这本书是2010年写的，Jacob Lund Fisker是比较早期Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE)的倡导者。FIRE到后面也分成了LEAN FIRE, FAT FIRE等等很多种，而这本书主要是偏向于LEAN FIRE，大致就是尽可能削减生活成本，用很短的时间实现财务自由（作者用了5年）。作者在书中主要说了一种文艺复兴的人类，学习很多技能，尽可能自己做事，从各方面降低生活成本，避免消费主义陷阱，也给出了挺多实打实的计算（虽然不是重点）。书本身比较偏向于哲学而不是方法论，作者相信每个人有每个人自己的FIRE，而过多描述他自己的FIRE本身意义不大，授人以鱼不如授人以渔。

“At some point, the teacher introduced tests and grades. Test-taking became the primary objective; learning secondary. We had the option to quickly forget what we had spent the past year learning after the test was done. In other words, we were being taught to be “flexible.” Later, there were job fairs and educational fairs telling us how to write résumés and how to interview so we could get jobs. Yet, I never learned why the world worked the way it did, and in retrospect, I think nobody ever even asked the question. Everybody always only focused on the “what” and “where;” no questions asked.”

高度的分工，工业的生产让整个社会的效率提高了无数倍，需要的是每颗螺丝钉的专精和服从，随时可能被替换。学校训练最多也是服从，在学校服从老师，追求成绩，在社会服从老板，追求业绩，一条龙。

“In real life, the prisoners of Plato’s Cave are those who are prisoners or slaves to their wages and their culture. A wage slave is a wage earner who is entirely dependent on their wages. While the wage slave is free to leave the current job, he isn’t free to leave the job market altogether and he can likely not imagine the possibility of doing so. He is still entirely focused on the wall.”

“A wage slave is a person who is not only economically bound by mortgages, loans, and other obligations, but also mentally bound by an inability to perceive that there are other options available, like the prisoners in Plato’s Cave. Their chains are not physical like those of 150 years ago (though they still are in some parts of the world); the chains are mental, which in some sense makes them worse, because it turns the prisoners into their own prison wardens. Like the slaves in Plato’s Cave, the only commonly accepted way for one of them to leave is to win the “prison game,” which means accumulating at least a million to retire”

柏拉图的洞穴理论。看似的自由，比如人可以选择自己从事的工作，这本身就是被限制在了大前提，一个成人在现代社会一定要工作。在这种理论下，成功的定义就是一直工作知道积累了足够退休的财富。自我的思想的束缚比150年前物理的铁链还要有效果，毕竟人不可能做自己认知之外的事，不认为自己有除了“一直工作到退休”以外的可能性这个枷锁本身是非常可怕的。

“Frequently, when someone is depressed, the advice is “Go out and spend some money. Buy yourself something nice. Treat yourself. Try a little retail therapy.” People don’t seem to realize that this attempt to feel good is exactly what propagates the problem. Compared to people just 50 years ago, modern wage slaves live a life of material abundance. They’re consumers”

“Similarly, many of the ways we used to do things have been redesigned to ensure that instead of doing it ourselves, we can buy some gadget or some service to have it done for us. This is convenient, because we’re usually too busy working to pay for it to do it ourselves”

消费主义和高度分工是一个闭环。一个人只会做自己的工作，工作赚的钱来以相对的高价买其他的产品和服务，越工作，越只会一小部分事，越用钱去娱乐、缓解压力、满足各种需要，欲望也就越大，就只能越努力工作去赚赚钱。