Quick note: English isn't my native language, so I used Claude to help translate and clean up some parts. Everything described here is my actual situation.

Throwaway. Posting because I'm not in a great headspace, and I'd genuinely value input from people further down this road than me.

I spent my entire 20s grinding to get here - every decision, every relationship, every sacrifice oriented around hitting financial security as fast as I could. I got there. And now that the finish line I'd been running toward for a decade is gone, I don't know how to actually feel safe. By the numbers I should feel secure. I don't. No matter how much I accumulate, the anxiety doesn't go away - and I'm starting to notice it leaking into how I treat the people around me. That's actually the part that scares me more than any market scenario.

So I'm posting partly to sanity-check whether my setup makes sense for a 60+ year horizon, but mostly to ask what actually helped you reduce the anxiety, and to get honest input on whether going back to work might be part of the answer.

The setup

• 29M, living in Seoul, South Korea
• Quit my quant trading job at a Singapore-based fund at 26. Trading my own book since then - no formal employment.
• $4.7M investable assets
• $2.8M primary residence, paid off
• Fixed monthly spending: ~$4,400 ($52.8K/yr - property tax, apartment management fee, insurance, car, food, internet, etc.)
• Average monthly spend including fixed: ~$7,630 last year ($91.5K). 3-year rolling average ~$6,600 ($79.2K).
• Planning horizon: assume I make it to 90, so ~61 years

The anxiety itself is what's actually scaring me. I built my entire identity in my 20s around accumulating, and now that I've stopped, I don't recognize who I am without that goal. Logically I'm fine. Emotionally I feel like I'm one bad cycle from disaster. Earning more never seems to move the dial - there's always another number that would supposedly make me feel safe, and then I hit it and nothing changes. I don't know how to actually internalize "enough."

There's another layer on top of that. I do trading as my "job" right now, but it doesn't feel like a job - it feels more like a money-making game with zero value-add to society. So even on the days I'm "working," I'm not building anything, not helping anyone, not contributing in any way that feels meaningful. That makes the "should I go back to work?" question more complicated, because the honest version of it is: go back to what? More of the same kind of work I'm already doing, just with a brand on top? Or something completely different that I don't even know how to start looking for?

What I'm asking

1. Has anyone here dealt with persistent post-FIRE financial anxiety, especially after grinding through your 20s to get there? What actually helped — therapy, more structure, a bigger buffer, going back to work, time?
2. For those who went back to work after FIRE - did it actually reduce the anxiety, or did it just become a different kind of avoidance?
3. For anyone who came from a high-paying but low-meaning field (trading, certain corners of tech/finance) - how did you find work that felt like it actually mattered? Did you have to take a big pay cut / status hit to get there, and was it worth it?
4. Brutally honest: am I "no job"-ing too early, or is this purely a headspace problem that wouldn't be solved by going back?

Thanks for reading.