I just read Nomadland and really, really liked it. I'm shocked this book isn't much more widely read in the FI community, because I saw so much that felt familiar.
This is a group of self-described "conscientious objectors" from the consumerist lifestyle template we are all presented with. People look at us and think we are odd for driving ten year old modest cars, just as they look suspiciously at van dwellers. Our community's core tenets have been that 1) our happiness is driven much more by non-material factors of our lifestyle like making a difference in the world, having abundant time to spend with friends and family, and working on updating the paradigms we take with us out into the world; and 2) "lack" of material things is not only itself not a hardship but actually a good discipline to force us to stop and look around and what does and doesn't contribute to a good life. Add the strong vein of oddball humor and the willingness to take society's rejection as a badge of pride, and it felt in many ways like looking into a mirror! As the MMM community has moved far up the income scale over the 8 years I've been around it, this was a really nice reminder of the broader tent we had in the early days.
At the same time, it was really troubling to see how little of a safety net there is underneath people. The author knew little about personal finance and was uncritical of impossible claims like a $140k housing loss being the difference between manual labor and retiring on a sailboat to never work again. But the book also profilrs people who worked hard to get through hardship and decades of alcoholism an intact person, people who pieced together a string of jobs only intermittently contributing to social security, people who worked two jobs without health insurance only to lose everything they had to cancer, ALS, or hard to pin down chronic pain issues. Should those people have saved more? Undoubtedly. Would it be nice if we were better at personal finance education to stave off some of these stories in the next generations? Perhaps. And if people did not save enough, should the richest society in human history afford those people enough of a hand that they can get by with food and an inexpensive one bedroom apartment somewhere? Just as clearly, the answer is yes.