MMM went way too easy on this worthless clickbait article in his post. I thought the name Lauren Martin was familiar, and sure enough a few months ago she astonished the internet with the equally tragic/hilarious "50 things about millennials that make corporate America sh#t itself", which was possibly the the most concentrated dose of millennial narcissism/solipsism/cluelessness on the entire web (no small achievement). Nice to see that she has now brought the intellectual rigor of a hack listicle writer to personal finance and frugality.
The funniest thing about the article is that it's a transparent rationalization for the author's own lifestyle mistakes (a sort of corollary to Steve Sailer's Law of Female Journalism). I guarantee Lauren is poorly paid and easily replaceable. By her own admission she's broke, and she's probably also deep in debt. She's vaguely aware that these are problems but can't allow herself to introspect about the poor choices that created them, because that would cost her psychic pain even as it led to personal growth. Instead she wrote this article to encourage people to pat her on the head on social media, which gives her a momentary dopamine boost even as she sinks deeper into the swamp. I shudder to think what her life will be like when she's 45, or even 35.
As for the actual content of what she wrote, the most anti-mustachian thing about it has got to be the striverishness. It's the same old blind worship of the Sex & The City NYC ultra-consumption lifestyle. Trendy bars, taxicabs, exotic foreign travel, etc. etc. We've heard it all before and it is BORING. I would also gladly kill myself rather than listen to another Millennial "entrepreneur" pimping his burgeoning online media empire (i.e. glorified blog) or worthless iPhone app, cranking the Tim Ferriss used-car salesman sleaze up to 11. I have infinitely more respect for a 20-something woman who quits her job to start a family (like the MMM clan did) than one who pisses her prime years away polluting the internet with sub-Buzzfeed level prose.
Mustachianism isn't really about superficial life changes like cutting out your morning latte or getting a cheaper phone plan. It's about thinking carefully about your values so that you direct your time, effort, and money towards what is truly worthwhile rather than just doing what the media/your parents/your friends want you to do. It's also frequently about having the courage and confidence to stand in opposition to the prevailing culture, which happens to be a Clown Culture of selfishness, conspicuous hyper-consumption, and debt slavery. And it's also about humility, and rejecting the idea that we are somehow too fancypants for a materially modest lifestyle of living in a normal house in a non-elite city, wearing normal clothes, cooking our own food, etc. For the Lauren Martins of the world this last step is by far the hardest, but once over that hurdle a huge new vista of useful and joyful activity opens up, and it finally becomes possible to see what shameful empty strivers these absurd NYC tranplants are.
