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"Okay, [friend] you turn around first and then I'll follow in the Tesla"
I'm pretty sure that woman loves her Tesla more than her husband.
Nice vignette. It's, like, uber-presumptive to treat the owner of a Tesla as if you could just expect a being like her to run errands, like some lackey.
In an unobtrusive way, we used to time how long it would take one of our acquaintance to shoe-horn into the conversation the fact that he had been a Rhodes scholar, some decades ago. Never more than 10 minutes.
Lol, this was a running joke in Frasier about him name dropping Harvard.
It's funny, I've actually made a bit of a sport recently of seeing just how long I can go when meeting someone, without lying or purposefully misleading, letting them assume I'm a 20-something university student with no significant accomplishments.
What's also funny is that when I talk to people about my current life, they all wax poetic about their favourite time of their lives being when they lived in that little apartment during school. They get all misty about how much they loved that little apartment, how fun and carefree that time was. Often they'll throw in some love for their old shitty car.
They often wistfully tell me to enjoy it while I can because midlife is just a clusterfuck of responsibilities and stress. This is usually where I'll finally admit that DH and I are 40 and 50 and that we too were wistful for our university days, which is why we proactively returned to that kind of lifestyle after downsizing our home and car.
And that's really what's being lost in MMM's new messaging.
There's an extremely useful discussion to be had around luxury spending, but he's not really framing it effectively.
The message of "don't feel guilty about a bit of luxury if you can afford it" really does contradict his original messaging that frugal options are often superior.
The key point he's missing is that *some* luxuries are absolutely worth the cost if you can afford them, but they are rare. If you find a luxury that is an excellent value relative to its cost, and you can readily afford it, then yeah, that's worthwhile.
I just posted in the stupid things you're lusting after thread a 12K used, all terrain wheelchair that has tank treads instead of wheels. I spend half my year in a place where the only thing to do is wander on trails in one of the most beautiful places on earth. I can't do that right now thanks to my legs being fucked.
12K for me right now is too much to spend on a wheelchair I don't really need, but if I had Pete's money, of course I would buy it!
Luxuries are not all made equal. MMM's original, very important point was that most luxuries actually detract from quality of life. Which is why so many people I meet get all misty and nostalgic about when they were broke students having true fun and engaging in profound relationships.
Most luxuries are a scam. They're bullshit that makes you more miserable and more unhealthy. Even if you "can afford" them, they're best avoided just for your basic well being.
So the messaging shouldn't be that "a little luxury is okay if you can afford it," the messaging should be that some luxury truly adds to your quality of life, but that even if you can afford it, you should stay hyper-vigilant to the task of assessing that value.
When I first went from being a broke student to making insane income, I was briefly spending like crazy on whatever luxuries I felt I had denied myself for my decade+ of school.
After a few months life felt so fucking hollow. The more I spent, the more pointless life felt. The act of existing in a consumerist world "indulging" in crap felt similar to how people feel after spending too much time on social media.
The things designed to grab our attention and our money just aren't good for us on average. MMM got this right the first time.
He's not wrong about not feeling bad about spending on luxuries, but he's missed A LOT of nuance in the argument.
IMO, I think he got too caught up in feeling like he needed to justify going against what he previously said, instead of figuring out the more complex argument to be made about assessing the value of luxury.