I suppose if we expect the pandemic generation to not be consumerists like their parents and grandparents, there would have to be some kind of revolutionary movement promoting a new meaning of life. After all, most of us who have decided to spend all our lives earning and using up luxury items or other drugs have defaulted into that rut for lack of anything more meaningful.
Religious and political fanaticism comes to mind as an alternative, but (a) it doesn't necessarily have to be that way, and (b) generational trends are pointing the opposite direction. Furthermore, religious and political groups today more resemble country clubs than monasteries. They don't offer much to struggling young people living in a harsher economic environment than the earlier generations ever knew. Throughout history, when a cultural default became impossible to pursue any longer, younger generations have rebelled. In the 1960's, young people avoided being sent to a Southeast Asian war of futility by becoming hippies, offending the values of their elders but yet surviving. In the 2020's, young people will find that the value set of their elders (the house, the car, the vacations, the remods, the riding lawnmower, hours a day of electronic media consumption) is impossible to pursue. They will face a choice to live in misery with a sense of failure or to adopt a different value set. Millennials took a baby step in this direction by valuing smartphones and sneakers over TVs and cars. The pandemic generation might have to give up valuing even these things.
The FIRE movement could expand in this future, but to be successful I suspect the discussion would have to shift away from "look at how well VTSAX does when held for 10 years!" and "I learned Javascript and now earn six figures!" and "I installed my own marble countertops and saved $1k!" which still hints at the value set of stuff accumulation. It would have to shift towards "our family car is covered in rust and we DGAF!" or "I converted my whole front and back yards to a vegetable garden. Neighbors don't know what to think!." or "talk me out of getting rid of my last internet-connected device". There is the opportunity to create local cells of radical stoics devoted to mutual aid, cultural resistance, and social support, like the fraternal clubs and societies that existed in the early 20th century. The cult could become a real counterculture movement.
This is far-fetched of course. Mustachians have little incentive to recruit others to the movement, and are largely still of the mindset that they don't need others to succeed. What recruitment has occurred has been through for-profit social media, not tireless volunteers. It's far more likely that a cult of personality forms around the generation of post-Trump / post-Sanders political leaders, or that nothing changes except the frame of reference for consumeristic competition shifts downscale and everyone accepts being miserable as they do now.
