I love the chance to hear dissenting opinions. She brings up a lot of compelling points that I've heard other people make in less hyperbolic terms. Namely, that you spend more money as you age. And not just out of necessity, but out of comfort. It's easy to call myself a "badass" when I'm in my physical prime. I'm young and strong and I can deal with a lot of bullshit right now. I can volunteer to get bumped from a flight and hang out in an airport for six hours in order to get a crazy flight credit. I can climb six flights of stairs to an AirBnB and sleep basically on a glorified air mattress.
I don't know how I'll feel when I get older, though. My parents were good savers and frugal people when I was growing up, but they've become quite a bit "softer" and spendier with age. Personally, I think I'm even more frugal than they were, but maybe the same could happen to me. I have a very enduring memory of traveling to New York in my early 20s and meeting up with my parents at Penn Station. They had just come in from Newark and were going to check into their hotel in Manhattan. While going up the stairs at the station, I noticed my parents lagging behind, struggling to get their two heavy suitcases up the long flight of stairs. With boundless energy, I ran down the stairs, grabbed my mom's suitcase, and ran it up to the top. Then I ran back down, grabbed by dads, and did the same. Being one to travel out of a backpack, I wondered what they could possibly need from those suitcases.
But people get old. Sometimes they want and need comfort, or help. And you need to expend resources to get that comfort and help. Will I be the same guy at 50 that I am at 30? Almost certainly not. Something to think about.
Suze's doomsday comments can be rebutted with a pretty simple line of logic though. If people who live on middle income spending by drawing conservatively on a pile of money are screwed, what does that say about people who live on middle income spending by laboring? People who are FIRE are dramatically better off than most, and it takes an extremely "rich person" mindset not to fully appreciate that.