COVID has made a lot of people shift to the gig economy, WFH, part-time, freelancing etc.
I keep hearing people say "I used to have a full time job and hated it, these days I do odd jobs and love it, but I miss the money I used to have. Now I'm happy, but poor."
The same in the FIRE movement, they expect to be poorer after retirement than they are now.
And I don't understand it, because for me it's the other way around; the years of the 9-to-5 slavery are the years of poverty and the longer behind me the slavery is, the more distant the poverty appears to be.
It's not poor people in 3rd world countries I'm talking about, but people who once worked 6 figure office jobs in Europe and North America. Some of them are in their 60s and they still don't feel secure about tomorrow.
Someone making 300k of indentured servitude tokens of a Western nation state after a few years should be set for life. And yet they own no capital and are totally dependent on selling their time as waged workers, the most scarce thing in existence but ironically the only thing they have, because life only distributes it at a limited rate of 24 hours per day. Judging by their other spending habits, if they could spend their entire lifetime in one shopping spree they probably would.
The whole point of slaving away is to have to slave away less in the future. If your tomorrow isn't freer and more abundant in options than your today, the latter was wasted in my books.
I understand some are unable to save due to an insufficient income, but I'm surrounded more by privileged people who seem to excel at staying in poverty. Which just goes to show privilege is overrated.
It's this kind of people that fund fiat. Like the human batteries in The Matrix.
Keynesians like to say big consumers are a godsend, because they stimulate the economy, which without them would collapse. But in reality, a decrease in consumption frees up more capital to be invested in production, which flattens the Hayekian triangle and leads to longer production cycles, higher productivity and more advanced goods. A lower time preference doesn't lead to a collapse, but to an improvement in living standards.
Everyone is free to spend as they please, but these high time preferers will get exploited more and more; as productivity increases exponentially, so does their output, but little of that output benefits them - nearly all of it goes to the low time preference class (a.k.a. capitalists), which sits exponentially more comfortably at the top of the food chain. The high time preferers, apart from their daily bowl of rice, will just get a slightly slicker iPhone every once in a while, as long as they keep dumping their daily and exponentially more valuable ration of time on the treadmill.
I strongly relate to this. I work a professional job with a flexible schedule, from home, and my wife takes care of our daughter and our home.
Because we control our costs, we are more financially secure and enjoy more leisure than many of our relatives who either have two incomes or one high earner in a stressful 9-to-5.
It really does come down to time-preference. There are many things that we know we would enjoy (and eventually will enjoy) that we don't spend money on now, because we have enough for now.
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15 sats \ 0 replies \ @BTCFC 1 Jun
Whether by design or not, I think there's just this overall lack of knowledge on what money actually is and meant to be, especially in terms of learning how to use it to set yourself free from being controlled. This is why we see so many people especially in the West with decent paychecks but still at the whim of their job because most only see money as a game of making more, and using it whenever they can on the new iPhone or what have you. When in fact, the most powerful aspect of money is that it allows you to establish autonomy over your time and thus take control of your life (if the money you are saving is properly functioning that is). Therefore, most people understand how to make money, and how to spend it away, but have no idea how to use it to invest in their own growth as a person, to use it to build something greater, and to use it to obtain their own freedom.
Great post!
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This goes to show that people who earn tons of money don’t necessarily know how to manage it. Financial literacy is the one thing I think educational systems should do more to promote it, but I guess public schools are more intent on producing workers for the nation
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A lack of financial education is in the interest of public education, i.e. the government.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fabs 1 Jun
Yes! I too think that, once you have a few hundred K's in Western Fiat, one could have a very nice life somewhere in SEA; a thought that'll be put to the test somewhere in the future--- if Bitcoin doesn't go to Zero, that is. 😜
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I agree. Many people get carried away with consumerism, seeking immediate gratification without planning for the long term. This lack of vision for the future can undermine financial security and, consequently, quality of life. Investing and saving with a long-term mindset is essential to building a more stable, peaceful future and no longer be a slave to the system..
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The whole point of slaving away is to have to slave away less in the future. If your tomorrow isn't freer and more abundant in options than your today, the latter was wasted in my books.
Who can deny this? This relates to everyone who is working today. But this is a sad reality that most people get attracted to schemes that make them forever a slave. Credit cards, EMIs, Easy loans, Monthly saving schemes, Life Insurance etc etc aren't there for nothing. They are here to make us slave and ruin our future.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 1 Jun
It does seem people with good salaries in the west simply don’t know how to save.
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