« Retire early » is the main part you’re missing from their argument, that implies saving large portions of disposable income. I always feel sad when people have high paying jobs they hate just so that « retire early » though, in a field like software engineering you can find a happy medium I feel like.

The happy medium for me would be working less than 20 hours per week. It's not about the work but about how much time it consumes. And part time software engineering jobs don't seem to exist... I would happily live on half my income for half my hours. But if retiring early is more realistic than that (and it seems to be), I'll take it.

It's possible much later in career when you establish yourself in a certain domain. You become valuable enough that you working half the time (or even just consulting) is more valuable than 2 other employees.

But people who can do that are also probably in positions to retire early already. Either with PhD's and 10+ years working on some now-extremely-valuable tech (think AI if you worked on it in the 2010's, or data science in the 00's) or some otherwise reputable name in their industry.

I've been very confused about how people are getting by.

If they're not in tech, and and they're not a member of the professional class (doctor, lawyer, etc), how are they doing it?

Is everyone working two jobs and doing uber on top of that, or what? How much of a bubble am I in? I'm in tech and I feel like I'm barely making it.

Middle class has been and continues to being squished and crushed, things are getting worse and worse if you haven’t noticed. And it’s not just in the US, but also other western economies such as Germany, France, UK, etc.

I wonder the same thing. I suspect that the answer is they carry a lot of debt that they never really expect to pay off.

Roommates, living with parents. A decade+ past when earlier generations moved to their own homes.