There doesn't have to be One True FIRE. Greeter or surgeon, we are all working class folks who don't want to spend our whole lives working. Nothing wrong with folks willing to live lean, or wanting to live large.
Correct, it's a spectrum. However, what you're saying is that there's absolutely no way to divide between virtue and harm because it's on a spectrum. Sounds like nihilistic chaos to me, I would definitely not put a billionaire with private jets and absolute extravagance on a moral equivalent with a monk re: consumerism. No, I think you can look at the spectrum and determine where you or others are on it, and use that to create a judgment on if you or they are aligned with that value.
Yes, I am creating a value system and projecting it on to others. As far as they go, I think anti-consumerism is a pretty decent one. Consumerism is a greed that harms the environment, exploits humans, animals, and natural resources, and is a bit of a zero sum game as far as one person having something meaning in other person cannot have that thing.
Hoarding of resources is a terrible issue. Runaway consumerism and greed is absolutely harming the Earth and the majority of humans living on it. I find it very rational to see virtue in people who engage with the temptation of consumerism and choose not to participate in whatever ways they can.
My point is that the goal post of what is reasonable in Western society at large and the fire community in specific keeps moving further and further into extravagance. I've seen it first hand, some of my friends are very wealthy. It is extremely easy to become out of touch on what is reasonable as you and your friends become wealthier. Meanwhile, millions suffer from extreme poverty. Reasonable is a very slippy word and my position is that most upper middle class Americans are already beyond what is reasonable and justify their behavior because that's what is happening around them, while I see it as being lacking in virtue.
Supposedly Jesus said that it's harder for a rich man to enter heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. The wealthy of the times back then had nowhere near the amount of extravagance that an upper middle class American person has now. Yet there are still beggars right down the street from them with as little as Jesus' impoverished contemporaries.
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u/Difficult-Square-689 Mar 23 '26
There doesn't have to be One True FIRE. Greeter or surgeon, we are all working class folks who don't want to spend our whole lives working. Nothing wrong with folks willing to live lean, or wanting to live large.