What I Mean by Financial Independence

Financial independence is often described as a number.

A target net worth.
A withdrawal rate.
A point at which work becomes optional.

Those ideas are not wrong, but they are incomplete. For many people, they are actively unhelpful.

Over time, I have come to think of financial independence less as a destination and more as a relationship with money, one that changes how decisions feel long before any spreadsheet says you have arrived.

This publication exists to explore that idea.

Independence is not about stopping work

One of the most persistent myths around financial independence is that it is about escaping work altogether.

For some people, that may be true. For most, the real value lies elsewhere.

Independence tends to show up earlier and more quietly. It appears in the ability to walk away from bad situations, in choosing work for reasons other than fear, and in having time to think before making decisions.

It is less about never working again and more about not being trapped.

Money solves fewer problems than people expect

There is a tendency to believe that once a certain level of wealth is reached, money stops being a source of stress.

In practice, what changes is not the absence of uncertainty but the shape of it.

New questions replace old ones. How much is enough. What risks are you actually comfortable with. What are you optimising for now.

Financial independence does not remove these questions. It simply gives you more space to answer them honestly.

Why investing matters but is not the whole story

Investing is an important part of the picture, which is why it features prominently here. Over long periods of time, it is one of the few levers that genuinely compounds.

But investing alone does not create independence.

Independence emerges from the interaction between how you earn, how you spend, how you invest, and how you respond when things do not go to plan.

Focusing on any one of these in isolation tends to produce brittle outcomes.

Long term thinking is mostly emotional, not technical

Most financial mistakes are not caused by a lack of information.

They are caused by impatience, comparison, fear, or overconfidence, usually at exactly the wrong moment.

Long term thinking is less about choosing the right asset and more about sticking with reasonable decisions through uncertainty, resisting the urge to constantly revise the plan, and accepting that progress is uneven and often boring.

These are not technical problems. They are human ones.

What this publication is for

The Long View is a place to think about money in this broader sense.

Not to compare outcomes.
Not to share portfolios.
Not to make predictions.

Instead, it exists to explore how financial independence actually feels in practice, why it is harder than it looks, and why long term thinking, while unfashionable, still matters.

If you are interested in making better decisions about money over time rather than chasing certainty or shortcuts, you are in the right place.

What comes next

Future pieces will look at questions such as why the idea of enough keeps moving, why high income does not guarantee peace of mind, and why long term investing is psychologically difficult even when it is working.

None of these have neat answers. That is the point.

Financial independence is not a finish line.
It is a way of approaching money, one that takes time to earn.