I believe that people do so little retirement planning that many will never decide to retire, they will be forced to retire because they will becomes unable to work. To me, the biggest benefit of FIRE is actually formalizing my need to retire some day and learning best practices to make decisions that will take care of my future self. Everything else is simply about consciously moving the date at which I am able to stop directly earning income. Higher paying job? That will allow me to move the date up. Second kid? That would require me to move the date back. A new car sooner or retiring two years earlier? Moving to a worse area but retiring five years earlier? Once I started thinking like this I realized that I often chose the option that lead me to be able to retire sooner by saving the money instead. I don't want more or more shinier stuff. I want to remove the powerful financial incentive behind how I spend the vast majority of my time.

Check out reddit.com/r/financialindependence. Plenty of people on the FIRE path with kids.

It's a good time for spending dollars in the UK too!

Yeah definitely, from reading the article it sounds like they just want the freedom to do what they want to do (and that likely could come with bonus income). The article mentions the programmer's wife is an optometrist and is still working actually.

Betting on the stock market (mutual funds) over timescales in decades is about the least risky thing you can do. You don't need a 5% return every year (that won't happen), you just need it to be the average.

There are a thousand and one ways to mitigate risk in terms of choosing investments and withdrawal strategies and your FIRE age, it makes no sense for you to be so negative of the concept. In the extreme case, some people make so much money starting so early that they can live the rest of their lives just on cash.

I would imagine that old people struggle to do what they want because they are old. They have family, health, and longevity issues to contend with.

For everyone else, hobbies exist.

Obviously this newsworthy example is an outlier, what is your point? That unless you retire at 34 you might as well keep working until you die? You seem to imply that everybody is due a retirement at the official sanctioned retirement age. They are not. Your retirement is of your own design. FIRE is about formalizing this and realizing that everything you do today affects that timeline. The person in the article was very lucky and ended up with a desirable timeline. His exact circumstances are not the lesson that you should come away with.