Most people in the US are pulled into living on credit straight out of school. You get a student loan, then a car loan, then a credit card, then a mortgage. You finance vacations, appliances, kitchen remodels, smartphones - mostly to keep up with friends and coworkers who finance their lifestyles too. A lot of people are in non-stop debt from the age of 18 to 55, if not longer. By most estimates, only about 10-20% of US households are debt-free.
Spending and getting into debt are useful tools. But I don't have any friends in tech who need to be told "hey dude, you should be spending more". I have quite a few friends who would be better off spending less.
For sure it's more common for people not to save enough. But for people who are frugal and save diligently for most of their lives, there often comes a point where they cross a threshold where they have met all of their financial goals, and the "problem" is no longer how save money but to enjoy spending it. And this can be a real challenge for people who have built up deeply ingrained saving habits.
My mother, for example, refuses to replace her iPhone SE with something with a larger screen despite 1) having failing vision and difficulty reading the screen, 2) using her iPhone every day, 3) easily being able to afford it. The idea of spending $1,000 on a phone is just something she is unable to bring herself to do, even though I think it would help alleviate a real source of frustration in her life.
My father, when he started shopping for his most recent car (and probably his final car), set out with the intent to buy a luxury car. But again, despite being able to easily afford one, all he was able to bring himself to buy was a well-equipped Toyota. Don't get me wrong - it's a great car and has served him incredibly well. But it makes me a little sad that he wasn't able to bring himself to finally treat himself to a luxury car after a lifetime of hard work and saving. They did a lot of long road trips together in that car in retirement, and I think they would have enjoyed something a bit more luxurious (though on the other hand, the reliability of the Toyota is not to be discounted).
I think what you're attributing to frugality might be a more a matter of age? Many older folks are just wary of change.
I'm not that old, but every time I upgrade my PC or phone, some of my workflows break and I need to pointlessly re-learn things I'd rather not re-learn. UI buttons get moved around, icons change, some settings are removed and others are added... this was exciting the first ten or twenty times, but it's just tiring now.
Basically, I'm at this stage in life where my reaction to systemd wasn't "oh wow, this is progress" but "ugh, I need to learn how to start, stop, or modify services again". In another ten years, I'll probably just say "no, I'm not doing this again, just let me use my old computer for as long as possible".
> my reaction to systemd wasn't "oh wow, this is progress" but "ugh, I need to learn how to start, stop, or modify services again"
I must be young at heart while >60 years old; my reaction was "why is everybody whining about it, it's pretty nice, I like it". Same with jj vs git, jj is amazing!
For years I did this with the thermostat - something I learned from my father who always kept the house under 65F (18C) in Winter. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit it even led to arguments with my spouse early in our marriage when I would enter a room and find the thermostat set to a balmy 70F.
Eventually I just sat down, looked at how much it costs keep the house a few degrees warmer in winter, and realized we could afford to be comfortable. And if I were really hell bent on saving money, there were other lower-priority expenses I could cut back on first. But I don't even think it was even necessarily about the money - it was more that saving energy and toughing it out felt virtuous to me. Which is all fine, but not something that should be imposed on your partner if they don't share the same beliefs (or if they just get cold easier than you).
I love the winter for this. My thermostat is set to 16C at night. I prefer if the heat never even kicks on, it’s noisy and disruptive to have air blowing through the vents. I wish there was AC that could make my house that cold at night while making no noise!
Funny, I went the other way round in the Bay Area. PG&E bills were so high so it was the choice of putting on a jacket or paying $1k extra over the winter months. And my reasoning was "I can afford a jacket".
I’m always colder in my mother’s house in Scotland (-5°C on cold days) than I am at my MIL’s house in the frozen Canadian wastelands (-40°C/F on cold days), because my mother will play games with thermostat to save money, where my MIL would simply die of exposure if the heating wasn’t on consistently for 6 months of the year.
A wife is a useful thing to have in this respect, not because they tend to profligacy, but because this kind of thing is much easier to detect and fix in someone close to you than in yourself. Both my wife and I have lived frugal lives at various times[0] and I feel much happier with the degree of spending we have now.
I'm reminded of the intelligent corvids in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory where the sum of the two birds forms a being with intelligence in a way that the individual segments do not. The frugality is a deeply embedded piece of our being and undoing it seems hard, but together we financially operate in a place that leaves us both feeling comfortable.
0: In the US sense of the term, not in the sense of the term as known in Taiwan or India.
Just a reminder that since a couple of centuries ago in most Western societies, wives are not "things" anymore, but rather human beings on the same level as husbands.
It's "incline", the subtext is: "Reader, you might start thinking of a certain common stereotype at this point, but don't do that, because my argument is very different, and that stereotype is irrelevant or possibly untrue."
Compare to: "A pick-up truck is a useful thing to have, not because you are insecure about your genitalia, but because you can take home bigger products from IKEA."
My experience has been that it's easy to say, "oh, it's just me", but much harder to subject someone you care about to the same standard that you would yourself. I'm in a similar position with the thermostat, even though something we initially bonded over was that we both kept our thermostats at a low temperature that was outside the window of being socially acceptable.
In the winter, I keep the thermostat at frigid temperatures when I am home alone and jack it up to warm just before any one else gets home. My thinking is that it is wasteful to warm up the entire house when it's just me since I can put on a sweater but I don't want to subject others to my, shall we say, quirks.
I keep meaning to calculate how much I am actually saving by freezing my butt off. My guess is it'll work out to something like $0.75 a day or something equally trivial.
Depending on the kind of heating system you have and the temperature differences you talk about it can be cheaper to heat the house to a constant temperature (because your heating can run more efficiently under lower load).
This is very culture-specific. I've seen this in Poland. Under USSR rule frugality has been necessary to survive, but it left a lot of people forever stuck in that mindset, long after things got better. I know people who have a fortune in the bank, but live like they're broke, because they're afraid to spend anything from a "rainy day fund" even on rainy days.
Yes! I related a little too much with the blog post. My grandparents were Sindhi and they had to flee from Pakistan to India during the partition. As refugees in India, they had to start their life basically from scratch. Now I get why it's ingrained in me to be frugal, and even take pride in it when there's none. I see the very same behaviour in my Sindhi friends when they feel bad for spending money on essentials like hospital visits.
I do something kinda similar, I guess it counts as maladaptive frugality?
Whenever I have something a little extra in my fridge, most often Italian prosciutto, I refrain from eating it, instead saving it for a "special occasion" even though it is, like, my favourite thing in the whole world. Eventually I have to throw the mouldy prosciutto away because I was too frugal to eat it.
I'm practicing though, learning to eat it. I don't know why it's so hard, I mean it's delicious! Should be easy!
Exactly the key of mindset that drives me to play through entire RPGs without ever popping a single item. It is essential that I collect 99 potions, and never consume even 1.
For some, I think there’s that satisfaction that comes with saving money (like you’re somehow “cheating the system”, even when it’s just a coupon that gets you to buy something you wouldn’t otherwise). In some cases, that satisfaction grows with the amount of time or effort expended to save the money in the first place, which is ironic because that money-value-of-time probably far exceeds the actual amount saved. Practically every engineer here probably has a story about spending a ton of time or effort to optimize something by a tiny amount; saving money can be like that too. It’s a little joy in life, and so long as it doesn’t outright prevent you from spending money when you should (or impose excessive optimization costs), I think it’s fine.
The maladaptive part is when you start regretting not saving money, because it has two knock-on effects: it makes the decision to spend much more emotional (which negatively impacts rational decision-making) and it can negatively impact the enjoyment of the thing itself. For example, the maladaptive part might take the form of being reminded of the cost every time you look at the repaired phone.
I've always found the "time is money" hourly rate comparisons a bit contrived, because I can't actually trade my every waking hour for an hourly rate.
The reality for most people is that the trade-off is actually between time spent on looking for bargains, or time doing something else that doesn't make any money.
My mother still clips coupons in the Sunday newspaper, despite being financially well-off enough to not clip coupons. I considered listing this as an example of maladaptive frugality in another post, but then I figured it’s just something she enjoys doing.
Agreed - I find I spend almost the same time on small decisions as large, and let the default (subscriptions, extra cars, storage) ride. That's turning the decision into a drama that befalls you (and avoiding those that don't). Or you find yourself down or up become cheap or profligate.
So, what big spending is adaptive? Better to drive decisions objectively based on future value.
Some scenarios:
- It lasts a long time, and you'll need to do it anyway. Best to get it early and enjoy it longer - for iPhones, cars, houses, marriage...
- It lasts a long time and you use it daily. Always pay for what you'll be glad to have: good socks, a powerful computer, a nice view.
- Your beloveds needs to know if you care more about money or them. Choose them.
- Something expresses your values: you appreciate an artist's work, so you pay good money for it. Some panhandler is stoic, so you give him a hand. (Just be careful about posturing.)
Another mindset is to think of your money as family (writ large) money, and invest in the future of family or friends. It's as much a vote of confidence as an injection of cash, and it helps you detach from the needy instrumentality of the money to consider what's best for their future. That's the weirder phenomenon: trillions held by baby boomers until they die (just in case), while their progeny waste time in terrible jobs and narrow circumstances for lack of investment. That's maladaptive hoarding.
I was so frugal that I didn't refinance my (admittedly already low) interest rate during Covid because "we were planning on selling the house in a year or so". Oh well :)
I read this article 10 years ago by a guy named Ricky Yean who went to Stanford as an economically disadvantaged admit and couldn’t shake his poverty mindset and it cost him when he was running a startup.
Why “few successful startup founders grew up desperately poor”
Poverty mindset is maladaptive because it teaches you only money is worth anything, so you hoard it. But in truth time is also worth a lot and sometimes it’s wise to use money to buy time.
Agree wholeheartedly but I worry some will read this and go all in the opposite. The key point is that humility helps make you free. Couple that with not being a slave to frugality and you can live without as much guilt and without a much restraint.
> I plan to have fun spending my money in the future, so it’s time to start practicing now.
The most optimal thing to do in our world is to pick an age, say, 60, and until your 60th birthday, maximize your suffering via frugality to just under the tolerable limit so as to maximize your potential for compound interest. This leaves you with the most freedom and opportunity during the most fun part of your life, when you no longer have to sell your labor and can do whatever you want.
Within our current model, trying to slip in bits of fun through spending money before that age is getting a poor return: you're trading vacation time, which you could instead barter for more money on retirement, and you're carrying with you a bit of suffering because you have to worry about going back to work. The best thing to do is just push it all until retirement.
The limit of human suffering before suicide frequently happens is apparently quite high, so, you can really stretch yourself out here. Live in your car in the Walmart parking lot, eat beans and rice. You maybe trade a bit of the compound earnings to establish certain time constrained things you want to cash in on at 60 like having a partner or kids, but beyond that, maximize that compound interest!
I hope it's obvious that this is a criticism. It's just, the more I think about it, the more this seems the selective pressure and incentives in our society are set up. Mostly I think it's insane that we both have an idea of "retirement" and also that we set it at an age where a significant portion of the population won't make it, and for those that do, a significant portion will get to enjoy five years of it, and for the remainder, health is bad enough that maximum enjoyment isn't possible anyway.
> The most optimal thing to do in our world is to pick an age, say, 60, and until your 60th birthday, maximize your suffering via frugality to just under the tolerable limit so as to maximize your potential for compound interest. This leaves you with the most freedom and opportunity during the most fun part of your life, when you no longer have to sell your labor and can do whatever you want.
This is the most depressing thing I’ve read in a while.
You don't have to act optimally according to the current system, I don't. My concern is many seem to try to act optimally without understanding how depressing the reality of its incentives are.
Even more optimal would be to pick an age, say, 60, and commit to moving to Canada for MAID at that time. This means you don't need to compound nearly as long, because you don't need to insure against a long life unable to work. Then you can start not selling your labor while you're still young enough to enjoy it.
Many of my happiest moments in life have been at the park, for free, with friends and family.
You don’t need to be retired or a millionaire to be happy. Nor is being retired or a millionaire any guarantee of happiness.
Saving for retirement is just about making sure your needs are met when your health starts to decline and you may no longer be able to work. If you’ve got a little extra saved to travel around the world or whatever, even better. It’s important, but don’t wait until retirement to be happy. There’s no guarantee you’ll even live that long, for starters.
>HN commenters complain about how some TODO app is using 300Mb of memory or has 700 dependencies.
yes because as we've learned this year nothing bad ever happens when you have hundreds of dependencies
we're living in an obese society, metaphorically and literally, we should put everyone through a decade of whatever the equivalent of playing ping pong with a spoon is in every domain of life. Being concerned with too much frugality is like being concerned there's not enough corn sirup in our diets
> we're living in an obese society, metaphorically and literally, we should put everyone through a decade of whatever the equivalent of playing ping pong with a spoon is in every domain of life.
What’s stopping you? Go ahead, live in a trailer and wash once a year.
Very impressive restraint and compassion from the author. I won’t be as virtuous as them.
Fuck being and fuck reproducing poors even harder. As someone who grew up with literal nothing to the point of not being able to afford basic care or food, there should be a state mandated minimum threshold before you open up your legs and consider having a children.
> Mandatory vasectomies for every man and only reverse it when they are rich enough? Or perhaps we chemically castrate them once they hit puberty?
I’ll go with this one, but for women. And while we’re at it, invent a Time Machine and go back 40 years in time and do a reverse Sarah Connor, I’ll give you the address.
Most people in the US are pulled into living on credit straight out of school. You get a student loan, then a car loan, then a credit card, then a mortgage. You finance vacations, appliances, kitchen remodels, smartphones - mostly to keep up with friends and coworkers who finance their lifestyles too. A lot of people are in non-stop debt from the age of 18 to 55, if not longer. By most estimates, only about 10-20% of US households are debt-free.
Spending and getting into debt are useful tools. But I don't have any friends in tech who need to be told "hey dude, you should be spending more". I have quite a few friends who would be better off spending less.
(EDITED)
Otoh, have a few friends in tech (and high finance) who need to be told "dude, we'd be better off if you worked less hard"
(Sorry.. I grew up deprived of data teaching me that "Schlep quickly compounds into Interesting Times")
For sure it's more common for people not to save enough. But for people who are frugal and save diligently for most of their lives, there often comes a point where they cross a threshold where they have met all of their financial goals, and the "problem" is no longer how save money but to enjoy spending it. And this can be a real challenge for people who have built up deeply ingrained saving habits.
My mother, for example, refuses to replace her iPhone SE with something with a larger screen despite 1) having failing vision and difficulty reading the screen, 2) using her iPhone every day, 3) easily being able to afford it. The idea of spending $1,000 on a phone is just something she is unable to bring herself to do, even though I think it would help alleviate a real source of frustration in her life.
My father, when he started shopping for his most recent car (and probably his final car), set out with the intent to buy a luxury car. But again, despite being able to easily afford one, all he was able to bring himself to buy was a well-equipped Toyota. Don't get me wrong - it's a great car and has served him incredibly well. But it makes me a little sad that he wasn't able to bring himself to finally treat himself to a luxury car after a lifetime of hard work and saving. They did a lot of long road trips together in that car in retirement, and I think they would have enjoyed something a bit more luxurious (though on the other hand, the reliability of the Toyota is not to be discounted).
I think what you're attributing to frugality might be a more a matter of age? Many older folks are just wary of change.
I'm not that old, but every time I upgrade my PC or phone, some of my workflows break and I need to pointlessly re-learn things I'd rather not re-learn. UI buttons get moved around, icons change, some settings are removed and others are added... this was exciting the first ten or twenty times, but it's just tiring now.
Basically, I'm at this stage in life where my reaction to systemd wasn't "oh wow, this is progress" but "ugh, I need to learn how to start, stop, or modify services again". In another ten years, I'll probably just say "no, I'm not doing this again, just let me use my old computer for as long as possible".
> my reaction to systemd wasn't "oh wow, this is progress" but "ugh, I need to learn how to start, stop, or modify services again"
I must be young at heart while >60 years old; my reaction was "why is everybody whining about it, it's pretty nice, I like it". Same with jj vs git, jj is amazing!
For years I did this with the thermostat - something I learned from my father who always kept the house under 65F (18C) in Winter. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit it even led to arguments with my spouse early in our marriage when I would enter a room and find the thermostat set to a balmy 70F.
Eventually I just sat down, looked at how much it costs keep the house a few degrees warmer in winter, and realized we could afford to be comfortable. And if I were really hell bent on saving money, there were other lower-priority expenses I could cut back on first. But I don't even think it was even necessarily about the money - it was more that saving energy and toughing it out felt virtuous to me. Which is all fine, but not something that should be imposed on your partner if they don't share the same beliefs (or if they just get cold easier than you).
I love the winter for this. My thermostat is set to 16C at night. I prefer if the heat never even kicks on, it’s noisy and disruptive to have air blowing through the vents. I wish there was AC that could make my house that cold at night while making no noise!
Funny, I went the other way round in the Bay Area. PG&E bills were so high so it was the choice of putting on a jacket or paying $1k extra over the winter months. And my reasoning was "I can afford a jacket".
I’m always colder in my mother’s house in Scotland (-5°C on cold days) than I am at my MIL’s house in the frozen Canadian wastelands (-40°C/F on cold days), because my mother will play games with thermostat to save money, where my MIL would simply die of exposure if the heating wasn’t on consistently for 6 months of the year.
A wife is a useful thing to have in this respect, not because they tend to profligacy, but because this kind of thing is much easier to detect and fix in someone close to you than in yourself. Both my wife and I have lived frugal lives at various times[0] and I feel much happier with the degree of spending we have now.
I'm reminded of the intelligent corvids in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory where the sum of the two birds forms a being with intelligence in a way that the individual segments do not. The frugality is a deeply embedded piece of our being and undoing it seems hard, but together we financially operate in a place that leaves us both feeling comfortable.
0: In the US sense of the term, not in the sense of the term as known in Taiwan or India.
Just a reminder that since a couple of centuries ago in most Western societies, wives are not "things" anymore, but rather human beings on the same level as husbands.
"... tend to profligacy" was really bothering me as well, until I figured OP probably meant "tend" as in 'take care of', and not 'inclined to have'.
No, "tend" means "incline" here, but the normal grammatical reading of the sentence does not suggest wives have profligate tendencies.
Ah, I misread. Thanks.
It's "incline", the subtext is: "Reader, you might start thinking of a certain common stereotype at this point, but don't do that, because my argument is very different, and that stereotype is irrelevant or possibly untrue."
Compare to: "A pick-up truck is a useful thing to have, not because you are insecure about your genitalia, but because you can take home bigger products from IKEA."
Thanks, I misread entirely.
This usage is fine. "A dependable friend is a rare thing to find."
s/wife/spouse/
My experience has been that it's easy to say, "oh, it's just me", but much harder to subject someone you care about to the same standard that you would yourself. I'm in a similar position with the thermostat, even though something we initially bonded over was that we both kept our thermostats at a low temperature that was outside the window of being socially acceptable.
In the winter, I keep the thermostat at frigid temperatures when I am home alone and jack it up to warm just before any one else gets home. My thinking is that it is wasteful to warm up the entire house when it's just me since I can put on a sweater but I don't want to subject others to my, shall we say, quirks.
I keep meaning to calculate how much I am actually saving by freezing my butt off. My guess is it'll work out to something like $0.75 a day or something equally trivial.
Depending on the kind of heating system you have and the temperature differences you talk about it can be cheaper to heat the house to a constant temperature (because your heating can run more efficiently under lower load).
This is very culture-specific. I've seen this in Poland. Under USSR rule frugality has been necessary to survive, but it left a lot of people forever stuck in that mindset, long after things got better. I know people who have a fortune in the bank, but live like they're broke, because they're afraid to spend anything from a "rainy day fund" even on rainy days.
Yes! I related a little too much with the blog post. My grandparents were Sindhi and they had to flee from Pakistan to India during the partition. As refugees in India, they had to start their life basically from scratch. Now I get why it's ingrained in me to be frugal, and even take pride in it when there's none. I see the very same behaviour in my Sindhi friends when they feel bad for spending money on essentials like hospital visits.
A similar term (often found as a reaction to Amazon LPs) is frupidity.
I do something kinda similar, I guess it counts as maladaptive frugality?
Whenever I have something a little extra in my fridge, most often Italian prosciutto, I refrain from eating it, instead saving it for a "special occasion" even though it is, like, my favourite thing in the whole world. Eventually I have to throw the mouldy prosciutto away because I was too frugal to eat it.
I'm practicing though, learning to eat it. I don't know why it's so hard, I mean it's delicious! Should be easy!
Exactly the key of mindset that drives me to play through entire RPGs without ever popping a single item. It is essential that I collect 99 potions, and never consume even 1.
For some, I think there’s that satisfaction that comes with saving money (like you’re somehow “cheating the system”, even when it’s just a coupon that gets you to buy something you wouldn’t otherwise). In some cases, that satisfaction grows with the amount of time or effort expended to save the money in the first place, which is ironic because that money-value-of-time probably far exceeds the actual amount saved. Practically every engineer here probably has a story about spending a ton of time or effort to optimize something by a tiny amount; saving money can be like that too. It’s a little joy in life, and so long as it doesn’t outright prevent you from spending money when you should (or impose excessive optimization costs), I think it’s fine.
The maladaptive part is when you start regretting not saving money, because it has two knock-on effects: it makes the decision to spend much more emotional (which negatively impacts rational decision-making) and it can negatively impact the enjoyment of the thing itself. For example, the maladaptive part might take the form of being reminded of the cost every time you look at the repaired phone.
I've always found the "time is money" hourly rate comparisons a bit contrived, because I can't actually trade my every waking hour for an hourly rate.
The reality for most people is that the trade-off is actually between time spent on looking for bargains, or time doing something else that doesn't make any money.
It really depends on whether you enjoy looking for bargains or not. If you don’t, then it feels like you are working, only you’re not getting paid.
My mother still clips coupons in the Sunday newspaper, despite being financially well-off enough to not clip coupons. I considered listing this as an example of maladaptive frugality in another post, but then I figured it’s just something she enjoys doing.
Agreed - I find I spend almost the same time on small decisions as large, and let the default (subscriptions, extra cars, storage) ride. That's turning the decision into a drama that befalls you (and avoiding those that don't). Or you find yourself down or up become cheap or profligate.
So, what big spending is adaptive? Better to drive decisions objectively based on future value.
Some scenarios:
- It lasts a long time, and you'll need to do it anyway. Best to get it early and enjoy it longer - for iPhones, cars, houses, marriage...
- It lasts a long time and you use it daily. Always pay for what you'll be glad to have: good socks, a powerful computer, a nice view.
- Your beloveds needs to know if you care more about money or them. Choose them.
- Something expresses your values: you appreciate an artist's work, so you pay good money for it. Some panhandler is stoic, so you give him a hand. (Just be careful about posturing.)
Another mindset is to think of your money as family (writ large) money, and invest in the future of family or friends. It's as much a vote of confidence as an injection of cash, and it helps you detach from the needy instrumentality of the money to consider what's best for their future. That's the weirder phenomenon: trillions held by baby boomers until they die (just in case), while their progeny waste time in terrible jobs and narrow circumstances for lack of investment. That's maladaptive hoarding.
I was so frugal that I didn't refinance my (admittedly already low) interest rate during Covid because "we were planning on selling the house in a year or so". Oh well :)
Thats more of a forecasting thing than frugality.
I read this article 10 years ago by a guy named Ricky Yean who went to Stanford as an economically disadvantaged admit and couldn’t shake his poverty mindset and it cost him when he was running a startup.
Why “few successful startup founders grew up desperately poor”
https://rickyyean.com/2016/01/22/privilege-and-inequality-in...
Poverty mindset is maladaptive because it teaches you only money is worth anything, so you hoard it. But in truth time is also worth a lot and sometimes it’s wise to use money to buy time.
Agree wholeheartedly but I worry some will read this and go all in the opposite. The key point is that humility helps make you free. Couple that with not being a slave to frugality and you can live without as much guilt and without a much restraint.
> I plan to have fun spending my money in the future, so it’s time to start practicing now.
The most optimal thing to do in our world is to pick an age, say, 60, and until your 60th birthday, maximize your suffering via frugality to just under the tolerable limit so as to maximize your potential for compound interest. This leaves you with the most freedom and opportunity during the most fun part of your life, when you no longer have to sell your labor and can do whatever you want.
Within our current model, trying to slip in bits of fun through spending money before that age is getting a poor return: you're trading vacation time, which you could instead barter for more money on retirement, and you're carrying with you a bit of suffering because you have to worry about going back to work. The best thing to do is just push it all until retirement.
The limit of human suffering before suicide frequently happens is apparently quite high, so, you can really stretch yourself out here. Live in your car in the Walmart parking lot, eat beans and rice. You maybe trade a bit of the compound earnings to establish certain time constrained things you want to cash in on at 60 like having a partner or kids, but beyond that, maximize that compound interest!
I hope it's obvious that this is a criticism. It's just, the more I think about it, the more this seems the selective pressure and incentives in our society are set up. Mostly I think it's insane that we both have an idea of "retirement" and also that we set it at an age where a significant portion of the population won't make it, and for those that do, a significant portion will get to enjoy five years of it, and for the remainder, health is bad enough that maximum enjoyment isn't possible anyway.
> The most optimal thing to do in our world is to pick an age, say, 60, and until your 60th birthday, maximize your suffering via frugality to just under the tolerable limit so as to maximize your potential for compound interest. This leaves you with the most freedom and opportunity during the most fun part of your life, when you no longer have to sell your labor and can do whatever you want.
This is the most depressing thing I’ve read in a while.
You don't have to act optimally according to the current system, I don't. My concern is many seem to try to act optimally without understanding how depressing the reality of its incentives are.
Even more optimal would be to pick an age, say, 60, and commit to moving to Canada for MAID at that time. This means you don't need to compound nearly as long, because you don't need to insure against a long life unable to work. Then you can start not selling your labor while you're still young enough to enjoy it.
Many of my happiest moments in life have been at the park, for free, with friends and family.
You don’t need to be retired or a millionaire to be happy. Nor is being retired or a millionaire any guarantee of happiness.
Saving for retirement is just about making sure your needs are met when your health starts to decline and you may no longer be able to work. If you’ve got a little extra saved to travel around the world or whatever, even better. It’s important, but don’t wait until retirement to be happy. There’s no guarantee you’ll even live that long, for starters.
I think of this kind of thing whenever HN commenters complain about how some TODO app is using 300Mb of memory or has 700 dependencies.
>HN commenters complain about how some TODO app is using 300Mb of memory or has 700 dependencies.
yes because as we've learned this year nothing bad ever happens when you have hundreds of dependencies
we're living in an obese society, metaphorically and literally, we should put everyone through a decade of whatever the equivalent of playing ping pong with a spoon is in every domain of life. Being concerned with too much frugality is like being concerned there's not enough corn sirup in our diets
I'm hoping the AI RAM crisis will turn out to be a good thing in some ways, although that's probably being way too optimistic.
> we're living in an obese society, metaphorically and literally, we should put everyone through a decade of whatever the equivalent of playing ping pong with a spoon is in every domain of life.
What’s stopping you? Go ahead, live in a trailer and wash once a year.
Legitimate complaint on HN of all places. TODO apps shouldn't be embedding whole browsers.
Very impressive restraint and compassion from the author. I won’t be as virtuous as them.
Fuck being and fuck reproducing poors even harder. As someone who grew up with literal nothing to the point of not being able to afford basic care or food, there should be a state mandated minimum threshold before you open up your legs and consider having a children.
Put poor people in prison for having children then?
Should we mandate IUDs for all women and require abortions for “accidents”?
Mandatory vasectomies for every man and only reverse it when they are rich enough? Or perhaps we chemically castrate them once they hit puberty?
What’s your preference?
> Mandatory vasectomies for every man and only reverse it when they are rich enough? Or perhaps we chemically castrate them once they hit puberty?
I’ll go with this one, but for women. And while we’re at it, invent a Time Machine and go back 40 years in time and do a reverse Sarah Connor, I’ll give you the address.