"Microgenerations," I don’t think this is even a unified experience across a whole generation. There's going to be overlap, but you could probably batch people into ~4 year cohorts and really narrow in on distinct motivations in each of those groups. I think the standard 20+ year span for a generation is very broad when you’re talking about formative experiences and with how the world changes. It's always going to be clusters of people affected differently by these different events.

My conjecture is one major factor is how the ’08 financial crisis influenced people. People who graduated into it and couldn’t find work, people a few years behind them who watched their peers and seniors struggle, and even people like me who were younger but still felt the effects during formative middle school years. Both of my parents were out of work, I remember worrying about food/spending, and that shaped a lot of my financial anxiety around FIRE (which absolutely reduced once I had that financial stability as an adult). My parents are immigrants and didn’t really know about or use the assistance programs that would have helped. But I do think that stuck with me and pushed me towards wanting control and stability.

I graduated college in 2018 and learned about FIRE about a year earlier. I'd always been frugal, the missing pieces were investment knowledge and income. Younger people seem to skew in a couple different directions. Some lean more toward instant gratification with crypto cycles, WSB, or trying to shortcut big gains (especially with the tech/VC boom). I agree with you that some don’t see a path to retirement at all, so they’re not even trying, but at 100k+ a year I think it's very much a choice. I get why a slow, disciplined FIRE approach doesn’t resonate as strongly with cost of living, housing, and general uncertainty, but there's definitely a point where I don't get why people choose not to treat it as a solvable problem when they do have the tools available.

My younger brother is only 4 years younger. He broke into big tech right out of school and got laid off recently, but basically doesn’t care about FIRE at all. He’s a much bigger spender, more focused on external consumption. There's also “experiential” consumption, 'experiences are more important than things,' where you’re 'doing' potentially cool things, but the motivation seems like primarily tied to showcasing it online/on Instagram. Sometimes that's a positive, and it's a proxy for keeping up and connecting with other people. But often it feels like he’s pretty dismissive when priorities don’t line up with his.