The personal, financial decisions that people make are personal to them. One person living on $X and saving Y% of their $Z income might be making the best and smartest trade offs for their happiness and well being, another might have the exact same figures and be fucking miserable.
One person's wise and admirable decisions is another's self-destructive and utterly unwise folly.
Correct. What I would like to see more of is people making deliberate decisions - that is, decisions they deliberated on, thought about, weighed the pros and cons. Another finance guy The Barefoot Investor advises a monthly Financial Date Night where the couple (or the single and a friend) sit down and discuss finances and what they want to achieve.
Many people simply drift. For some, that might mean drifting from your impoverished life into corner drug-dealing, unplanned pregnancies and early death. For others, that might mean drifting from a prestigious private school into a law degree to practice when it bores them, and a very high-spending high-debt high-stress lifestyle with marriage breakup. Nobody should drift, we should take the helm and steer the boat of our lives in the direction we have deliberated and decided on. Some will encounter more storms than others, but everyone who takes the helm will get closer to where they want than those who just drift.
I mean...sure...but it's a hell of a lot more nuanced than that.
I've volunteered at enough homeless shelters to know that surviving isn't easy or in any way passive.
I also went to high school with a lot of those elite kids who never felt like they had any choice but to become doctors and lawyers, and saw what it did to them psychologically (and the subsequent suicides, addictions, etc) and I long ago learned not to make assumptions.
People don't tend to "drift" out of passivity, what you perceive as drifting is more like succumbing to enormous pressures that you might not be able to relate to or empathize with.
I get paid to talk to people about finance and even the most seemingly mindless-spendy ones tend to think a lot about their spending, it's not that they're mindless, it's that the reasons behind their spending aren't mentally healthy, so they're not thinking about it in a productive way.
They tend to casually talk about it as if it's mindless, but if you drill down into it, it's a form of self soothing that they actively psychologically quarantine off from rational thought.
It's not passive, it's actually pretty complicated mental gymnastics. Which is typical of pretty much all self-destructive behaviours.
Those of us who spend mindfully aren't above anyone, we're not superior or wiser, we just have a much, much more productive relationship with spending.
I *was* going to say that we have a healthier relationship with money, but then I remembered that A LOT of people here post really troubling accounts of relationships with money based on fear and anxiety, and I decided to rephrase it.
If you see someone "drifting", there's a reason for it. It may not be a sane reason, but there's a reason and it's probably not a simple one to resolve with just "manning up" or "taking the helm".
