He started coding around the clock, tinkering on D.I.Y. software ideas whenever he wasn’t at work, barely sleeping. He doggedly pushed one project after another to the App Store, praying for something to take off. Eventually, one did: an app that let users tune in to police scanners around the world. Then another. Their runaway success took even him by surprise. By the time his peers were splurging on their first West Elm sofas, he was a self-made multimillionaire.

One simple FIRE rule of thumb is to first calculate your target “FI number” by multiplying anticipated annual retirement expenses by at least 25, and then squirrel away as much as possible into interest-accruing or tax-advantaged buckets like 401(k)s, low-fee index funds, certificates of deposit, HSAs and Roth IRAs until you hit that number.

The first quote sounds like religion: sacrifice everything in the here and now and you may enter heaven. The second quote just describes “passive income” schemes that depend on paying less taxes and the stock market, which is highly speculative and relies on actual labourers to do the work that makes these companies so valuable as they claim.

The article mentions three “tomes” of the FIRE movement: one by a former astrophysicist, another one by a software developer. Jobs paying above $100,000 are most common, which is just 6 percent of the US population.

My interpretation of the FIRE movement is that it is an attempt to revive the “American Dream” by telling you to live an ultra-minimalist lifestyle and “hustle” for in most cases more than a decade, and relying on the stock market and tax breaks instead of actually producing things with your own labour. It feels like an ultra-charged version of the capitalist mindset, realising the boot on workers but only caring about saving yourself. It’s the ending to ‘Ready, Player, One’.