improves without requiring your attention while you focus on building something that actually excites you. A simple starting allocation:
The point isn't the specific instruments. It's the automaticity and the identity behind it. You're not saving for retirement. You're building the economic foundation that makes you ungovernable. My dad was rightMy dad wasn't wrong about the mechanics. Set up an auto-transfer. Pay yourself first. Let it compound. But he was wrong about why I'd care. Nobody builds financial density to be comfortable at 70. They build it to be free at 40. Or 50. Or whenever they're finally ready to stop asking permission. My brother figured that out twelve years before I did. He took his year off. I'm building toward something that makes a year off look like a warmup. I don’t think about it as ”saving for retirement” anymore. Warmly, Bjorn |
Bjorn Falkenstrom
Every Sunday, I send a 5-minute email documenting how I'm escaping my 9-5 with simple "ugly" emails that sell—the wins, the mistakes, what's actually working—so you can do it too (it's free)
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