The FIRE Tribe
"Assistant Manager Chae. I'm quitting."
"What???"
A peaceful ordinary life can vanish in a single abrupt blow. Like Assistant Manager Park—the undisputed ace of the facilities team—simply disappearing.
"Park, what are you talking about all of a sudden? Are you transferring somewhere?"
If it wasn't a joke, it was a genuine disaster. The new year had barely started, and it was still the dead of winter. On a construction site already buried in closeout, the facilities team was short-handed as it was. Losing one more person meant a straight drop into work hell.
Park only scratched the back of his neck, gave an awkward little laugh, and went on.
"Not a transfer. A graduation."
"Graduation?"
Graduation? What was that supposed to mean? He was at an age when his own college commencement was already going soft at the edges of memory.
"I'm going to live as one of the FIRE Tribe now. I've made enough to play for the rest of my life."
The FIRE Tribe...??
I blinked, half afraid Park had suddenly lost his grip on reality.
"Park... you're serious?"
Before he could answer, a familiar voice came from behind them.
"No, Park, that's not how this works. If you stop earning, how do you plan to live?"
It was Assistant Manager Kim, from the same facilities team.
"None of us came here to accomplish anything grand, I'll give you that. But while you can still earn, you stack that paycheck, month after month. You don't feel even a little bad throwing away a job you fought so hard to get into? Quit, and you'll be aching for these days before you know it."
He's not wrong.
I nodded along beside them. How much had he ground himself down, from his school years straight through his twenties, just to land a stable job like this?
From high school through university, it had felt like one long training period whose only purpose was getting through this company's door. The payoff was the respectable position he held now. Walking away from all of that looked, from where he stood, like an enormous gamble.
But then Park grinned and went on.
"I've saved enough. I hit it big in the stock market not long ago."
"What...? A big... a big score in stocks?"
Kim looked visibly rattled. Park kept talking.
"Yeah. The investment blew up, so I'm quitting, parking the money in dividend stocks, and living off the payouts. That's my FIRE."
And with that, he was gone. It happened in a blink.
"...He left."
"The guy just walked out..."
It didn't take long for one of the five desks in the facilities team to empty. We stared at the vacant seat and felt, all at once, a hollow ache and an envy we couldn't help.
We'd suffered the same overtime. We'd taken the same tongue-lashings from the department head. And a single stock had split his life and Park's onto entirely different roads.
I envy him...
"Hey, Chae. Quick smoke?"
"Sure."
A cigarette in the cracks of the day. We stepped outside to air out our heads.
On a construction site, smoke breaks are mandatory.
I wasn't a smoker, though, so I detoured through the pantry, tore open a yellow packet of instant coffee, and followed Kim out with the cup in my hand.
I was the one who spoke first.
"Honestly, I'm jealous. FIRE in your thirties."
"Tch. Tell me about it. Whenever I brought up stocks he played dumb, and the whole time Park was going all-in behind our backs. Never saw it coming."
Kim said it with his eyes glued to his phone. Watching him, I went on.
"You trade too, don't you, Kim?"
"Who doesn't, these days? Everybody's in."
Coffee slid down my throat. Even so, I still couldn't make sense of what Park had done.
"How much can you even make in the market that you'd give up a salary and walk out of a stable job? I don't get it."
Kim's hand stopped short. He let out a short laugh, turned the phone around, and held the screen up to me.
"Heh. Chae, take a look at this."
"...What is... whoa. Is that profit?"
The screen was full of names. A few were blue, but most burned red, and even a complete outsider like me could tell that the red of gains was winning.
"See? Dump your paycheck into stocks the second it hits and the money just copies itself. You should grab Samsung already. It clears eighty thousand this year, no question. I'm even looking at a hundred thousand."
Kim's gains really were nearly two months' salary. Even so, a sour unease made me lean back a little.
"...But isn't the market way too dangerous?"
"Huh?"
Wasn't it? I knew exactly how frightening stocks could be, and from where I stood, Kim—shoving his salary in without a second's hesitation—was the one who looked strange.
Right. One bad run of trades and your whole life is gone. Instantly.
My own father was proof. Until I was in middle school, our family had lived well enough. Then he lost everything in the market and vanished, and we'd been paying down that debt right up through last year.
"Chae, everybody trades at least a little these days. Look—Park just quit because of stocks. I'm in the market myself."
"Aren't you basically an expert? For an ordinary person like me, stocks are just too..."
Kim cut me off, his voice bright with excitement.
"Yeah! Look at this—Samsung's climbing right now!"
Beep. In the time it took the cigarette to burn, another red light had bloomed inside Kim's brokerage account. Even while he smoked, his money was copying itself.
He laughed at whatever I'd said, lit a second cigarette, and kept going.
"Listen, Chae. When the won depreciates, savings accounts and time deposits lose value on their own. Even while Warren Buffett is asleep, money makes mon—"
Beep. Kim's return had just ticked again.
After that he talked for a long while, lit up with it, but most of it was too technical for me to follow. The rough summary was that anyone who wasn't in the market was an idiot, so I ought to buy stocks immediately.
My thoughts, though, had already gone somewhere else.
Beep.
Samsung...? Why does Kim's stock window give me that chill...?
A chill. You could call it instinct. When had it started? If I traced my memory back, I'd been good at feeling that cold prickle since sometime around high school.
At first it was only a slightly sharper sense for a room. Back in school, when everyone was chattering before the teacher came in, the chill would hit and I'd shut up and pretend to study—and then the teacher would walk through the door. On the college entrance exam, too, I'd finished my answers, felt that same chill, gone back over them, caught the wrong ones, and scraped into a top university by the skin of my teeth.
In the army the chill made me keep a little distance from a fellow recruit who acted friendly from day one. That recruit later assaulted a senior and got transferred out, and when the ones who'd stuck close to him caught hell, I was able to slip clear. By the time I was sitting for certifications and interviewing for jobs, it had grown a little more precise than in high school. In most things, all I had to do was heed the chill.
Live that way—simply steering clear of whatever set the chill off—and small advantages accumulated. The feeling had always been a kind of signpost for how I ought to move. Mostly, it was a warning sign.
And that chill had just washed over me the instant the numbers on Kim's profit screen changed.
Samsung's price on the phone was clearly rising, and still, looking at those numbers, I felt the chill. The same cold prickle that came whenever something bad was about to happen. It hit hard every time the figures in Kim's window shifted—especially Samsung's.
I've never traded. But if I'm already getting the chill... absolutely not.
I didn't have to look far. In my own house, hadn't my father blown everything on stocks? The market was dangerous. For a small citizen like me, all the more.
Then a voice from inside the office called for me.
"Chae!!! Where are you!"
"Ah—I'll head in."
"Yeah, yeah. I'm going out to the site. Don't forget what I said—get into the market before the close. Earnings drop today, so Samsung's definitely mooning tomorrow!!!"
Since when does anything definitely moon.
A fixed salary was enough to live on. Thinking that, I sat back down and set my fingers on the keyboard.
But.
That day, too, I worked the usual overtime as if it were only natural—four and a half hours, until eight-thirty. Then a company dinner was announced out of nowhere. I was dragged to it, forced to keep the mood afloat, forced through a fifth bottle, and stumbled through my front door at one-thirty in the morning.
And when I found myself hauling my spinning body straight toward sleep, setting an alarm because I had to be up at five—
Dead drunk, the thought seized me completely.
"Earlier... Kim definitely told me to buy Samsung, right...?"
Drunk, I broke every last savings account, flung the money at a brokerage, and tried to buy Samsung.
The market is currently closed.
"Wh... what is this!!!"
The unfairness of it was staggering. Because the job kept me on overtime late every night, I couldn't even trade—the market hours had already passed me by.
On a normal day I wouldn't have felt it this hard. But tonight I'd drunk too much, and Park's case kept surfacing, and I thought I might actually cry.
"This... this isn't the life I dreamed of..."
I'd believed that getting into a major corporation would make everything happy, that life would simply work out. But even if I saved for the rest of my days, an apartment—a home of my own—would be nearly impossible to buy. Take out a loan to buy one, and that was just debt.
And that wasn't all. Dating, marriage, a child—all of it was money. All of it was debt. I'd spend my whole life paying it down. Staying at this company forever. Working this late, forever.
Thought of that way, maybe Park really was the wise one. He'd found his real self before it was too late and walked out into the world.
Right about now he's probably reading in bed at home, perfectly comfortable, then drifting off. He could even sleep until nine.
Earning money so you could buy back your own time—maybe that really was an enviable, sensible choice.
I want that too. I want a little room in my life.
Then a single popup caught my eye.
U.S. stocks can now be traded twenty-four hours a day!
"Huh...? This one's open right now? American stocks?"
I went in, and the screen was packed with companies I'd never heard of.
"Wh... what is all this?"
I looked around, and in my drunkenness I hit agree on every popup that floated up. I didn't even notice an auto currency-conversion request go through. I just kept browsing.
"Wow... I seriously haven't heard of a single one of these names."
If I was going to invest, I wanted something safe, something I'd actually heard of, like Samsung. Then, in the dizzy swim of my vision, one icon snagged my eye.
"Huh...? Is this icon Google...?"
Google? If it was Google, it had to be a safe stock. Probably.
Buy!
Click.
And the instant I hit the buy button, the alcohol vanished all at once.
"..."
Not a careful, staged buy. His entire net worth, all in. Ten seconds later, the result was +0.4%.
"T... two hundred thousand won...!!!"
Two hundred thousand won in ten seconds. His heart felt like it was flopping in his chest. Tension sent it hammering, blood racing through his whole body. The stock kept climbing.
0.5%... 0.6%... 0.9%... 1%.
At some point I was lying on the bed, staring only at the chart on my phone, and I realized twenty minutes had passed. And on the account, in red: five hundred thousand won.
Money really does copy itself???
Why had I waited this long to do something this good? And then the number printed 1.2%.
A jolt.
Was it because my heart was pounding so hard? I felt a chill far stronger than usual. And before I knew it, on instinct, I sold.
50,000,000 won → 50,600,000 won
+600,000 won · 25 minutes
Fifty million won came back as fifty million six hundred thousand. In twenty-five minutes.
I stared at the number for a moment, and then I simply fell asleep. I'd been so tense that the alcohol had spread all through me, and the drunkenness had surged back up at once.
Five o'clock. My eyes opened to the alarm.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep!
Up early for work, morning safety stretches, a walk through the site, then back to the office. I bowed to the department head, who was working at his desk with a ramrod posture, and turned to greet Kim as well—and stopped.
"...Kim? Why do you look like that?"
"...Oh. Chae. It's nothing, just... haah. Want to grab a smoke?"
"...? Yes. I'll be right behind you."
Didn't I just see him come back from one?
I followed him out. He was already on his second cigarette.
"What's going on, Kim?"
"Hah... Chae. Did you trade yesterday?"
How does he know?
"Yes... well. I ended up trying it once."
"Hah... I'm sorry. Then you got stuck holding Samsung because of me."
"Sorry?"
"Earnings came in way worse than expected. The stock dropped six percent. I puked up everything I made this year."
No wonder it felt chilly yesterday... wait.
Without thinking, I opened the brokerage app and checked Google's price.
My heart kicked. On a hunch I pulled up the chart, and sure enough—after I'd sold at 1.2%, the stock had slid and slid, all the way down to −3%.
Wait.
Maybe that chill I'd felt last night was actually...