For the longest time, every single decision I made ran through one filter:
Is this moving me closer to retirement or further away?
Big production day? Retirement math. Vacation? Retirement math. Buying something? Retirement math. That was my only measure of success.
And by 29, it was "working." I was on track to retire from full time dentistry at 45.
Cool, right?
Except for one thing,
Do you understand how long 16 years actually is?
That's not a countdown. That's a sentence.
So if the only win was retiring at 45, what was everything before it?
Just suffering through?
Because if I wasn't enjoying the 16 years leading up to it, I wasn't going to suddenly become a pleasant person the day I stopped drilling teeth. I was going to be miserable for 16 years and then miserable in retirement wondering why I didn't feel better.
Turns out there's a name for what I was doing.
Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar calls it the Arrival Fallacy — the false belief that reaching a goal will bring lasting happiness. He coined the term after winning a major squash tournament and feeling completely empty afterward. The trophy didn't deliver what he thought it would. The stress, the pressure, the emptiness — it all came back.
Sound familiar?
We do this our entire careers.
Get through undergrad, then you'll be happy. Get into dental school, then you'll be happy. Survive residency, then you'll be happy. Build the practice, pay off the loans, hit the FIRE number — then you'll finally be happy.
But the finish line keeps moving. And here's what nobody warns you about: if you arrive miserable, you'll stay miserable.
The destination doesn't fix what the journey broke.
That's when the real question hit me:
What am I actually building this for?
Because retirement planning isn't a life plan. It's an escape plan. And escape plans assume your life sucks now and will magically be great later — which is just the arrival fallacy with a spreadsheet attached to it.
So I stopped asking "when can I escape?" and started asking "what do I actually want my life to look like right now?"
I still invest. I still want financial freedom. But now money is a tool to create freedom today — not just someday.
I didn't need to wait 16 years to start living. Neither do you.
💊 This Week's Prescription:
Write down the one thing you keep saying you'll do "someday." Then pick a date. Not someday — an actual date. That's your start.
Hit reply and tell me what you chose. I read every response.
— Dr. Mike