Let us pause, dear reader, to contemplate the modern equivalent of the Protestant Ethic: the packed lunch. A couple in their thirties, by dint of a decade of Tupperware and thermoses, have retired at forty. The financial press is agog. The world, apparently, takes note. This is the revolution? We have traded the barricades for the bento box, and we call it progress.
The story is simple enough: two modest earners, forgoing coffee-shop lattes and Pret a Manger, saved aggressively, invested wisely, and now sit on a beach in Thailand, or perhaps a narrowboat in the Cotswolds. Their freedom is laudable. Their discipline is admirable. But let us not mistake this for a political awakening. This is not the storming of the Bastille. It is the quiet, methodical hoarding of capital by the petit bourgeoisie.
Historically, early retirement was the preserve of the rentier class – those whose grandfathers had plundered India or owned mills in Manchester. Now, it is available to any accountant with a spreadsheet and a will of iron. But what is lost in this transaction? The great engine of consumer society relies on our willing self-exploitation. We work, we spend, we die. The early retiree opts out of the cycle, becoming a ghost in the machine. They are celebrated, but they are also an anomaly. For every one who escapes, a thousand remain chained to their desks, their packed lunches a daily reminder of their own failure.
There is an intellectual decadence at play here, a narrowing of ambition. Past generations dreamed of utopias, of collective liberation. We dream of a sufficient pension pot. The Fall of Rome was debated in terms of virtue and decay. Today, we debate the optimal withdrawal rate. Our national identity is no longer bound up in empire or industry; it is bound up in individual financial liberation. Britain, once a nation of shopkeepers, is now a nation of spreadsheet warriors.
This obsession with early retirement is, at its root, a symptom of a profound dissatisfaction with work itself. We have made labour a drudgery to be escaped, rather than a vocation to be embraced. The Victorians, for all their faults, believed in the moral value of toil. They built cathedrals and railways. We build spreadsheets and investment portfolios.
And yet, I cannot bring myself to mock the couple entirely. In a world of gig economies and zero-hour contracts, they have seized a sliver of agency. They have played the game and won. The tragedy is not that they succeeded, but that such success requires a decade of monastic frugality. A society that demands this level of sacrifice for basic financial security is not healthy. It is a society that has abandoned the social contract.
So let us applaud their discipline, but let us also ask the harder questions. Why must we choose between a life of bean-counting and a life of debt? Why is the packed lunch a badge of virtue, when it should be a choice? The personal finance revolution is a sideshow. The real revolution would be a world where forty-year-olds do not feel compelled to flee the workforce entirely.
But that is a thought for another column. For now, I must go. My sandwich is getting cold.
