Lately I've been feeling a bit like Mustachians are running around patting themselves on the back, reveling in their accomplishments, without a consistent view of what has brought them together. Some of the posts I've read on this forum and in the financial independence subreddit even seem to contradict the ideas found on MMM.
I've been going back through the early MMM blog posts to find the origin of "Mustachianism" and see if there was ever a definition post or general philosophy. The closest thing I could find was the post on
Stoicism, but that is about stoicism.
The first mention of Mustachianism that I could find was on September 6th, 2011. Since then it's been slipped into discussion as if we should all innately understand it's meaning.
I know Mustachiansism is derived from the acts of a Mustachian, but right now that seems to be expressed as the last year's worth of blog posts from MMM. I would imagine our interpretations of what that means differ significantly. There's blogs like Toward Mustachianism, forum topics like Alternatives to Mustachianism. What am I to take these phrases to mean? It seems like these authors have a commanding grasp of the term.
I guess what I was looking for was a blog post or other reference along the lines of:
Mustachianism is:
- Doing for yourself what others spend money on
- Limiting cash outflows to needs
- Planting dollar follicles
- Replacing active work with passive income streams
- Pursuing more noble pursuits than paper pushing
- Understanding and demanding the value of your time and work
- Measuring current habits
- Reflecting on those habits and identifying areas needing change
- Building discipline in all areas of life
- Question all "conventional" wisdom
Maybe some of those are incorrect, maybe I'm missing some other principals.
What I'm trying to form is my own mental model. My current understanding is there is a healthy balance between hard work, frugality, and early retirement. Sometimes, however, attempts at frugality can tip the stupid-scale.
For example, I would lean towards saying that the
Mustachian Office Chair is not Mustachian at all, but simply cheap. My mental model so far is that a Mustachian would get a properly constructed, high quality office chair - something that they may be using for up to a quarter of their working life - by doing the research and leg work to find the best possible chair at the best possible price. When the Mustachian has completed his working career - a few years later - the chair can be sold at nearly the cost it was purchased because high quality items do not depreciate as quickly as low quality items, and the Mustachian received a killer deal on it to begin with.
That said, maybe my mental model is skewed to what I've valued from this blog and community and maybe that's enough. What are your thoughts about the meaning of Mustachianism.