How is the FIRE movement doing?

[zbigi]

Another thing---although I don't know how new this is---is that American kids have been brought up being told that "they can be anything they want to be"(?) (In contrast my cohort was brought up being told that the only thing that mattered was that "we were happy".) Compound this with the constant barrage of ads telling people about all the things and services they "deserve".

This is what I was referring to. The expectations instilled in children and teenagers are out of whack, and are setting them up for a life of disappointment and mental health struggles. Especially when coupled with sheltered upbringing, which doesn't allow for developing mechanisms for coping with disappointment and failure. Unfortunately, I see that seeping into Poland as well (we are one of the most US-loving countries in Europe, and we're aping many US cultural mores without a second though). When I was in school, parents never came in to argue about their children's grades. Now, they do. It's handholding all the way through beginning of adulthood, and often beyond that (buying an expensive flat in Warsaw, finding a good job via connections etc.).

[daylen]

This idea that we can just throw young people into harsher conditions to change their perspective for the better seems misguided. Sure, some people never learn to appreciate what they have until they loose it all, though most people can at least think abstractly enough to imagine what it might be like given enough stories and this is enough for them to grow into a deeper appreciation. I think perhaps many of the smartest gen-zer's are stagnated by the sheer complexity of the world as sensed from a plethora of social media lenses. Paralysis by relentless analysis. Blogs and vlogs are touching more and more corners of global society, sliced and diced into short-form media to reach non-readers.

Perhaps it is harder to figure out the "why" of FIRE in the age of the internet? When the why comes, they will find the "how".

[zbigi]

Imaging something and living that experience are two very different things. For example, Simone weil, after working in Renault plant in France in 1930s (she was from a wealthy family, so did it only to better understand workers' plight) wrote: "only after that experience, I understood what it's like to be a slave". And even that is debatable, as she was not a real wage slave (she could quit any time) - but it's still better than just thinking about it in abstract terms.

I agree with wealth of option / analysis paralysis being a contributing factor. People nowadays read about some extreme outliers on the Internet and consider life/career paths of those people as viable options for themselves to replicate. When widening the search like that, there are literally millions of potential options to consider. It also makes more sensible options seem less appealing, which may lead to not taking up any path at all ("why should I be a hairdresser or a BigTech flunky, when I want to be an influencer or a self-sustained open source developer").

[daylen]

Very different and yet very similar at the same time. Internal states and external states are tightly coupled into the human body. It is possible to imagine yourself walking off a cliff just like it is possible to imagine society walking off a cliff and yet trust both imaginations roughly equally.

[Jin+Guice]

I agree with @WRC that a lot of the problems young people face today are... problems young people have faced for awhile.

Imagine the effects of advertising when it first came out, then became something everyone saw, then became inescapable. I don't think social media has 0 effects (if anything again making advertising more pervasive and also having people, not just companies, advertise themselves), I do think people are over worried about the effects.

I do think it is likely that grow isolation and loneliness due to the internet is likely a problem, though the internet does also provide the opportunity for greater connection and community (just the irl and locomotion pieces iare missing, which I think is important for most people).

Growing inequality is and has been a concern. Particularly it seems that housing and food have increased dramatically recently?


I still don't think these are the reasons FIRE has lost popularity, or at least stopped growing as quickly or at all.


I think it suffers from:

1) Maxing out the easiest people to convert.

2) Being associated with tech bro culture.

3) Not appearing to solve for problems of isolation or popularity or life purpose initially.

4) Challenging deeply held cultural assumptions that go beyond showing people logical solutions.



The latte thing has always struck me as dumb. It emphasizes cultural shaming and a self-blaming austerity mentality. I could alternatively say about FIRE (or at least ERE) "afford a latte everyday and retire early and wealthy anyway."

[grundomatic]

We can rag on them and give bootstrap advice, but if you step back and think about what their life experience has been ... born post 9/11, Great Financial Crisis, Occupy movement, Trump/BLM instability, pandemic and lockdowns ... I get why they aren't fonts of hope. They feel completely disenfranchised.

I'm probably at risk of sounding like the grumpy old man, shouting at the kids for driving too fast or playing on his lawn, but I don't think this is necessarily new. 20 somethings not saving money, feeling cynical, or upset about society seems to be the norm for every US generation for at least the last eighty years.

I was going to write something similar to @WRC–that this generation just gets new lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, but I agree with Seppia that the pandemic and the associated fallout will shape the younger generation. The people around for bank failures stuffed their money in their mattresses for the rest of their lives, I wonder what the equivalent will be?

I think people who were anywhere between 6 and 20 during covid will be scarred for a long time.
I was I firm believer in the moment that those who were locking down hard were severely underestimating the second order effects on the psyche of people.
They were robbed of two very precious developmental years

I’d push those numbers lower. The five-year-olds missed kindergarten, and the three-and-four-year-olds missed preschool. Believe me, it mattered.

When I listen to my friends in other industries (healthcare and law [enforcement]) talk shop, I hear similar patterns to what I saw in teaching. Formerly tough jobs became unbearable, causing people to leave, making the work even worse for those left, repeat cycle. So while office workers finally got to work from home and their lives improved, many others have found their post-pandemic work lives much worse. So while the traditional target market for FIRE may be losing interest, perhaps there is potential amongst other market segments.

[daylen]

@ J & G

It is pretty indisputable at this point that social media is really good at hijacking the attention of young people often with polarizing effects. Perhaps only religion and the market can rival social media as a social technology(*), and it is probably only going to get more immersive. With power can come great harm and/or benefit. If technologies are like marbles in a bag being drawn randomly(+) then social media is still a morally grey marble that is in a superposition of being both a beneficial white marble and a harmful black marble (from Nick Bostrom's writing on existential threats). It could help educate and guide people down the paths they actually want to follow or otherwise polarize people into divergently conflicting paths of torment.

(*) Traditional media like books, tv, and journalism all being weak sauce compared to a personalized algorithm to strip mine your attention into endless scrolling.

(+) They basically never are in reality but nice simplifying assumption for long-term existential risk.

[daylen]

On the flip side of the pandemic harming extroverted kids, did it give introverted kids some social breathing room? A younger me probably would have enjoyed not going to school.

[jacob]

Perhaps only religion and the market can rival social media as a social technology(*), and it is probably only going to get more immersive.

Religion and belief vis-a-vis family and traditions vis-a-vis community and squad and tribe are all social technologies. Philosophy vis-a-vis market competition vis-a-vis trial by fire vis-a-vis survial are all individual technologies. The two are effectively mutually incomprehensible to each other. It's not just that they're don't talk each other's language. It's that they refuse to understand each other.

Obviously, I'm not drawing marbles from a bag here but rather suggesting an SD type transition from the individual to the collective.

[jacob]

On the flip side of the pandemic harming extroverted kids, did it give introverted kids some social breathing room? A younger me probably would have enjoyed not going to school.

That too. Recall the COVID-era (it only lasted 2 years ... hardly a life-changing experience?!? ... although two years IS a long time for a teenager) memes from those in solitary occupations: "I've been preparing for this all my life" as reality aligned with their preferred behavior. Anyone following the ERE cannon breezed right through that. Conversely, the popular outgoing kid exclusively focused on comfort, safety, and enjoying life got a hard reality-check during the most critical period of their ego-formation.

[Ego]

Recall the COVID-era (it only lasted 2 years ... hardly a life-changing experience?!?

Hardly life-changing? Really? This is a mind-blowing statement to me.

[Seppia]

Probably not life changing for whoever:
- did not need AND did not want (both) to mingle with people for school/work/social needs AND
- did not travel AND
- did not live in areas where personal freedom was severely impacted.

So probably not that life changing for like 0.1% of the civilized world

[grundomatic]

Ok, sorry for the extravert bias. I'm sure there are some mini-adults that benefitted from remote school just as much as the office workers benefitted from remote work. They could get their work done without having to deal with their idiot classmates.

As far as early childhood education, though, call me old-fashioned or say that it's a professional bias, but I think young kids are better off at school than at home on a screen. As for their preferences, informal polling by me showed home/school preference going from about 50/50 pre-pandemic to more like 20/80 post-pandemic. Home is not always a nice place for a kid, and just like the tough jobs, it seems to me like the tough households only got worse during the pandemic. Two years is 1/3 a lifetime for someone that is 6. That is a lot of catching up to do.

[daylen]

There's always this tension in a complex systems between shocks that break the system and shocks that disrupt the system into a more responsive state. Gradually introducing small shocks can teach systems to better respond to larger shocks. Shocks that are too sudden and powerful can have existential consequences for the institutional latticework. Black-ish marble technologies like nuclear bombs and viruses can for instance have the disruptive potential to bring down institutions and thus society as a whole. New institutions can emerge with time but it's usually preferable to adapt existing institutions to novel times. Some of this is done through deliberately small interventions or micro cultural movements, and some of it may occur through events that don't quite destroy institutions while sending them onto a more responsive track.

This is a very similar process to individual learning and exploration. Sometimes kids learn through schooling and sometimes they learn by getting lost in the wilderness or visiting a strange environment. Perhaps these shocks are teaching the system to make use of both physical and virtual spaces, thus becoming less susceptible to future covid's or the like.

As the physical world becomes more digitized our institutions may turn inside-out. Not really sure if this will be existentially shocking or just adaptive learning. Should be interesting either way.

[Jin+Guice]

@daylen:

I agree that social media has a great addictive power and we are running a wild experiment on young people.

I don't think that this is new, as technology has advanced the newest generation is always the first to do something. No media vs radio vs television vs computers vs internet vs smart phones.

So social media holding everyone's attention, new and different, a new technology that young people get socialized under, has happened many times before.

Think of how many hours of advertising we see and now take for granted, vs how there was once a time with no advertising.

We may be saying the same thing. I do and don't think these are new and unprecedented times. I agree that social media has A LOT of attention, it is addictive and it is most widely used by young and impressionable people. It has the potential for great good or great evil or both. I don't think anyone is has totalitarian rule over it yet. The choose your own adventure aspect of it is also novel and has the potential to cause problems, but I don't think anyone is good enough at exploiting that yet to get a critical mass of people to follow them.



I also don't think that FIRE is effectively using social media to promote itself, but I could be wrong. For better or worse, FIRE doesn't attract a lot of people who are great at marketing. I think this is a major reason that the movement stopped growing and it's actually pretty impressive how many people it got considering that the main format was and is blogging and books.

Robin Greenfield, who is arguably more extreme than us but puts a lot of effort into social media has 216.1k instagram followers and 446k youtube subscribers. MMM has 85.7k instagram followers.

[jacob]

The introvert/extrovert angle is interesting because a few pages back it was argued that FIRE became less interesting as soon as [presumably the introverts] no longer had to suffer from dealing with other people in person at the office.

[theanimal]

I agree that social media has a great addictive power and we are running a wild experiment on young people.

I don't think that this is new, as technology has advanced the newest generation is always the first to do something. No media vs radio vs television vs computers vs internet vs smart phones.

So social media holding everyone's attention, new and different, a new technology that young people get socialized under, has happened many times before.

The difference between the social media/smartphones and older technology is that social media/smartphones are rewriting people’s brains. Radio, tv, computers and internet on their own did not lead to higher rates of anxiety, depression, suicides and loneliness. None of the older versions served as their own roulette machine, compelling the user to want to use it more and more and get stuck in a dopamine addled loop. For the young, this process is even worse, as it occurs during their development. They are experiencing not just the psychological effects, but full on biological changes as well. There are studies that have mapped teenage brains and shown that the “reward” centers have grown larger than those of the “control” centers within the brain, in this particular case the difference is attributed to the use of smart phones. So its not that people are just experiencing lots of dopamine and wanting more, but their brains are shifting to want more.

It is true that there is often a backlash against new technology that comes out and the young are often the first to widely adopt it, but never before have technologies like tv, the radio or even the computer been so biologically and psychologically altering.

[Western Red Cedar]

I don't think that this is new, as technology has advanced the newest generation is always the first to do something. No media vs radio vs television vs computers vs internet vs smart phones.

So social media holding everyone's attention, new and different, a new technology that young people get socialized under, has happened many times before.

The reference I made above regarding research on the connection of mental health and social media use was in regards to points and research from Jonathon Haidt. I can't recall, if he made this point in The Coddling of the American Mind or if he is planning on tackling it in his next book. He talked to university guidance counselors and found a large uptick in reported levels of anxiety, depression, and thoughts of self-harm. This coincided with the first generations to grow up entirely on social media.

Social media and the impact on various developmental stages appears different than other forms of technology.

https://jonathanhaidt.com/social-media/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... ls/620767/

I know others have made this point as well, such as Johann Hari in Lost Connections. Perhaps this is what @JP and others have observed in their children and other Gen Z folks. He's basically saying that a lot of these social and psychological issues are the result of unmet needs, which is what @J&G is arguing in his recent essay series on pathological culture.

https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_t ... anguage=en

*ETA - Saw that @theanimal was basically making the same point while writing this up.

[Western Red Cedar]

It's the first generation where "being an influencer" is not just a job description but the #1 goal of American kids (dunno about Europe, but probably up there as well). An influencer on social media is basically someone who is famous for being famous.

I just learned a new term yesterday for some of the content creators I was describing - "Finfluencer". FIRE is just one topic for discussion among the finfluencers.

[Jin+Guice]

I think y'all are underestimating the influence that other technologies had. How about being in the first generation to have your parents raise you mostly by putting you in front of the TV? The computer? The internet? Industrialization? I feel like each of these things did rewire our brains as well as increase anxiety and depression.

I don't disagree that social media is different. All of these technologies are different than each other and I think they were all a grand experiment that was pretty scary when they came out. Social media is different and poses different threats. Maybe this is the one that is really really bad, or maybe one of the others was really bad and we just integrated it anyway because that's what people do.

I have no way to win or lose this discussion, but I think it's interesting. For arguments sake, I'm still taking the position that social media is just the newest in a line of dangerous technologies and, while it is increasing anxiety and depression, it is too soon to determine if the effects will be drastically different than the technologies which came before.


From a pathological culture standpoint, my view is that our society is pathological so the tools we develop are used to express that pathology. We live in a culture that rewards building a technology that captures attention and rewires dopamine circuits, so that technology is built. The same technology and know-how could be used to help and connect people, but that is not rewarded so we don't build it (although I do think social media has done this to a small extent).

This is to say that I very much agree that people are being hijacked by technology because of their lack of needs being met, but that the technology did not cause those needs to go unmet. I do think it is being used in a way that reinforces needs not being met.