I've been thinking more and more about how American culture produces a result indistinguishable from feudalism. In feudalism, if you ever tried to leave your place as basically a sharecropper on land owned by the nobility, you'd simply starve to death. To escape a system that worked you and exploited you until your very last breath, you'd have to think in a very nonconformist and creative way, develop artisan skills, and reject the messaging around you, much like FIRE people today.
In America, if you do what everyone else is doing and believe the predominant messaging, you will live the same life as a medieval serf. Sure, you'll have higher material comforts, but you'll still work your entire lifetime and live in fear, held back by the unexamined superstitious assumptions around you.
Feudalism was a great way to get most of the population to toil their lives away for the benefit of the rich, but American culture is getting close to delivering the same results by rewarding the peasantry with social status signifiers, which only last as long as their productivity. Boomers and GenXers with minimal savings will have to work until their bodies break down. At that point they will die from a lack of medical care and be discarded.