FIRE Movement Meet Workers Revolt
Home sweet home, When only people on passive incomes can afford a modestly spacious home, we've got a revolt on our hands.
There is a movement in the generation entering the workforces called FIRE, standing for Finacial Independence Retire Early- the goal is to retire by forty, about the age when corporate employees start to worry about being considered over the hill.
This generation has never known what it is like to live in a society with a strong middle class rather than a society of haves and have nots and an almost impassable void between them. The youth of the Fire movement wants to be in the haves but in so doing they become dependent on the entrenched paradigm that they seek to escape.
Millennials and Generation Xers blame the Baby Boomers for accumulating extreme wealth and stealing the future of the current generations.
The newest generation wants to be the wealthy elite as long as they perceive themselves to have a shot at it. Unlike the Baby Boomer generation, they are not starting out their journey as idealistic flower children, they just want to be the winners and not the losers. Can they reverse-evolve into idealists? Silly idea?
David L is a smart young content provider from the youngest generation entering into the workforce. He sees the problem, He writes:
The quote: “Many people die in their 20s but are not buried until they are 80,” is shared all over the internet, expressing our negative sentiment towards work-life and highlighting our desire for financial freedom to quit our jobs so that we can go back doing things at our own terms. (emphasis by Mackenzie Andersen)
Why be financially independent when you’re 60 when you can do it at 30? As a result, we see there is a fervor towards the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) movement among the young in recent decades.
The young are dying to work as hard early as possible in their careers so they get promoted, get rich ASAP, and invest their money in assets. Hustle culture is going on and every young person must work in a full-time job and 3 side projects so they can generate more income that goes into their savings account. People who achieve financial stability before 40 gain celebrity status within the community and they get to brag about anything they want while the rest of the world worships them.
….On behalf of humanity as a whole, it is problematic when we develop a culture where everyone is racing to work with the expectation that one day we can stop working. (emphasis by David L)
Is it any wonder that younger generations are calling out older generations for not retiring early enough? How can those in the FIRE movement be promoted to the highest paying jobs and catapult themselves to retirement before forty if the previous generation is working into their sixties and beyond and holding down the coveted highest paying job?
And what does David L mean by “going back” to doing things on our own terms? David L doesn’t say, as if the phrase is a Freudian slip expressing a collective unconscious memory of a time before the current entrenched paradigm was entrenched.
These are the young people of the workforce working in the “quality jobs” as so declared by the State, issuing its spin in the service of its own monetary corporate interests. “Quality jobs” are jobs that pay higher than average wages and benefits. Period. End of the story. All other factors are insignificant to quality, according to the old worn paradigm.
There is universal agreement that one turn in the road named The Time Before- that time that when we, the people, could live life on our own terms, was the 1970s.
During the 1970s central management of the economy was deemed by many a state Legislature to be an essential government function, responding to a push in that direction by the federal government’s The United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968, Public Law 90–577i, and the middle class diminished as incrementally as the corporate state expanded.
There is a clear and straightforward way to measure the success of economic policy and that is by the health of the middle class. When the middle class thrives, there are opportunities at all levels of the economy. Ensuring the existence of a healthy middle (Gini rating) should be the sole involvement of the government in its role in managing the national currency.
For most of the bottom of the economy, the most accessible avenue to rising runs through the middle. When the void between the top and the bottom increases, it should tell us that policies that have been instituted are not working. Why would one expect the middle class to grow stronger by doubling down on the same policies under which the middle class has been stifled?
When the founding fathers of Maine's corporate state declared that the economy suffered from a lack of capital they decided that the solution was to take from the whole to enrich the top.
The contemporary solution is to deconstruct the corporate state and let the free enterprise system breathe again. The corporate state has spurred the growth of large private corporations that have become inseparable from the state. The corporate state shares the same singular measure of value as the shareholders of the corporations that create the quality jobs from which the followers of the FIRE movement aim to escape.
The jobs that the younger generation covets for the money, only, theoretically enable FIRE-motivated workers to earn enough to invest in a passive income and escape from endlessly selling their time on this earth in the service of shareholder profits.
Or so they think,
The young want to be the shareholders and not the workers in jobs measured in worth by the worth of a dollar but these days affordable workforce housing doesn’t rise to the quality level of the affordable low-income housing of a decade ago.
It is a flimsy house made of dollar bills.
Once we had only the mainstream media to tell us the corporate story of the wonderfulness of the quality jobs, but in the age of the content providers, we, the workers, speak and rate the quality of the quality jobs.
A young writer named Jess Rohloff makes the point, - quality isn’t monetary- it’s spiritual!
Depression Feels Physical, Burnout Feels Spiritual
For the last couple of months — I think it may have started around the time we changed the clocks in parts of the U.S. that are still observing Daylight Savings Time nonsense — I have not been myself.
Work is frustrating. It used to be fun. However, there is zero communication across the company. No alignment around mission/vision/values. The culture may actually be toxic. We lack clear goals or KPIs, there’s absolutely no standard process or procedure that I’m aware of, and the whole company seems to be running on scotch tape and spreadsheets.
Yes. Scotch tape. We haven’t even gotten to the level of duct-taping our spreadsheets together into something coherent and actionable. Burnout Might Be Worse Than Depression (for Me) Jess Rohloff
This could be a work environment negotiated by the state in a quality job for corporate welfare tradeoff. All that is required to meet the state quality job standard is higher than the average pay and benefits. The quality of the working environment and the worker’s engagement in the work process doesn’t make the measure. While spiritual well-being means nothing to the state, work engagement and a quality work environment are highly impactful in creating spiritual well-being. A system that measures value solely in money is a contributing factor in the spiritual hemorrhaging of contemporary democracy.
The sought-after reward of the FIRE movement is that after spending one's youth in the service of a culture one hates, one can accumulate enough wealth to escape the system that generates wealth and live life on one’s own terms.
But what does it mean to live life on one’s own terms? Can one ever do so when the means to that end is to spend one’s prime years doing the opposite? Prime years for what? Oh yeah- they are called the prime money-making years.
It’s a dubious concept that this generation will spend the years of its youth, working “quality jobs” during the day and side hustles deep into the night to develop streams of passive incomes so that they can quit by age forty to “live life on their terms”.
What if that concept has got it all wrong and the years of our youth are the prime meaning-building years? Or the prime years for coming to terms with what your own terms are?
Can one ever really know what living on one’s own terms are after living for years on the terms established by a citadel that is “only in it for the money”?
Will the next generation look at the current rising generation and say- We are not going to be like them. We are going to live meaningfully throughout our life. We are not going to sacrifice living life on our terms so that we can live life on our terms.
Thanks to covid, workers were able to realize that they are more productive working at home, on their own terms. Workers reason that if they can produce the same amount of work in less time working remotely, that they should be able to do so for the same pay. They do not need to do that work at corporate headquarters. They already have a better work-life balance simply by doing the same work on their turf, and they may or may not be looking for a side hustle.
However, the system that created the quality jobs determines the rate of pay pursuant to a deal struck between the corporate state and its private partners. In exchange for incentives and subsidies, a company must create jobs that provide benefits and wages higher than average for the area.
The area is most often an opportunity zone in which special exemptions and subsidies apply in order to attract industry to the area. Each new employer in an opportunity zone must top the last one in pay and benefits resulting in a small concentrated area where the incomes and benefits rise far above the rest of the region and state, subsidized by the taxpayers.
As remote working grows, decentralization takes hold.
The thinking of corporate management might factor that the worker’s rate of pay was not determined by the individual worker’s worth to the company, but by the rate of pay in the area where the job is located, and so if an employee moves to an area where the average rate of pay is lower, it is fair to adjust the worker’s pay accordingly.
Re-adjusting the rate of pay per area rather than per employee may benefit the fight against gentrification by slowing the rise in the cost of housing as urbanites relocate to rural environments. At the same time, a worker who knows their true value can negotiate their own terms or else transfer that worth to independent contracting as a small business owner.
But the workers want space too. The working classes are upset that they do not see a path to a more spacious lifestyle. The FIRE movement realizes that having space requires a passive income, which, as David L points out, depends on other people working, while you sleep. Working people can't afford space, only the shareholders class can afford space-aka the owners of the means of production, the owners of the workers, who have been subsidizing the means of production because the State says that job creation is a public benefit.
But if the workers stop working, the shareholders don’t make any money.
Everybody wants out! This construct isn’t working the way we were told that it would.
The FIRE movement has an escape plan but others are calling it quits on a wing and a prayer, seeing the path they are on as offering no hope - hope, that human emotion, immeasurable and off the map and considered insignificant in a world where the maps and measures record material data, only. A quality job is measured in the amount of pay and benefits, all other factors, including hope, are considered insignificant to the quality of a job, according to the old worn paradigm.
The centrally managed economy instituted itself and justified its act by declaring everything it does to be a public benefit. The non-profit corporations declare the same and the megacorporations exist to make the world a better place. It is only those small entrepreneurs that are in it only for the money- because small entrepreneurs have to earn it unless they are fortunate enough to have an in with the wealth redistribution networks.
Everyone has an opinion on what benefits the public and what doesn’t. I submit that categorizing jobs as a “quality job” or “working for welfare” is damaging psychologically and spiritually to a society and a culture and categorically to the public detriment.
Other categories are “the creative class” and the “essential workers”, the latter term coming into popular usage with covid recognizes that there are some jobs that just have to be done and that not all of them can be automated and, worse, essential workers are looked down upon by those in the creative classes, who have been glorified by corporate state rhetoric and it has gone completely to their heads!
Well not quite. It has also gone to their pocketbooks, sort of.
Time for a reset. That’s not an optional choice.
Sounds as if they object to being exploited by the system … but would willingly exploit others by becoming part of the system. Am I understanding correctly?