I miss the optimism. I haven't been on the forum as long as some of you all but it seems like people have gotten more pessimistic. I know there are still people on here who retired on a 4% WR and figured that they could get a part time job if they needed to. Lots of us here still have average incomes and live frugally too.
Huh. Yes I wouldn't have put my finger on it until you said so, but I think you are right that the mood was much more optimistic in the past. Although I feel like society as a whole, or at least the particular slices of society slices I am exposed to/interact with, have gotten more pessimistic in the last decade.
Perhaps part of the shift is explained by a lot of those optimistic folks hitting 25x expenses (or the more complicated and detailed numbers specified by their own math) retiring, and dropping out of participating as much in the forum? Lots of folks are active during the accumulation phase, but then in actual FIRE people start pursuing their own interests and living their best lives and, understandable, are going to be less interested in a forum focused on discussing how to get to where they already are.
I too find the pessimism pretty rampant.
And yes, I think that the general absence of retired happy voices is a big part of that.
I'm afraid it's just going to get worse and worse.
So meta!
I share many of the thoughts already mentioned. The whataboutism is frustrating - it shows up here because it's a big part of wider society. In almost effort to improve something you see comments that essentially say "but the 10% of people for whom this isn't practical invalidates the whole idea." It also seems to me that there used to be more great stories of people doing amazing things to improve their lives. For a while the journals were my favorite source of recreational reading because there were well-written, real stories of adversity and triumph. There are still some of course.
I still get a lot of value and pleasure from participating, but the novelty of having my views challenged, my thinking broadened, and profoundly changing the course of my life has worn off because I've internalized the main points and maybe there isn't anything fundamentally new to say in this area right now.
Ironically pessimism and whataboutism tend to be inversely related to how a person has experienced real life, plan ruining crises.
Those of us who have had everything we work for blow up in our faces and our major life plans ruined, tend to realize that life just goes on; you're still just you, still just living your life. It's not the end of the world, things are just different from what you expected.
In the end it's all just so...normal.
People tend to see their future as dichotomous: success or failure, when reality is nothing like that. Success doesn't feel like "happily ever after" and failure doesn't feel like "game over".
So when I see people agonizing over what the markets might do, which is totally out of there control, and probably going to be fine, it all just seems so fucking manageable.
Life is hard, challenges come up, sometimes they're financial, plans get changed, life keeps on going and keeps being hard, and everyone makes the best of it, and no one ever worried their way out of it.