Financial independence and early retirement (“FIRE”), extreme early retirement, vagabonding, and the four-hour work week: the compelling siren songs of the digital generation.

Just as the blogosphere had begun to find its stride, Tim Ferriss published his classic opt-out book and tapped into the zeitgeist that had long struggled for mainstream respect under the banner of the working mother seeking “work/life balance.” He turned that stale conversation into a cult of lifestyle design and inspired a slew of side hustlers, who variously figured out how to tap Alibaba to source and sell “me-too” shlock on Amazon and happily shilled on blogs about the latest mass market products in exchange for secret promotional dollars. The clever ones managed to start tech companies that have attracted billions of investment dollars and flipped The Natural Order of Things on its head, with gray haired boomers salivating over the prospect of owning a piece of that mythical unicorn company that can generate obscene profit margins with virtually no overhead and employee rosters in the mere single or double digits.

But for those millennials who have been asleep, or more likely, diligently, tirelessly and obediently pursuing (and then paying for) the pricey educations we were told would take us to the moon, we may have missed that boat full of hucksters and clever young (mostly male) hustlers. Instead, we may find ourselves waking up on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration at the age of 31, having finally just paid off our student loans and showing a positive net worth for the first time in our adult lives, but with two young children to support and a nasty and incurable case of type 1 diabetes holding us back.

“You could have waited to have children!” I can hear the protests now. “Your spendy lifestyle is the bed that you made for yourself!” They would, of course, be right. Some people ate ramen and had roommates and slept on a futon, and their frugality and flexibility paid off in spades. Great for them! Really.

But there has to be a Plan B, for those of us who couldn’t or simply chose not to abandon the ship before it left the harbor. I won’t jump down too far down the rabbit hole, other than to point out that women’s bodies don’t wait forever (egg freezing hysteria aside) and to ask why childlessness should be the price of a ticket to freedom for those who just happen to be double-X. I’ll just say that some of us are on the ship now, whether because we woke up too late or because we needed something that it offered and had little to no choice in the matter. The question is where we go from here.

We have mouths to feed, insulin to inject and stability to preserve. But we’re still millennials, and that mythical 9-to-5 life has as little to offer to us as it does to the tech bros, internet hustlers, and the cult of hyper-frugal, hyper-optimistic, insurance-shunning and globally vagabonding early retirees. So how do we craft a path to financial independence and early retirement without cutting ties to the organized world that we and our children rely upon? How do we fulfill our promise and contribute our full potential to society, all without tying ourselves to the mast in service of a thankless corporate money vortex?

Join me as I figure it out, one dollar and one blog post at a time.