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 [1] over the next 20 years.
FIRE [2] 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 [3] 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 [4] – “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 [5] to portfolio diversification [6] 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 [7] 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 [8] 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 [9] 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 [10] 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 [11] 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 [12].
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 [↩ [17]]