In a World of AI, Is FatFIRE Still the Point?

I am going to say something that might sound strange coming from a woman who built an entire website around building wealth and hitting financial milestones.

I am not sure any of it matters the way I thought it did.

Not because I have changed my mind about money. Money is still freedom. Money is still options. But because the world is changing so fast right now that the rules I built my life around might not be the rules anymore. And I do not know what the new rules are. Neither does anyone else.

This is my theory about what is happening. It is probably wrong. But so is everybody else’s theory. None of us know the future. The difference is, I am going to tell you that upfront.

What Is Actually Happening

In the past two years, artificial intelligence has gone from a research curiosity to something that can write code, diagnose diseases, generate legal briefs, create photorealistic images, hold conversations that pass the Turing test, and, oh yeah, help me write articles for this website. I use AI tools every day. They make me faster, smarter, and more productive. They also make me wonder what exactly humans are for.

Robotics is not far behind. We are approaching a world where physical labor, not just knowledge work, gets automated. Warehouses, manufacturing, driving, cooking, cleaning. The machines are not coming for blue collar jobs or white collar jobs. They are coming for all of them. Maybe not tomorrow. But the trajectory is clear enough that pretending otherwise feels irresponsible.

And the speed. That is the part that gets me. This is not the Industrial Revolution unfolding over a century. This is happening in years. Maybe months. The model that felt magical six months ago is now the slow one. I have been watching this from the inside of the tech industry and even the people building it do not know where it is going.

Two Scenarios, Both Wild

The Dark Version

In this scenario, AI concentrates wealth in a handful of companies and the people who own them. The top 0.01% own the machines that do everything. The rest of us become economically irrelevant. Not unemployed in the “I need to find a new job” sense. Irrelevant in the “there is nothing you can do that a machine cannot do cheaper and better” sense.

Mass unemployment. Social instability. A new kind of inequality where the gap is not between rich and poor but between those who own the AI and everyone else. Your investment portfolio, your carefully constructed index fund allocation, your 4% safe withdrawal rate, none of it matters if the economy restructures around a technology that does not need human workers.

I do not think this is the most likely outcome. But I do not think it is impossible either.

The Bright Version

In this scenario, AI makes everything abundant. Energy gets so cheap it is nearly free. Production costs collapse. We get some form of universal basic income because there is simply too much wealth being generated to let people starve. Nobody has to work. Or more precisely, nobody has to do work they hate.

Learning calculus because it might get you a better job? Pointless. Grinding through a career you despise because it pays the mortgage? Unnecessary. The entire concept of “earning a living” becomes as archaic as subsistence farming.

In this world, what does investing even mean? If goods are abundant, what are you saving for? If labor is optional, what is retirement? If the economy runs on AI output, does a stock portfolio represent ownership of anything meaningful, or is it just a number on a screen connected to machines you do not understand producing value you cannot measure?

I do not know. Nobody does. And that is the honest starting point.

What Both Scenarios Have in Common

Here is what I keep coming back to. In the dark version, your portfolio might not save you. In the bright version, your portfolio might not matter. In both cases, the thing I have spent the last fifteen years optimizing, meticulously tracking my net worth percentile, obsessively checking whether I have “enough,” it starts to look a little absurd.

My drive to reach FatFIRE status, to hit that number that means I am safe, I am enough, I made it, it seems almost comically irrelevant when I hold it up against the scale of what is changing.

And that is terrifying. Because that drive is me. It is my identity. It is what gets me up at 5 AM and what makes me open spreadsheets at midnight and what this entire website is built on. If the game changes, who am I?

What I Am Actually Certain About

I have one conviction, and I am holding onto it like a life raft:

Psychology is the most important investment you can make. It always was. AI just makes it obvious.

Here is what I mean.

Everybody gets traumatized. Everybody gets hurt. That is not a maybe. That is the baseline. You grew up with parents who did not know how to love you right, or you lost something you could not replace, or the world told you that you were not enough and you believed it. Welcome to being human.

But here is the thing that took me years of therapy to understand: resilience and happiness sometimes come from pain. Not despite it. From it. The people I know who are genuinely at peace are not the ones who avoided suffering. They are the ones who walked through it, sat with it, and came out different on the other side. Not harder. Softer. More open. More honest about what they actually need.

In a world where AI is about to make everything uncertain, that inner work is the only thing that cannot be disrupted.

A robot can manage your portfolio. It can write your emails, file your taxes, even cook your dinner. But it cannot make you feel connected to another human being. It cannot sit across from your kid and be genuinely present. It cannot pick up the phone and call someone you have not talked to in years and say “I miss you” and mean it.

Those things are free and priceless at the same time. And they are about to become the only real currency.

The Practical Part (Because I Cannot Help Myself)

I know how this sounds. “Lady who built a finance website suddenly discovers that money is not everything.” Groundbreaking.

But I am a practical person. I cannot just say “invest in relationships” and leave it there. So here is what I actually mean in concrete terms:

Therapy. Not because something is wrong with you. Because something is wrong with the idea that you can navigate an increasingly chaotic world without understanding your own patterns, triggers, and coping mechanisms. If you can afford it, do it. If you think you do not need it, you especially need it. This is the best money I have ever spent. Better return than any stock pick.

Time. The most inflation-proof asset is an afternoon with someone you love with no agenda. I know how that sounds coming from someone who schedules her life in 30-minute blocks. I am working on it.

Vulnerability. Reach out to that person you have not talked to. Forgive someone. Or accept that you cannot forgive them and let it go anyway. Tell your partner the thing you have been avoiding saying. Have the awkward conversation. Send the text. Every single time I have done this, my life got better. Every single time I avoided it, the distance got worse.

Your kids. In a world where knowledge is free and skills are automatable, what are you actually teaching your children? I think about this every day. I am trying to teach mine emotional intelligence, resilience, curiosity, and the ability to connect with other humans. Not because those things look good on a college application. Because in twenty years, those might be the only things that matter.

Community. Social connection is not a nice-to-have. It is a survival strategy. Having friends, real friends, people who know your worst parts and choose to stay. Having neighbors you actually talk to. Being part of something that is not transactional. The research on loneliness and mortality is terrifying. In the age of AI, isolation will be the default. Connection will be a choice you have to make actively, every day.

What This Means for Investing (Yes, I Am Still Going to Talk About Money)

I am not telling you to sell your portfolio and move to a commune. I still believe in diversification. I still max my 401(k). I still track our net worth. Old habits die hard, and also, we still live in the current world where money matters.

But here is how my thinking has shifted:

I am less interested in optimizing and more interested in resilience. I used to agonize over whether I should be 70/30 or 75/25. Now I care more about whether our financial life can absorb a shock we cannot predict. That means more cash than a textbook recommends. More optionality. Less leverage. Less precision.

I am investing in skills that AI cannot replicate. Not coding. AI writes better code than most humans already. Emotional intelligence. Persuasion. Leadership. The ability to make someone feel heard. The ability to sit in ambiguity without panicking. These are the skills that will have value regardless of which scenario plays out.

I am less attached to the number. I used to have a number. You know the number. The one that means you have made it, you are safe, you can exhale. I still have it. But I hold it more loosely now. Because if the world changes as much as I think it might, that number might buy me half of what I planned, or it might be more than I ever need. I do not know. And I am trying to be okay with not knowing.

I am doubling down on relationships as a financial strategy. Not networking. Relationships. The people who will take your call at 2 AM. The neighbors who will watch your kids. The friends who will tell you when you are being an idiot. In a world of maximum uncertainty, your network is your safety net more than your portfolio is.

The Uncomfortable Confession

Here is the part I have been avoiding writing.

I built this website because I wanted to feel safe. I wanted to quantify my way to certainty. I wanted to check my net worth percentile and see a number that told me I was okay. I am enough. I made it.

AI is making me confront the possibility that certainty does not exist. That it never did. That I was using money as a proxy for control in a world that was always uncontrollable, and now the uncontrollability is just more obvious.

That sounds like a crisis. It kind of is. But it is also, weirdly, a relief. Because if the game was always uncertain, then I was never as behind as I feared. And the things I thought were distractions from wealth-building, the therapy sessions, the slow afternoons, the hard conversations with my husband, the hours reading to my kids, those were the real investments all along.

I do not know what the future holds. I do not know if AI will make us all richer or all poorer or something we cannot yet imagine. I do not know if my portfolio will matter in twenty years or if the concept of a portfolio will seem as quaint as a horse-drawn carriage.

But I know that the people I love are real. I know that being present is real. I know that doing the inner work, the hard, boring, unglamorous work of understanding yourself, is the one investment that compounds regardless of what the machines do.

How do you believe you are enough in a world of total chaos?

I think you start by admitting you do not know. And then you reach for the person next to you.