The Cave at the End of No
You Can’t Optimize Your Way to a Life
Once a month, I sit in the back room of a library with a group of people who all share the same quiet goal: financial independence.
It always feels a little like a secret society. No secret knock or password, but we gather as if we’re about to talk about things most people don’t bring up in everyday life.
And that part is true.
To get there, you walk down two flights of stairs, make a weird left turn, go up a ramp, then another ramp, and the door is on the right. It feels like a very large closet. Concrete walls. No windows. Echoey in a way that makes everything sound slightly more serious than it probably is.
We sit in a circle, and one by one, the thoughts that have been building all month start to come out.
What is enough? How much do I actually need? Am I doing this right?
Those aren’t the exact questions, but everything we ask circles around them.
Should I be in the stock market or real estate? What should my withdrawal rate be? How much money is enough?
Some of us, especially those further along, try to brush these off as basic. But they’re not.
They’re the questions.
And they don’t go away.
Because the answer that felt right three years ago often doesn’t feel right anymore. The plan that worked on paper shifts when life shifts. What seems optimal depends on things that are always changing.
Optimization has limits.
That’s both the art of financial independence and the hardest part of it.
For someone like me, who tends to look for the best solution, that’s hard to sit with.
I catch myself trying to optimize everything.
What are the exact right vitamins? The exact right workout? How many steps? How much sleep? How much time creating?
At one point I caught myself wondering: is it 9 almonds… or 12?
As if somewhere out there is a perfect ratio of inputs that will finally unlock the right way to live.
Then I started reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. A man who lost nearly everything — his family, his freedom, his manuscript — in Nazi concentration camps. Who watched people die. Who nearly died himself. And who, inside all of that, found meaning.
I’m over here trying to optimize my almond count.
He found meaning in the worst that life can offer. I was trying to find the best option among the good ones. And we were both, in completely different ways, asking the same question:
What makes this worth it?
That gap — between my almonds and his ashes — should embarrass me.
It does, a little.
But I think that’s the point.
The question doesn’t scale with circumstance. It just keeps asking itself.
Frankl is careful about this. He doesn’t argue that you need tragedy to find meaning — only that meaning can be found inside whatever life hands you.
The scale of suffering doesn’t determine the depth of the question.
It just strips away the distractions faster.
I have the luxury of being distracted by almonds. He didn’t.
But we both still had to answer for how we used the time we had.
Parts of Frankl are hard to hold onto. I’ve had to reread sections, sit with them, and even then I feel like I’m only catching pieces.
But one idea has stayed with me.
Frankl suggests we try to live as if we could look back on this moment later, knowing we didn’t get it quite right the first time. Not to judge ourselves. But to see more clearly.
My partner actually does a version of this.
In the morning, before she gets up, she imagines she’s 90. She pictures her body older, moving slower, her thoughts not always as sharp. She really sits inside it.
And then she lets it go.
I’m not 90. I’m here.
What comes back isn’t fear. It’s clarity.
That’s what Frankl is pointing at. Not just an idea. A practice.
Because you will not choose perfectly. You will not see the full picture. You will not arrive at a final, best decision.
What you can do is choose with awareness. With intention. With responsibility for the moment you are in.
The FI community taught me something important: freedom is often a subtraction problem.
Say no to lifestyle creep. No to the new car. No to the job that owns you. No to the slow drift into a life that looks fine from the outside but feels like a cage from the inside.
That no is real. It works.
But it isn’t easy.
We live inside a system that has spent decades perfecting the art of telling you that you need more — more comfort, more status, more options, more insurance against every possible future.
The marketing isn’t subtle. And it isn’t random. It knows exactly where you’re soft.
Saying no sounds simple until you’re standing in a showroom, scrolling at midnight, or watching everyone around you upgrade something you convinced yourself you didn’t need.
The no has to be chosen over and over again.
It doesn’t get easier so much as it becomes a practice.
And then one day you realize the practice worked — and you’re standing somewhere very quiet, wondering what it was all for.
A cave.
And standing in that cave, I realized something:
The no was never the destination.
It was just the door.
Money can free your time.
But it can’t tell you what your time is for.
I’m not reading books about meaning because I’ve found it.
I’m reading them because I feel lost.
This writing is part of that. Linking ideas. Building a new map. Trying to see what life looks like when you take away the thing you spent most of it doing.
At some point, you have to start saying yes.
Yes to things that take your time. Yes to things that ask something of you. Yes to people, to effort, to care.
Not because they are the best choices.
But because they are meaningful.
Your life isn’t just this moment. It includes the beginning, the middle, and the end. And those final moments, whenever they come, will shape how everything before them is understood.
Which means any attempt to lock in “best” today is unfinished.
We don’t get the full picture while we’re still inside it.
But we can pause long enough to ask:
Will I be able to stand behind this choice when I look back?
The cave at the end of no is real. I’ve been there.
Quiet. Self-made. Exactly what I built.
But once a month I navigate two flights of stairs, a wrong-feeling left turn, two ramps, and a door that shouldn’t be where it is — and I end up in a concrete room with no windows, sitting in a circle with people asking the same questions I can’t answer alone.
That room is a cave too.
But this one has other people in it.
And that changes what the cave is for.
We’re not talking about what we’ve escaped. We’re not optimizing in the dark by ourselves.
We’re sitting together in the mess of it, trying to figure out what’s actually worth stepping into next.
That’s not the end of the search.
But it might be what the search is for.