COVID has made a lot of people shift to the gig economy, WFH, part-time, freelancing etc.
I keep hearing people say "I used to have a full time job and hated it, these days I do odd jobs and love it, but I miss the money I used to have. Now I'm happy, but poor."
The same in the FIRE movement, they expect to be poorer after retirement than they are now.
And I don't understand it, because for me it's the other way around; the years of the 9-to-5 slavery are the years of poverty and the longer behind me the slavery is, the more distant the poverty appears to be.
It's not poor people in 3rd world countries I'm talking about, but people who once worked 6 figure office jobs in Europe and North America. Some of them are in their 60s and they still don't feel secure about tomorrow.
Someone making 300k of indentured servitude tokens of a Western nation state after a few years should be set for life. And yet they own no capital and are totally dependent on selling their time as waged workers, the most scarce thing in existence but ironically the only thing they have, because life only distributes it at a limited rate of 24 hours per day. Judging by their other spending habits, if they could spend their entire lifetime in one shopping spree they probably would.
The whole point of slaving away is to have to slave away less in the future. If your tomorrow isn't freer and more abundant in options than your today, the latter was wasted in my books.
I understand some are unable to save due to an insufficient income, but I'm surrounded more by privileged people who seem to excel at staying in poverty. Which just goes to show privilege is overrated.
It's this kind of people that fund fiat. Like the human batteries in The Matrix.
Keynesians like to say big consumers are a godsend, because they stimulate the economy, which without them would collapse. But in reality, a decrease in consumption frees up more capital to be invested in production, which flattens the Hayekian triangle and leads to longer production cycles, higher productivity and more advanced goods. A lower time preference doesn't lead to a collapse, but to an improvement in living standards.
Everyone is free to spend as they please, but these high time preferers will get exploited more and more; as productivity increases exponentially, so does their output, but little of that output benefits them - nearly all of it goes to the low time preference class (a.k.a. capitalists), which sits exponentially more comfortably at the top of the food chain. The high time preferers, apart from their daily bowl of rice, will just get a slightly slicker iPhone every once in a while, as long as they keep dumping their daily and exponentially more valuable ration of time on the treadmill.