You'll Never Be Able To Retire - What Is Missing in Tweets That You Need To Know

Just invest $X a year for Y years at Z% return and be filthy rich...right?

There is nothing to gain from being a downer.

If you send simplistic rah-rah tweets you get likes and shares. No matter how unrealistic or likely false the advice is, people like a nice simple happy story.

It is a pretty good trade-off for the gooroo. You don’t have to think or test or model or be creative. You don’t need to come up with anything novel. You just keep rotating through a handful of positive feel good tweets - no proof neccessary.

And since every other gooroo is using the same heuristic, it becomes an echo chamber where everyone sees everyone else using the same rules. Then since everyone is saying the same rules, everyone feels that much more confident that the rules are fact.

“If everyone knows that everyone knows that doing ‘X’ leads to success, it must be true, we can’t all be wrong.”

[Editor’s Note: They can, in fact, all be wrong]

Meanwhile the rule is being applied in ways not intended by the original author, but who needs to actually look at what that guy said…

“FroogalBudgetFIREFinancialGooroo69” has been on this earth for 22 years and studied extensively what other gooroos in their 20s are saying on twitter

Just closed my 10th client this month buy my cold outreach agency sales course. I am going to take this money and invest it for 40 years and grow it to $1 million (buy my investment course). I am able to do this thru budgeting (buy my budget spreadsheet here). I’ll be able to retire in 30 years and live off my investment using the 4% rule forever - Tad, financial gooroo, 8 years old

Nobody wants to hear that they likely aren’t going to make it. Or the risk of their current trajectory is going to fall short. And nobody…I mean nobody…wants to hear that the heuristic they are using for retirement planning likely means they are going to be eating cat food.

When you have a heuristic every gooroo uses that has a high probability of failure, it is a very bad outcome. When every gooroo is saying “Do ‘X’ and retirement success” it means:

1. Most people will will do less than ‘X’.

   1. People will be people. They will be lazy and do less than X figuring if ‘X’ is guaranteed success since they are in the 90% of people who are better than average, they can do less than X and still succeed

   2. [Editor’s Note: Shockingly, 90% of people can’t be better than average]

2. Some people will actually do ‘X’

   1. Some will succeed due to pure luck out of their control

   2. Most will likely fail since ‘X’ was based on the past and the future isn’t going to look like the past

   3. Only the ones who succeed will talk about it (who wants to talk about their failures), which makes the echo chamber louder as the successes are shown as societal proof…aka survivorship bias as explained here

3. Or X is so far in the future, none of us are around when the results happen - looking at every gooroo promising riches by investing small amounts for 50 years.

   1. Isn’t that a great little grift Anon? “Buy my course today, implement it for the next 30 years, and you will succeed”…there is a little bit of a timing difference between when you pay and when the results are seen.