How is the FIRE movement doing?

[Jin+Guice]

@7: I'm thinking of moving to Detroit when New Orleans is swallowed by water for exactly those reasons.

[jacob]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLj6FT5lZRY

Who keeps tracks of what the popular kids are doing these days? Are we already an underground movement again?

[7Wannabe5]

Interesting. I've been trying to recall which books on frugality I read prior to "Your Money of Your Life" and "Tightwad Gazette" circa 1992. I know I read "Homesteading in the City" which was published in 1975 in 1986/87, but I think there must have been another book which gave me the idea to take my first "mini-retirement" in 1986/87. I took a semester off of college, worked around 35 hours/week at a keg store, and saved up enough money to support myself for around 6 months just lounging about reading and doing artsy projects, while living in a very inexpensive semi-vegetarian Level-Green/Yellow-ish co-op which charged around $325/month for shelter and food. I might have just come up with the idea myself, because I did also choose to drop out of high school without permission when I was 14/15 and self-educate in the library, but I think there was some simple living Utopian novel I read that inspired my "mini-retirement" at age 21/22.

Anyways, I have very little familiarity with any of the other FIRE gurus/sites of the 21st century mentioned in the video you linked, because not of my "generation." However, I would agree that the trend towards work-from-home has somewhat obliterated the largest carrot offered by FI. OTOH, I think this trend may also be eventually heading towards the ultimate downside of "piece-work." IOW, with greater autonomy comes greater competition at lower levels of production. So, this trend combined with the integration of AI may form a newish carrot for the coming generation.

[J_]

I have seen the video. And the answer @jacobs question and the video’s question: do (E)RE need to be dusted off for a new generation? Yes perhaps. Make it an attractive VR story?

Nevertheless Ere stays important for all, from teenagers to the elderly. We need inspiring stories like @animal, @mF, @c40 @rube @sky to mention some.

We can ask why philosophers like seneca or spinoza kept being so of interesting to us over all those centuries?
Is the Ere book of the same quality?

Seneca we can read and understand more easily than the more thorny (pun intended) Ethica of Spinoza. But starting with his earlier books makes Spinoza easier to understand.

As the video mentions: the speaker could not read the dense texts of The Ere book.

@Jacob of someone else of the forum: Is it possible and has it an advantage to write\draw/make a VR film or book with a daring introduction to a new kind of life, an ere life?

Which suits the era in which we are now?

[jacob]

@Jacob of someone else of the forum: Is it possible and has it an advantage to write\draw/make a VR film or book with a daring introduction to a new kind of life, an ere life?

Which suits the era in which we are now?

I'm out of my depth in so many ways on that question. I might be projecting my personal experience too much, but I think the current era (2020-2030) is much less about "what is said" or "how to do". IOW, objective arguments about what works or interobjective arguments about what is the best strategy both fall to the tiktok-generation of [inter]subjective import. What matters now is "who said it" and whether it "looks good" or it has the potential to "go viral".

[Seppia]

“Jacob Lund Fisker is an astrophysicist, and the book is written like one. It’s dense, academic and difficult to read.”

I may have read a different book.

I am probably turning into a grumpy old man who yells at clouds, but I see so much mediocrity and adjusting to the minimum common denominator in everything that is mainstream* that I am not sure it’s a bad thing if ERE/FIRE go back to being a niche/weird thing.

*from food to movies to music to education to the political discourse, anything that is thought for mass consumption

[AxelHeyst]

Interesting points about the shifting perspectives on what the carrot and stick is, e.g. the shifting freedom-from and freedom-to.

Up to 2020 it was freedom-from The Cubicle and pointy haired bosses.

WFH 'solved' that for a lot of people, and gave another less difficult aspirational path to those who don't have it ("All I have to do is take this boot camp course to learn programming and I can get a cush wfh tech job or two while working from wherever and make lots of money").

Also, the rise of youtubing/earning income as an online creator is a path to this type of freedom-from, or at least it looks like one. Bottom line, there are multiple paths to freedom-from normal 9to5 worklifestyle that the mainstream culture is aware of, and most of them look both easier and funner than FIRE and especially ERE, which involves frugality, sacrifice, smaller houses, and lentils.

Also due to the vibecession I'd guess that fewer people are optimistic about the Simple Math of Early Retirement working for their cohort.

I wonder, though... if as AI-fueled algorithmic attention harvesting tools level up yet again, freedom-from-TheMachine is going to become a new dominant source of freedom-from motivation for a new cohort of FIRE/ERE people. The problem with even WFH FTE and in particular internet based creator economy is you've got to be fully plugged in, and as Seppia said a lot of that is going to involve a race to the bottom. In 2020/2021 the online creator economy looked like a slam dunk, but more and more people are starting to see the underbelly of it and get more worried about what it means for their brains and souls to enter faustian negotiations with the superorganism/Machine/etc.

Phrased positively, WFH and being a youtuber can't (or often can't) provide the Freedom To Have Yourself To Yourself, spend days and weeks reading quietly, not updating social and being plugged in, etc. FIRE/ERE can.

We might be getting an increase in burnt out refugees from wfh and creator economy soon. I wonder.

[jacob]

“Jacob Lund Fisker is an astrophysicist, and the book is written like one. It’s dense, academic and difficult to read.”

I may have read a different book.

I am probably turning into a grumpy old man who yells at clouds, but I see so much mediocrity and adjusting to the minimum common denominator in everything that is mainstream* that I am not sure it’s a bad thing if ERE/FIRE go back to being a niche/weird thing.

Haha, me too, grumpy, old, hair turning grey. Too much math, too few pronouns, ... and so many other complaints. All I know is that the world is changing, so the main problem with the message might just be that it's not tiktok compatible enough. Note how blogs are out and podcasts are in now?

Maybe the takeaway is that subculture is a permanent thing and that rather than seeing subculture as a way of saving the world or whatever one's ideology is ... the focus should be on finding one's tribe and just "let it be" wrt the rest of the cultures. Of course, this might just be my grey hairs of privilege speaking.

[daylen]

Communication and translation technologies are binding together subcultures more than ever (although not always directly). Getting quite challenging to stabilize a subcultural position with respect to the global network that is constantly searching and feeling for novel signals to amplify or dampen. These algorithms are cutting or glueing sub-networks or subcultures together. In the long run acting as an attractor towards a single world culture if the digital infrastructure doesn't go bust before sufficient ground-up, analog communities are in place to remember and carry on "the knowledge".

[J_]

All I know is that the world is changing, so the main problem with the message might just be that it's not tiktok compatible enough. Note how blogs are out and podcasts are in now?

I loved figuring out the Ere book, even with insufficient cognitive skills. Because I understood/felt the promise of freedom to…like a fairy tale which you have in your own hands..

I do think that being curious is a thing of all times, perhaps especially for young people like @ baby animal or @baby seppia in the near future.

How does they or @rube or others with children think how they can pass on the Ere possibility and its promises?

Once I talked with @rube about this: his answer: my children choose themselves, all we as parents can do is, living such a life.

Is that an inspirational angle for looking at new influential methods to enlighten/spread the Ere principles?

[AnalyticalEngine]

I think it's worth distinguishing the difference between FIRE on the internet and FIRE in real life. Internet-FIRE does seem to be dying, but I don't think this is unique to FIRE. Rather, the entire Internet has gotten increasingly unusable due to the heavy influence of social media and search algorithms. Blogs are dead, hell, podcasts are even dead among certain demographics. YouTube has increasingly been reduced to 10 minutes chunks of algorithmically optimized non-content, let alone stuff like TikTok with 30 seconds videos on how to self-diagnose the mental illness of the week. FIRE was heavily reliant on bloggers, all of whom were individuals with their own platforms who later got rich and became demographically unrelatable to young people (no one in their 20s cares if some guy in his 50s has $4 million dollars and quit work). Meanwhile, a newer generation of blogs became impossible because blogs as a platform are increasingly irrelevant, and TikTok is only suitable for learning how to dance and make scrambled eggs at the same time then forget both.

Meanwhile, in real life, FIRE just gets drowned out as some person doing whatever they wanna do because there's no movement or community organized around it. In places where there is a physical FIRE community, I've found it's pretty much detached from the internet and you have to be there to know it exists.

So the real risk here has been over relying on the internet to build the movement. Stuff like young people having less money or buying being an easier sell than frugality are not really new, although I do think both of these are increasing trends that are hampering FIRE due to demographic unrelatability.

[daylen]

Hard to break away from mixed reality. Virtual worlds and physical worlds are in the process of colliding and reassembling into something more augmented and subtle. The internet is a lot bigger than most people think. It is easy to look at the superficial layers of the clear/popular net and discard all the hidden or partially hidden layers. What of all the collaboration increasingly being done by gen z in virtual Disney land? Just fun and games until they become virtual lobbyists.

The older generations doubling down on analog seems wise but it is hard to stop the digital momentum, eh?

[Seppia]

so the main problem with the message might just be that it's not tiktok compatible enough. Note how blogs are out and podcasts are in now?

I see it the other way around. TikTok is incompatible with anything that is deeper than the most superficial of superficial.
The content on TikTok must be as superficial as the mosquito that can walk on water.
It doesn’t even break the first mm of water surface.

One of my lifelong mottos is “you cannot learn something unless you read at least a good book on the subject”
Implying no amount of documentaries, movies, shorts, articles etc will be enough to be a solid base upon which one can build a good opinion.

Like the famous CCCCCCCCCCCCetc, where “writing a good book about the subject” is the last C, TikTok is the space before the first C.

So leave the entry level fire stuff (VTI, 4%swr and chill) to the masses, and just keep ERE where it is.
“Serious stuff” and “the masses” are two subsets that do not intersecate.

[jacob]

I think it's worth distinguishing the difference between FIRE on the internet and FIRE in real life. Internet-FIRE does seem to be dying, but I don't think this is unique to FIRE. Rather, the entire Internet has gotten increasingly unusable due to the heavy influence of social media and search algorithms. Blogs are dead, hell, podcasts are even dead among certain demographics. YouTube has increasingly been reduced to 10 minutes chunks of algorithmically optimized non-content, let alone stuff like TikTok with 30 seconds videos on how to self-diagnose the mental illness of the week. FIRE was heavily reliant on bloggers, all of whom were individuals with their own platforms who later got rich and became demographically unrelatable to young people (no one in their 20s cares if some guy in his 50s has $4 million dollars and quit work). Meanwhile, a newer generation of blogs became impossible because blogs as a platform are increasingly irrelevant, and TikTok is only suitable for learning how to dance and make scrambled eggs at the same time then forget both.

Is it truly unusable or just relatively unusable though? What the internet did (and does) was to connect people who weren't connected before [the internet]. For the first 30 years (between 1985 and 2015) the connection was made asynchronously. First people made BBS and websites and linked to each other. This required creators having significant technical skills. Next it became blogs, which required essay-writing skills from the creators and the ability to respond in multiple written sentences from anyone else. Since about COVID ... or rather ... since Generation Zoom, the internet is now bringing together people who prefer to have conversations in groups. This is possible because bandwidth now allows voice+video from several people at the same time. This is a skill in and of its own. A skill that I don't have and which I'm also don't have the talents for (too much staircase wit on my part).

So maybe it's just that ...

That is ... unlike the "written culture" of 1985-2015, the "conversational culture" that replaced it basically leaves no trace. It is also darknetted in the sense that it can connect people, yet it can't find new people because it happens behind closed doors/subject to invitation. Basically, once search engines were invented the old internet was like an open-house where the lights were one and anyone could walk in. The new internet is killing all that ... you can zoom with your "squad" but only if you already have one from real life.

It's tricky to put this in perspective given how we're currently in a transition zone. It'll be interesting how it turns out.

[Ego]

In 1972 when the average Boomer began voting, the national debt per citizen was about $2,200
In 1990 when the average GenX began voting, it was about $12,818
In 2007 when the average Millennial began voting, it was $29,679
The average GenZ turns 18 this year with a national debt of $101,827 per citizen and $264,945 per taxpayer.

Is it possible that GenZ's lack of interest in FIRE is an accurate reflection of their reality? We talk about entering runaway-mode with investments. Is it unreasonable for them to believe that they will be fortunate as a generation to avoid runaway-mode with debt?

[delay]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLj6FT5lZRY

The production quality of this video stands out. Smoothly narrated and professionally interlaced with regognizable images. It reminds me of Mr. Money Mustache, who wrote fluently, and has maintained the same quality of writing since he started. The narrator explains he did not finishing Early Retirement Extreme because of math. I don't remember there being lots of math in the book. I do remember abstract models that insipre thinking.

The narrator approves of Dave Ramsey, Go Curry Cracker and Root of Good. They deserve adjectives like "brilliantly", "inspiring" and "packed". The video repeats its catchphrases in text: Inflation, High Home Prices, Artificial Intelligence. More Efficient, Less Wasteful, Financial Freedom, A More Fulfilling Life. It ends with a link to another video by the same author about the 4% rule.

The professional presentation makes this video feel less authentic than ERE. The video shows no natural enthusiasm. I wonder what drives the team behind the video? What story are they trying to tell?

[zbigi]

Note how blogs are out and podcasts are in now?

It's way more natural and easier for people to listen to somebody else's lecture than to grok the same ideas from the their book. We have built-in circuits in brain dedicated for decoding speech that are probably millions of years old, while there's nothing analogous for reading. Hence, print might soon turn out to be an obsolete invention (at least in the space of idea dissemination), and will be superseeded by podcasts and video (youtube) lectures. Just imagine how many people would be familiar with Sokrates or Platon's ideas if their lectures survived and could be uploaded to youtube. The huge popularity of Jordan Peterson among younger audiences is a testiment to the validity of video lectures and deep 1-on-1 conversations as means of idea dissemination.

[Scott 2]

Consideration of complex ideas will always depend on visual representation. Working memory has limits that disadvantage any other strategy. It's a key reason I stopped listening to podcasts.

I think the higher fidelity mediums accelerate access to that ceiling. But the information density sucks. More advanced strategies require someone to asynchronously consolidate and organize information.

My primary learning mediums are now books and experience based learning. Information density from the former, rapid feedback loops from the latter. Even better with mentoring.

Video chat can facilitate the experience based learning. Some of that is being dark netted. I don't see the written tools going away though. The advantage of a higher strategic ceiling is too great.

[7Wannabe5]

The huge popularity of Jordan Peterson among younger audiences is a testiment to the validity of video lectures and deep 1-on-1 conversations as means of idea dissemination.

There are so many things wrong with this sentence.

[daylen]

Eventually, we will just use telepathy to share experiences directly and relive memories of the long dead.