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Comment by Mistletoe | Hacker News Reader

I read FIRE subreddits a lot and see a little too much optimism and unreasonable expectations. They are ready to retire with just another decade of incredible stock market returns. It’s rarely that easy. All signs point to another lost decade coming, like after 1968 and 2000, that is going to break a lot of hearts I’m afraid. Unless they plan for it appropriately and have reasonable expectations.

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I couldn’t stand being around anything FIRE related mid way into The Fed’s free for all near 0% interest rate decade. The influencers were the ones making money by spreading lies and shame and everyone else seemed to be scrambling to be another influencer. A lot of those influencers came from money and had inheritance already, and/or had very high paying tech jobs, but hid that well to give hope to their readers.

The main thing I question about FIRE is...how many people can achieve FIRE and live off the stock market returns, essentially contributing very little to society, before society is unable to sustain the "parasitic" load they generate?

Someone retiring "normally" around 60-70 has traded their labor for money, usually in ways that can benefit other people in some fashion. When they retire, there are multiple benefits -- their previous position opens up, hopefully allowing the next generation to be promoted. Their years of experience help shape the way the next generation runs the business, hopefully because they know why things are the way they are (Chesterton's Fence) and can pass that information along. This is pending the retiree not being a serial job changer of course, institutional knowledge requires people staying to learn it.

Compare that with someone who worked as little as they had to, achieved FIRE and retired early at 30. They didn't "pay into" an organization, they just extracted value and retired. They didn't help lead anything. They didn't shape the culture for the next generation. And at the risk of stereotyping, I imagine "succeeding" in FIRE would inflate one's ego in very unhealthy ways.

I don't want to say "FIRE is evil" but SOMEONE has to create the value they are extracting, and if it reaches a tipping point where more are extracting than creating, it will make for a novel problem. Replacing workers with AI is an obvious stopgap, but that just perpetuates the current, weird monetary system we have and that profit would have to be redistributed as UBI or something for it to replace workers in a way that they don't just starve.

Society is changing and it's gonna change even more so it will be interesting to see where we end up.

>The main thing I question about FIRE is...how many people can achieve FIRE and live off the stock market returns, essentially contributing very little to society, before society is unable to sustain the "parasitic" load they generate?

I wonder how many of these people are even factoring changing demographics. As the population continues to age, retirement is going to get even more expensive because labor will continue to cost more and more

Especially as people are deferring starting a family as long as they can, with some just giving up entirely. Lots of countries are struggling with replacement birth rate and our economy is based on endless growth, so something's gotta give.

It could get even worse - imaging that they have so much wealth that they pass it onto their children who don't even have to work till 30. You could imagine a growing class of people who don't work and merely live off their inherited wealth. Of course, that already exists; they're called wealthy people.

Sure, but the mindset of the FIRE Zoomer is much different than wealthy people in the past. An easy example would be Fred Trump, whose "winners and losers" mindset was taught to Donald in a way that Donald went to college, started businesses, and maximized his "wins". He taught this mindset to his children and they went to college, even if it was just for networking.

What would a FIRE Zoomer teach their children, especially if they invested in crypto early and got lucky? Why work hard if mom and dad "don't" work at all? Why go to college if the point of college is training for a career? How will those children be shown by example how to be a helpful member of society?

I suppose a lot of FIRE people likely intersect with the Child Free crowd where they are achieving financial independence by not having any expensive dependents they need to care for. That does reduce the amount you must spend by quite a lot, but if enough people do it the economy will have issues finding workers at all as more people voluntarily check out of the system and leave no descendants to continue in the future.

Well, there's a few things there I'm not really interested in touching, but perhaps if a society is interested in perpetuating itself, it should try and make people happy to live in it and reproduce?

>perhaps if a society is interested in perpetuating itself, it should try and make people happy to live in it and reproduce?

I agree with you. Currently at odds with the goal of having a society of happy people is the society-wide tendency to attempt to extract value from others. This can make for a lot of very unhappy people who have no resources to reproduce.

Regardless, society is made up of people, and people come from families. The tendencies those families normalize are likely passed down. There are negative tendencies that damage society, and positive tendencies that support society. Working for and with each other is one of those supportive tendencies, and while it can be learned at work or school, kids imprint and learn from their parents the most.

My main point is that if a FIRE couple ends up raising a family but don't have to work for a living, the kids may be missing out on a fundamental aspect of society in their day to day lives. Obviously entitlement is an issue with humans in general, but at a societal level FIRE feels a lot like a selfish "FU, I got mine" and that's not a great tendency to pass down to kids.

> My main point is that if a FIRE couple ends up raising a family but don't have to work for a living, the kids may be missing out on a fundamental aspect of society in their day to day lives.

Again, if you replace FIRE with wealth, I don't see much of a difference. Perhaps you have bought into some wealthy ubermensch-like mythos of the rich as the "job creators", but I assure you that they're capable of as much laziness as anyone else. Much more in fact since they don't actually need to work.

I agree with you again. My original question was asking "how many FIRE people can there be before it negatively affects society" so my thoughts and comments are scoped at that level -- how many FIRE people/families/descendents would it take to affect society in a meaningful way.

I haven't done a good job of making that clear at all, and I apologize. There are surely a lot of people trying to reach FIRE goals and if that were to be a meaningful 15% of the population, how would we be affected as a society?

One thing that's interesting in all this is that a common FIRE tactic is to live very frugally your whole lives to achieve and then maintain FIRE. If a meaningful percentage of Americans stopped spending as much money, the economy would feel it at a certain point.

These are the kinds of society-level thoughts I have been aiming to discuss. FIRE makes for some interesting futurism if it becomes the dominant American household financial strategy.

I suppose the whole concept of FIRE is a bit hard to pin down. I believe most peoples' goal is indeed to retire eventually, so who's to say when the appropriate age for them is? If someone takes 50 years to generate enough value to live out their remaining days while someone else only takes 5, then isn't that determined by the labor market and their desired lifestyle? I'm all for a more collectivist "we're all in it together" type of society where retirement is a bit more of a managed concept (I get the impression France is like that where private retirements are rare and that's why Macron raising the retirement age was such a bitter pill), but that is not exactly the way that the US works.

I agree completely with everything you are saying. I always ask my brother- if everyone is retiring and the population is aging, who are you selling your stocks to when you want to retire?

Why would you need to sell them? Many companies pay dividends.

https://www.physicianonfire.com/selling-shares-beats-collect...

But the question still stands, where will the dividends come from if the companies are underperforming and everyone is retired/dead?

Looking at it from a "retiring now-to-soon" perspective, FIRE is great! Keep buying everything I have to sell! There will definitely be someone around to buy them off you when you need to sell ;)

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