Nearly 20 years ago, Channel 4 unleashed the TV comedy Nathan Barley – to the general disinterest of almost everyone.
The six-episode series saw the eponymous Barley navigating the hipster enclaves of East London on a child’s bicycle, as he attempted to become a ‘self-facilitating media node’.
Nathan Barley – an early work from Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker – found a few cult fans.
But it confused everyone else.
I suspect you had to occupy a specific youthful London media bubble to get all the references. Of the 700,000 viewers that Nathan Barley did attract, I’d guess 650,000 were there to laugh at the creative swearing.
There are other reasons why the show bombed. Parodying Internet culture seemed passé in the hiatus between the Dotcom crash and YouTube and Facebook. Almost nobody back then shared their life online in video the way Barley did. East London’s Shoreditch already seemed ‘over’ if you were a hipster who’d arrived in the early 1990s. And Barley’s ‘Rise of the Idiots’ theme perhaps seemed frivolous while war raged in the Middle East.
Watch Nathan Barley now though and it’s a vision of our everyday:
The idiots won, obviously.
People do the funniest things
If you’re under 30 then, you might not find Nathan Barley very funny for a different reason. Which is that its world and characters no longer seem strange at all.
It’s hard to believe, but everyone being glued to their mobile phones in Nathan Barley was meant to be laughed at. The ubiquitous mobiles seemed over the top in 2005. This was two years before the first iPhone, remember.
But today my website analytics tell me that more than half of you will be reading this on a smartphone.
We’re all Nathan Barley now.
Pouring cold water on the FIRE pioneers
A lot can change in a couple of decades to turn the peculiar into a prophecy.
And I suspect a similar transformation of social norms will happen with FIRE1 over the next 20 years.
FIRE broke out of its Internet backwater a few years ago. Since then we’ve probably seen as many writers deriding it as actually investigating how FIRE practitioners look to achieve financial independence.
True, Charlie Brooker hasn’t yet created a drama starring Mr Money Mustache battling the Internet Retirement Police.
But FIRE’s critics regularly smirk at those of us who…
Want to quit boring jobs to pursue our passions – “These precious snowflakes don’t realise that life is meant to be hard graft!”
Aim to live off saved assets rather than work – “Madness! Who’d let their well-being depend on the whims of Wall Street?”
Target a 4% safe withdrawal rate – “Nobody knows when the stock market will crash! Future returns aren’t guaranteed! How can FIRE followers call any withdrawal rate ‘safe’?”
Study life expectancy forecasts to figure out how long our money will last – “Bit morbid, isn’t it? My dad didn’t think about any of this. He just did his job for as long as he could.”
Put something other than work on a pedestal – “Nobody cares about your watercolour paintings, salsa dancing, or your trip to Choquequirao.”
Pursue unrealistic financial goals – “FIRE might make sense for a few richly-paid tech and finance bros. But most people have zero chance of becoming financially independent.”
I could go on. You often hear healthcare cost concerns in the US, for example. Others argue it’s selfish to spend your kids’ inheritance on your living expenses.
FIRE pioneers are mapping out our future
Most of these complaints have some basis in reality. Few would deny it’s hard to amass a sufficient wodge to make FIRE work. Nor to husband your precious pot to go the distance.
Heck, these challenges are what keeps Monevator in content.
From exploring how to max out a big pension to portfolio diversification to the rebranded Sustainable Withdrawal Rate, these are frontier lands, with hostiles as likely to be around the next corner as a nugget of gold.
However I’d suggest many of these issues are simply being run into by FIRE pioneers first, rather than by them uniquely.
We’re all in it together
Consider the big trends in personal finance and demographics facing today’s workers:
End of Defined Benefit pension schemes for most of us – Many a FIRE critics’ attack vector has zeroed in on the unseemliness of thinking about your future retirement income – early or otherwise – in your 20s and 30s. But FIRE pioneers are only getting their heads around this ahead of the rest of the population. Paternalistic company pensions are almost a relic of history.
Pension freedoms and the ‘pots for life’ talk – Ditto wondering how best to invest your pension, drawdown an income, or manage your money to make it last. Today’s pensioners often hit these questions without giving them any thought beforehand. Future pensioners who’ve hung around geeky FIRE locales debating the 4% rule should be better at managing their own money.
Increased longevity and (potentially) longer retirements – Someone retiring early at 45 clearly needs a good handle on how long they’re likely to live. Otherwise, their retirement funds are liable to flatline before they do. But with today’s 65-year olds already set to live on average into their late 80s (and newborn girls having a life expectancy of 90) a 45-year old retiree has more in common with a 60-year old retiree than not.
Longer and more flexible working lives – I don’t personally believe it’s best for most people to fully retire in their 40s, say. Increased longevity is one reason why. But me and my fellow flexi-FIRE types who instead reinvent the rules of work and retirement to suit our lifestyles – and fast-evolving economic reality – won’t seem so unusual in 20 years’ time. By then everybody will be at it.
Shorter job tenures, more job hopping – Older generations saw restructuring, offshoring, and outsourcing destroy the notion of a job for life. Now younger generations are job hopping faster than ever. FIRE seekers aim to max their income – and savings – so they can potentially opt-out ASAP. They chase the best opportunities rather traditional career paths. Seems prescient.
Interest rates and inflation – Macroeconomics matters long-term and – disasters notwithstanding – that long-term is coming for more people. High inflation, say, wasn’t such a risk when you only expected a fixed annuity to see you through a ten-year-long retirement. But just ask anyone under-75 with a fixed income how they feel about the 30%-plus inflation we’ve endured over the past few years. Ever more of us will become money geeks in order to understand these risks.
Less family support, more going it alone – Some deride FIRE singletons or couples who have no kids. “Easy mode!” they cry. But fertility rates across the wealthy world have more than halved since 1960. More people than ever have no children at all. This doesn’t just make FIRE more realistic for them (according to the critics’ own terms). It also means no kids to help look after them later, which means yet more DIY-ing through the challenges of old age.
Of course a lot of other things could happen over the next 20 years too. Even if we dodge a nuclear or climate-related catastrophe, there’s the potential of AI coming for our jobs.
Even so, I struggle to think of a future in which the world looks more like that of a salaryman in Surbiton in the 1970s than a FIRE pioneer on a laptop in 2024.
No one is a prophet in their own land
In literature and philosophy you often find that those best able to criticise a topic are also the ones most capable of seeing to the very heart of their target.
For example while it’s hardly flawless, you won’t find a better foreshadowing of capitalist consumer culture than Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.
Perhaps it takes an external perspective to see the broadest trends. Whereas those actually living the lifestyle of tomorrow are just getting on with it.
Nathan Barley filmed himself ‘pranking’ his hapless co-workers because it was witless fun, not because he anticipated YouTube clickbait. He was on the money in trying to be a ‘media node’. His problem was he got there before Instagram and TikTok birthed the influencer economy.
When I think about FIRE today, I see something similar going on. FIRE’s tenets offer an early glimpse of a widespread future.
Those of us pursuing financial independence might like to think we’re outsiders seeking a very different path to the masses.
But it seems probable to me that the questions FIRE pioneers are attempting to answer will soon be asked by almost everyone. We’re just ahead of the crowd.
- Financial Independence Early Retirement [↩]
Either you own a piece of the means of production, distribution and exchange; or your owned. In a world potentially on the threshold of AGI and improved robotics / automation; value accrues evermore to the owners of capital, and ever less to the providers of labour. Before capital meant atoms, now it means electrons. Data and digital are the new spinney jenny and steam engine. And as meatspace and cyberspace merge, we become consumer and product – stimulated, manipulated and exploited. Get a financial snowball going, because UBI just ain’t gonna cut it.
Very insightful, thanks. The article explained perfectly what’s happening across the world, and then poster @DeltaHedge very succinctly summarises precisely why it’s happening.
When you’ve been pursuing fire for a long time and when you see it being discussed in the mainstream media you feel like it’s old hat, but we’re still early to that big concept of the permanent retreat of labour vs capital.
This article is well Mexico.
Lovely article, thank you. Prescient and relevant not just to FIRE (‘E’ for early) but to the sub-set ‘E’ for eventually, as the inevitable minimalising of any UBI turns the concept of any sort of retirement into a DIY FI process attached to no particular age milestone. We’re all on the same journey. Sooner we realise and hop on the bus, the more favourable the ‘E’, as the bishop said to the raver!
Super article, thanks TI.
@Delta Hedge is spot on in that first sentence. A very long time ago it dawned on me that I was sick to bl**dy death of being owned and decided to change the situation; which I did.
Very well put TI!
Inflation is the ogre loitering in my financial future. I am on target to hit my original number (set almost five years ago) but with my council tax north of £2K pa and a pint pushing £7 OMY is featuring heavily in my thoughts.
Whatever I choose to do I feel much more secure knowing how much I have and a good approximation of what we spend.
Ah Daaaan Ashcroft! Absolute gem of a satire, top notch cast and the belligerent bite of Brooker and Morris. Hardly surprising it was underappreciated.
For the rest. Yep. I’m not sure the UK population’s really woken up to the modern reality of pensions as something you need to take responsibility for on a personal level. DC pots would certainly have been something my parents couldn’t have handled themselves ( fortunately they were in decent FSS) so they’d probably have ended up handing their entire future welfare to smooth talking salesmen from Close or St James or the like with no real accountability.
I’ve attended a number of seminars re DC schemes and the level of education offered by the providers is generic and rudimentary. It’s better than nothing but it hopelessly underplays need to stay invested past retirement date ( and the risk/ volatility that should be expected with such). Plus sleepwalking into default lifestyled funds will not necessarily be the best course of action for those that start late and need to target more aggressive growth.
Probably a lot more societal impact for a generation that end up needing to work longer than their parents for a more volatile position in retirement.
Yes, I’d say there are a cluster of weak signals relating to FIRE which hint at the future.
Elsewhere, I often feel that the variety of in-work benefits, PIP etc – already speak to a work-less future and is a form of stealth UBI or FIRE for non-FIRE types. Community energy projects where the excess income is spent in the local community, on energy saving measures, more community energy feel like another sign (would be interesting to see these develop into a local equivalent of sovereign wealth funds perhaps).
> Put something other than work on a pedestal
cough 😉 I am not absolutely convinced this is particularly a charateristic of the FI/RE space, as time goes by the emphasis seems to be on the first part ofthe acronym. Nothing inherently wrong with that, to thine own self be true but a deplatforming of Calvin it ain’t.
@DH #1
>In a world potentially on the threshold of AGI and improved robotics / automation;
Inspiring, but I would say simplistic. The pace of the decline of Western power is picking up, and its charming belief in continual growth on a world of finite resources may not clear that hurdle. Anybody noticed that an increasing proportion of the working population is being immiserated, as Steinbeck noted 85 years ago in an earlier episode “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”
As for the AI utopia to come, Frank Herbert has a cautionary tale, though I acknowledge perhaps that’s the point
Monopoly/oligopoly capitalism would happen without an AI Gold Rush.
But Big Tech accelerates + extends trends.
It reduces competition.
It heightens profit share.
It increases market concentration.
And it furthers the ascendancy of financial capital and technology over human labour; perhaps even over human values.
What comes next is unclear.
We can’t even retrodict the half dozen ‘revolutions’ of recent centuries: the agricultural, demographic, political, industrial, financial, and informational.
So prediction about an intelligence revolution, if that is the course which we are on with machine learning and AI, seems utterly futile.
But it is no less necessary because of that futility.
@ermine #9: Sci-Fi does not so much imagine futures, as to warn against them.
FH’s quote is an onion ring. What’s going on at the surface is not necessarily to be believed.
@comment #25 (on May 31, @6:19 pm) in the thread under MV’s “First they came for the Call Centres” Weekend Reading (…a play on Lutheran pastor Niemöller’s post war confessional poetic “First they came”?..) I linked to 4 AI related pieces:
https://monevator.com/weekend-reading-first-they-came-for-the-call-centres/
The 3rd (at YT piece) is by ex Guardian columnist, self described accidental Buddhist, digital nomad and Sci-Fi writer, Damien Walter.
He delves into that a similar quote from FH, and arrives at an opposite conclusion as to what it was warning of.
I have time for Damien Walter as I stalled then bailed on the 3 body problem book; I also switched off the movie everything everywhere all at once after 10 minutes so perhaps my taste in the arts is overly parochial.
I find Damien’s idea of 500 years stone axe to interplanetary settlements far-fetched even if his alternative reality could prevent imperial governance putting a dead hand on the pace of innovation. The breakdown of the bicameral mind book asserts that introspection is perhaps only 4000 years old 😉
I also wonder what is going to power all this AI gubbins, and perhaps more fundamentally, who is going to pay for it to turn a profit if an increasing proportion of the population are too poor to buy food. Things that can’t go on generally don’t.
They’re building a cable car up Choquequirao so you will still be able to get up there even if you don’t retire until 67.
I remember reading something by Charles Handy many years ago (in the Future of Work I believe, but I can’t lay hands on my copy at the moment). He described the idea of a ‘job’ as an artefact of the industrial revolution. Traditionally you were either tied to the land and agriculture or a self-employed artisan (or an artisan in training as apprentice or journeyman). Handy thought that for knowledge workers in particular, the future was fewer jobs and more self-employment. I think we see this playing out today with more independent workers and shorter stints with companies.
All that plays into at least the FI part of FIRE.
Looking at my own history, I find that despite seeing myself as having had a long corporate career, I have now spent the same amount of time as an independent worker as I did in a conventional corporate career. My son has a highly fragmented pattern of work, lots of short stints, and so do many of his friends.
Overall, this seems to be the shift back to historical patterns of economic activity Handy described. And that means we all need Monevator thinking.
Let’s not forget about auto enrolment, its been going for 12 years now and its something of a silent revolution, but its not unknown for employees contributing the minimum each week/month to have built up six figure pots with decades more work ahead of them.
Not sure about value accruing ever less to the providers of labour, try getting hold of a plumber, painter, joiner, electrician or kitchen fitter to suit your timescale at a price you think is fair!
“at a price you think is fair!”
I see man-in-the-pub economics survives – survives better than pubs do, perhaps. In the middle ages people talked about a “just” price which presumably means much the same thing i.e. a price to be imposed on the seller by the buyer or by state coercion on behalf of the buyer.
More power to create and more information at our fingertips.
It’s no surprise there is a power and trust issue on filters and facts.
Individually, holding onto the basics of how to learn and think critically have never been more important.
For society, accepting growing numbers of creators /artists with power to reach niche pockets of the world should also bring better chance of finding more diamonds in the rough.
I am lucky to be an optimist who will always believe the future is bright. The alternative always looks so sad….
Sorry but the idea that “FIRE pioneers are finding the path for everyone” is rather over-egging the pudding!
I agree with most of the trends that TI is describing. Adaption away from late 20th century norms is going to be necessary. I just don’t see that FIRE had added much to those discussions. Many people have been considering these issues without ever having heard of the acronym FIRE.
What ever FIRE blogs have added to the discussion has to be weighed against the loads of BS psychobabble they spout. All this crap about stoicism, needing some special mindset, or that optimism will make it all possible. Nor that whiff of their superiority over the “plebs” who they say are addicted to consumerism despite it being that which drives those equity returns. Or the whole nonsense of “declaring FIRE” like it’s some major life event to only decide you don’t have enough money and needing to go back to work a few years later.
Many of my ex-colleagues are “retired” at ages from early 40s to late 50s. To make that move they all considered their possible longevity, how best to hedge the risk of inflation whilst still providing inheritance for their children. They move in and out of work on a whim. Back to finance, perhaps a start-up, a directorship etc. When it becomes boring they just stop. Another masters/PhD, off to the allotment or a Ju Jitsu. Bum around. Come back when something pops up that interests them. They understand their position is just a function of numbers – what’s incoming vs outgoing. They don’t need to give it a strange acronym or wrap it up in psychobabble. It’s just their life.
Nathan Barley, absolute genius of a show, good that Morris got a mention in the comments as well as Brooker in the article. On the hour, the day today, brass eye, pretty much sums up my formative comic years. I was chatting to a twenty something colleague recently and realised they didn’t really know who Alan Partridge was, had watched one show, and thought it was a bit shit. A small piece of me died.
The other unbelievably good but even more unloved comedic gem is Garth Marhengis Dark Place. I think you could do worse by taking a sabbatical and just watching channel 4s back catalog of comedy.
Zxspecrtrum – the acronym for your retired colleagues is Fat Fire. There’s a whole subreddit for it. They are far more irritating than normal FIRE types and usually work in soulless jobs with only financial reward, like finance.
Speaking to some American friends from Vermont where “normies” are being priced out of the state in all sorts of ways
Main culprit-lots of trust fund youngsters who don’t need to work and find their fulfilment in the many “good causes” currently on the go,Gaza,Climate Change ,Gender Identity and Global Warming etc
Their thrifty parents have enabled them not to have to financially worry at all
A large cohort of youngsters going straight into retirement without having to even pass go !
Interesting
xxd09
Thanks for the comments and feedback everyone 🙂
Of course I agree that all this stuff has been explored outside of FIRE circles. However I would say there’s a pretty big gulf between extremely high-earning financial professionals and, well, the rest of us. But if challenged to write another post about how high-earning City and tech types pioneered a FIRE-lifestyle I agree it wouldn’t be hard to do. Indeed there could be some crossover, given that more than a few of them became leading FIRE bloggers.
What I’m really talking about here though are ordinary Joes and Janes. People like my sister, who now into her 40s and with her own home and substantial savings still thinks instinctively always on the impact of a decision on her monthly cash inflow and outgoings, not on her overall asset-backed picture. Or consider the so-called WASPI women. Most people simply don’t have a clue about any of this stuff, and I maintain that the vast ecosystem of FIRE-related writings is providing a bedroom of thinking — and even more experiences. For instance, yes people declare FIRE and go back to work, but that is telling us something. Even FIRE types don’t think they’d do it — and for those without an FU fund the idea of working when on some level you often don’t have to is pretty mystifying.
RE: AI and the future of work, this absolutely has to come into the picture and will change the landscape as we all agree. Again though, no argument that this stretches well beyond the concerns of FIRE.
I have an half-finished draft called Own the Robots that I wrote in the late 20-teens about this but never finished. Now it feels a bit old-hat, but I might re-work it and use it as an intro to a Moguls deep dive in the months ahead. It would feel vital even if the tech stock boom wasn’t forcing the issue by telling us (rightly or wrong) this IS the future.
@Old_eyes #13: “Overall, this seems to be the shift back to historical patterns of economic activity”: the irony of each socioeconomic revolution is that it ends like its geometric namesake: a rotational symmetry finishing up back where it began. To slightly misquote Lampedusa’s ‘the Leopard’, “Everything must change, so everything can stay the same” – AGI and ASI, if either emerges, will at once change everything, and yet will actually change nothing. There will still be Masters and Servants, Owners and Owned, Elites and the Rest. We can ask who the priesthood of the AI world will be, but not whether there will be one. Scratch the surface of any radical, reformer or revolutionary – be they a Silicon Valley guru of the Californian ideology, or a would be Wolfie Smith or Nathan Barley – and you will find a conservative and a reactionary not so far below.
One would think that FI is just a common sense goal. To be resilient towards the vagaries of the job market and one’s personal health. To create flexibility and options for the future; be it self-employment, passion projects, whatever. Yet many (most?) don’t pursue FI and from what I have seen, it is because they lack the belief that it is even possible. The FIRE movement has been hugely valuable in showing people the possibility and a path towards it (if sometimes flawed).
And FIRE is important because it questions our culturally ingrained consumerism and workism. Where else would such debates happen nowadays – perhaps at the churches that hardly anyone attends any more?
The mainstream model is broken. Sell decades of your life in a high-stress meaningless job, to buy crap you don’t need in a futile attempt to fill the void.
FIRE puts the emphasis back on independence, freedom, and the search for something more meaningful, whatever that may be as an individual choice.
If the FIRE movement wasn’t making any impact then it wouldn’t keep being picked up by the mainstream press, however badly. Most movements have many names but the important thing about FIRE, and its relations, is that it showed people on 5 figure salaries that they could achieve something assumed to be the preserve of people earning 7 figures.
@TI. The ordinary Joe and Janes can do “leanFIRE”, but it only works because they are a very small minority that exploit the system.
Take a simplified example: someone aged 21 who has just finished their degree. They get a job at the current mean UK wage of £35,724. So their take home is £29,240 (tax and NI is £6484, and effective tax rate of 18%). They spend £20k and save the rest. Assuming a 4% real return and that wages and living costs rise with inflation, then aged 51 they will have a pot of capital slightly north of £500k in current real terms. They take a 4% withdrawal rate to give them their £20k real term expenditure. Nothing clever or special has been done. No stoicism or positive thinking was required!
The issue is that the’ve paid less than £200k in tax. Assuming they live till 86, then taking out their (not full) state pension from 68, the’ve only paid in a net £7k over their working life. That’s not even half a hip operation! Given we operate with a £1 trillion deficit or about £15k/annum/person (inc children) then these people are clearly leeching off the system.
Look it’s perfectly fine to exploit a system to your advantage. What you are doing though is taking an edge case and saying you can extrapolate these ideas to the mainstream. I don’t see how the system would be sustainable under such a move. Broad society cannot expect to live 86 years and only work for 30 of them. Western economies depend on people buying crap they don’t need and cannot afford. If people abandon consumerism, then you also lose positive real returns on equities. Apple isn’t valued where it is because people need a new phone. It’s because they desire a new phone.
There are complex feedback loops in play and to assume you can perturb one part significantly while assuming the rest of the system remains invariant is just not valid.
@ZXSpectrum48K — All good points and I agree a system where everyone pursues FIRE – or more specifically the ‘RE’ is not sustainable or possibly even desirable.
However I feel we’re talking at cross-purposes a bit? My article isn’t meant to be implying that ‘everyone’ will go FIRE, or even most people will (though I do think more people will — that right tail minority will increase in size, perhaps at some cost to the left tail, through broader societal trends). I can see that by using ‘path’ in the title I’m somewhat implying this, so understand the ambiguity. However what I’m really trying to highlight is that lots of *things* that FIRE people do (practical things more than stoical mindsets or whatnot) ‘everyone’ will be doing.
For instance, my father worked, got a job, contributed to a pension scheme, paid off his mortgage, and saved some money in cash (a small amount). When my parents did have some excess cashflow in older age he did the AVC pension thing, and spent a little more on a fixed-site holiday caravan, which was genuinely the closest he got to thinking of money as a flexible asset. He couldn’t be persuaded to think of it as a tool (I tried in the mid-to-late 1990s, albeit a bit precociously on my part!) He was basically distrustful of the stock market, didn’t understand it, and didn’t want to know. Everything was on a fixed and someone pre-defined path for him.
Of course there were choices required but I’d argue as I say in the piece that they were a long way from the ultra-flexibility of a multi-contract/income/job nomadic FIRE type recalculating their net worth once a week and projecting sustainable SWRs, who knows perhaps with an eye on market valuations at least re: broad asset allocation and so on.
It’s this type of practical financial mindset that I’m suggesting FIRE is exploring / broadening access/recourse to, not even so much the output of a lot more people being FIRE or perhaps even using the term ‘FIRE’. More thinking that this way becoming a norm out of societal trends/necessity.
Perhaps it’s slightly wishful thinking in that a few more of them might read our articles too. 😉
My gut instinct was that the title is a bit much but I like it much better on reflection.
Pioneers arent the first to go somewhere. They’re the ones that go there and send the message out to say “we’ve gone here and it works for us, this is how we got here”. People make their choice about whether thats what they want too and whether its worth it to get there.
Not everyone hears or takes action on that message. FIRE pioneers showed me a path not trodden by any of my relatives or peers before me. It turns out some of my friends have got themselves FI whilst I’ve been pursuing that path. Usually not in a diversified, risk based and budgeted approach to a destination but through hard work, luck and using what they’ve got / know / learnt to pursue more income which covers their lifestyles and then some. They didnt share their path and it would be difficult to replicate.
Thanks to the FIRE pioneers who have charted their journeys for inspiration for anyone looking for it, like me.
@TI
I do wonder if you may be seriously underestimating the amount to which you are an outlier 😉 Most people just don’t want to live like that, with such an exceptional level of uncertainty and endless hustle. While I accept that I may be part of the fossil record probably closer to the attitude of your Dad than you, I managed to play some of your game through a combination of luck and being able to switch it through the intellectual centre.
In fifteen years of living it since deciding I needed to retire early, I never learned to trust investment income. I was able to grow the pot, even across the gap before getting access to DC pension holdings, that was the GFC lift. It was a lonely and fearful period, nothing seemed to be stable enough to build on. It appears you are happy sensing the ebb and flow of the markets and your financial position. I fearfully looked at my networth and tried to stop it from falling; intellectually I can now see that I underspent quite seriously in the first part, although hindsight is a marvellous thing.
The link “Cultures of destruction are destroying workplaces” in your next weekend reading shows a bit of what this brave new world of working is like. Not all of us want to allocate so much of our finite life-force to the damn subject of working. I was OK with working, you gotta pay your way, I probably paid a reasonable amount of tax/NI over my 30 years so that even ZX48k won’t shoot me as deadweight. I wanted to deliver value in what I did, not become an advertising agency for the Brand of Me and endlessly chase my fifteen minutes of fame. One of the pernicious trends in work I observed in my time there was the increasing requirements of braggadocio and hustle relative to the amount of time spent on doing the job or learning how to do it better. The sheer inefficiency of the performance management edifice that replaced the annual appraisement was horrendous.
Observation shows when given a chance many people want to also think about other things than work in their lives, be that children, or travelling, being creative, or any of the myriad of aspects of being human that are not classed under the topic of ‘work’. They may take pride in their work, they may want to do a good job and improve things for the beneficiaries of their efforts, but they’d also like to have something else in their lives.
How the hell did we end up designing a world where the pac-man of Work ate up all our time? When I was a child the factory workers had none of the autonomy that your paragraph implied, and some of the work was arduous enough that physical health problems often manifested in their late forties. But they were off the clock after the factory siren went off, they were able to spend time with their mates in the pub, their children on the weekend, and many of them had hobbies, be that fishing, carpentry, all sorts. Much else was wrong with that Britain, but it didn’t live to Work.
The endless competition and relentless pressure is empowering for some, but look around you. It’s a miserable way to live for many who are either unaware that this game needs to be played or those who can’t play it. The Deliveroo rider ain’t going to be revelling in ultra-flexibility of a multi-contract/income/job he’s going to be shit scared about what he’s going to do if somene nicks his bike/he has an accident, rather than computing when his NEST pension pot will reach 25 times his outgoings.
So for different reasons to ZX48k, I disagree with the thesis of the post. FIRE pioneers are finding the way for a narrow section of society – those capable of the abstraction involved in investing, and with the resources at their command to play the game. That’s aways going to be a minority sport. There are some slightly generalisable principles, but auto-enrolment has probably done a lot more for younger Britons’ retirement prospects that everything written about FIRE put together.
For that narrow sector of students who were ready for the master to appear, yes FIRE discourse will transform their lives. It did mine, but ‘for everyone’ is gilding the lily. Not for the reason that if everyone did it it would shatter Western capitalism, but because it is a narrow path, many may be called but few can swing it.
Twenty years ago a colleague told me about the great advantages of using salary sacrifice and delivered it with the flourish “you’re crazy if you’re still working here past 45”. He’s still working, because his wife and kids rather liked the trappings of a decent salary, the kitchen refits, the holidays in Italy, the nice things. I could do what he couldn’t because desperation focuses the mind; I was the student who was ready for the master to appear. He wasn’t, though he had a better grasp of the situation 😉
@ZX #25: it seems to me that you’ve made an argument for ‘each according to his abilities and each according to his needs’ type socialism there 😉 A ‘fair’ system wouldn’t look like the current one, that’s for sure.
Of course, the system isn’t sustainable in aggregate. It’s not that FIRE types don’t understand this. They do FIRE precisely because they do.
Their ‘edge’, if you will, is in the relative ‘weakness’ (for want of a better word) of the majority – who (fortunately for FIRE types) through one or more of financial illiteracy, competing priorities and an exceeding widespread inability to pass the marshmallow test don’t or won’t try FIRE; such that FIRE is, and will likely continue to remain, very much a minority activity, and the date of system wide collapse can, therefore, hopefully be postponed for most of our lifetimes.
@NWIan @ #14 said:
“Not sure about value accruing ever less to the providers of labour, try getting hold of a plumber, painter, joiner, electrician or kitchen fitter to suit your timescale at a price you think is fair!”
Mmm. Maybe that’s because, in the real world, all the graduates who’ve been suckered into racking up vast amounts of debt doing degrees in things like “Gender Non-Binary Decolonised Mongolian Basketweaving” and the like are discovering that, absent a trust fund or mummy & daddy working for “that awful [oil company*] / [bank*] / [brokerage firm*] [*delete as appropriate] dahlink” to bankroll their luxury beliefs, shit still needs to get done.
With the general looking down the nose at “trade” (particularly in the UK), what you’re finding is that in an ever more complex society, which is ever more dependent on technology, ever fewer people actually have any clue about how things work (many postively revel in their ignorance) and their skills are now commanding a premium. Supply and demand 101.
Tarquin, Hermione, Bubbles et all still need working light-switches and plumbing that doesn’t leak. It’s just that there are more of them than people who know how to sort those things out.
🙂