How can you count yourself as working class? Even outside top US salaries most of us could probably take several years off the job without any huge issues due to savings/investments.
I mean of course we are providing labor for money, but this is very different than a blue-collar worker living paycheck to paycheck doing hard manual work.
We have far more in common with blue-collar workers living paycheck to paycheck than we have with an socialite whose inheritance grows faster than his or her ability to spend it.
Fundamentally, almost all of us are N missed paychecks away from bankruptcy. For a lot of people, that N is 1, for some, it's 2 or 3, or even higher if you managed to save wisely. But we all have some number N. And the fact that we have that number should unite us against the few people on the far side of the derivative curve whose N is infinite. Tech workers had their relatively brief moment in the sun where their N was maybe 10-20, it got to our heads a little, and we started thinking we were "very different than a blue-collar worker".
I agree, of course, that tech people are closer to the worker class than the capitalist class and there are many common interests.
On the other hand, as long as you manage your finances sanely, even in Europe you can reach a FIRE state (maybe not 100% retirement, but very close to it) in your 40s without too many issues.
If someone in tech is close to bankruptcy, due to missing a couple of paychecks, I really have a hard time to understand how they accomplished that. Of course, that may be different, if you just started your career.
Nevertheless, I know exactly 0 blue-collar workers (and I know quite a few) that could do FIRE in their 40s, and with sane financial management decouple themselves from the whole runmill in like 2-3 decades.
I mean of course we are providing labor for money, but this is very different than a blue-collar worker living paycheck to paycheck doing hard manual work.