I love Mr. Money Mustache, but I think MMM will never win in the general public. Most of the people are just too stupid, to follow MMM for their own good. I've seen some horrendous examples of reverse-Badassity that just blows my mind.
Here is a recent example: A friend of a friend is into K-pop (Korean pop) - let's call him Bob. Bob loves most of the bands, bands like BTS, BAP, etc. (I'm not Korean, so I know very little about this). This friend makes around $70k per year, decided they wanted to see some K-pop concerts in the US. The face value of the tickets, including front-row, are around $200 per seat, pretty steep. However, scalpers / brokers already bought up the best tickets during the first few minutes of the sale. Ordinary people have zero chance to fight professional brokers who use a myriad of techniques to get those seats.
So this person decides to look on Stubhub for seats. Bob finds a seat near the front for $1,000, in a venue out of town, halfway across the country. Bob decides he has to have it, and buys the ticket for $1k, books travel (air, hotel, etc) for another $1k, just to see this 2 hour concert.
Total cost to Bob is $2k, or 2.8% of his annual salary, before taxes. Bob makes $35 per hour, this means the concert will take 57 hours of Bob's work to save $2k (before taxes), or around 75 hours after taxes. In other words, to enjoy a 2 hour concert, Bob has to work 60 - 75 hours to save for it.
This is just insane. Call me crazy or lazy, but I'd rather just do nothing for 60-75 hours, rather than attend a 2 hour concert. Or maybe get super high on drugs (being sarcastic here but not really - wouldn't getting high for hours / days on end be better than blowing it stupidly on a 2 hour concert? - I don't do drugs btw), or go buy a new washer / dryer, or buy a new fridge, or buy a 3 week cruise, or a home entertainment set, or 2 years of gas, or a night with a high end escort, etc. You get the idea. In no way I can imagine that a 2 hour concert is worth this amount of money.
Now multiply Bob by thousands of people, because these K-pop concerts are generally sold out, and a lot of people over-pay for the concerts by buying the tickets from brokers / scalpers. It boggles the mind what kind of money is being spent. Worst of all, the money is not even going to the bands these people enjoy...it mostly goes to the middle man, the broker / scalper.
I dropped a friend off at a K-pop concert recently. The people attending were mostly younger people, the "hip" generation who love these bands. So the people who overpay for these events are not even wealth, rich people who don't even blink an eye at spending the crazy money for these tickets. And, at the concert venues, they are buying over-priced shirts, stupid glow-wands at $60 each... I really think those people are insane.
Coming back full circle, these are some of the worst value propositions for your money I can think of. For $2k, I can imagine a hell of a better time than standing in a crowd watching a band perform for a couple of hours. Logic it does not make.
I have a reservoir full of anti-Badassity stories like this. It boggles my mind the kind of stupid shit people do to blow money on. It's like they don't value their own time or money. This really convinces me that most people are dumb as rocks. It's astounding that people actually resonate with MMM and have some sanity in this world. I truly think we are the exception, not the rule.