So yeah, I've been lazy again at writing and since some people have thrown snide remarks about it, I guess this must be rectified. To get out of the hole, I decided to just briefly comment on my thinking regarding a recent blog post I read about
how people overextend themselves financially and how that is a source of anxiety (related to
Parkinson's law).
In general I think the guy hit the nail on the head very well; due to a variety of reasons, I guess, people tend to inflate their costs of living in tandem with increased income, sometimes even faster than their income rises. This type of pattern seems relatively universal, especially if you don't actively try to counteract it. If you don't think about it and have bad routines set out, of course you're going to expend more energy on what you're doing than is necessarily needed. Some energy, in this case financial resources, must be spent on combatting the second law of thermodynamics. You can do it intelligently or less intelligently. Doing things less intelligently often costs more than doing things intelligently.
One could of course argue that the top 1% has some type of moral obligation to do this or that, in this case to think about their spending and not overextend beyond their means. The original text suggests that this would have very direct implications on the wellbeing of the individuals in question and at least hints that the world might somehow be a better place. The first statement is undoubtedly true, but the second one is so much more complex that I would not take a strong stance either way. If the wealthiest people spent less, the only certain thing would be that the wealthiest people would be spending less. Of course one can extrapolate that it might cause unemployment to go up or the unfair distribution of resources to go down or get rid of all the wars. Who knows. I would imagine that it depends on how you scope the situation and what you are observing. As a whole the system is just so complex and interdependent that it's difficult to say what resultant effect will overpower other effects.
On a more practical level I got around to thinking about my situation. After doing a one year stint at a local non-profit NGO on what were pretty much pro bono terms I did manage to shrink my financial footprint rather significantly, mainly by accepting that with less disposable income I would have to ditch certain things and introduce new things into my life. Forge new routines which were less costly than the old ones. And so on. Despite having gone "back to the industry" since, I've actually noticed that the new routines I've forged have kept me subjectively thinking more satisfied than my old routines. Another relatively cool extra perk is related to precisely what was discussed in the original post cited above: the "space" between what I earn and what I spend widened quite a bit and I can be fairly relaxed about survival (although as a person living in the developed world and enjoying the benefits of public healthcare, free education, social security, and so on, I wouldn't really have to worry about that in any case). Ultimately, though, I think that what is happening here is that from an evolutionary and survivalist perspective I've increased my odds of survival by increasing my level of fitness to survive. I wouldn't go so far as to argue being antifragile in the Taleb-ian sense, but certainly more resilient.
However, if everyone was to do this type of shift and go back to bare minimums, what would the impact on me be? Difficult to say, but right now I think that for instance professionally I exist only because there is so much waste from people being uneconomical and inefficient in what they do and because one can relatively easily make a career out of doing more for less. If everyone across the board not only in their personal lives, but also in the professional careers, started applying more clever tactics in how to spend less effort in doing more, it is entirely possible that my comparative competitive advantage would shrink and result in a more of a Red Queen competition situation for me. On a holistic level the world would quite possibly be better off, but on a personal level it would undoubtedly force me to run faster. I suppose that might be fun in itself, but would again require adjustments to be made on a personal level to again increase fitness in the changing landscape.
