[This post is my submission for the December edition of Figuring Good Out, the new EA blogging carnival.]
On the quest to be frugal I think many EAs miss good opportunities to invest in themselves.
General wisdom suggests that you shouldn't spend too much of your money on things that you don't need. And that makes perfect sense. As money, time, and attention are limited resources, you need to be selective about how you allocate them. There are a lot of changes most people can make that will save them time and money without sacrificing anything comparable. However, I do think this mindset can be limiting, especially for young people with big dreams and a long road ahead toward achieving them.
Instead, I think that it's often right to spoil yourself by "wasting" time and money. I recommend spending "too much" on clothing, furniture, and other cool stuff. Whether or not you are materialistic or superficial, most other people are. Possessing nice stuff makes you come off as more impressive, more competent, more self-aware, and more attractive. (Yup, halo effect.) You'll also gain confidence, more relatable things to talk about, and, of course, some cool stuff.
I don't think pinching pennies is the necessary way to live as an EA, especially if you're young and building up career capital. Overspending on nice stuff has social repercussions that most EAs could probably use.
The same could be said for time. Taking breaks, having hobbies, learning about new subjects, and generally spoiling yourself can be really useful for keeping you motivated and on track. This might be especially true for those that feel as if they have unusually high potential.
In particular, I'm thinking of items and subjects that are generally considered to be for the superficial, materialistic, and hip: expensive clothing, accessories, pop culture, sports, plants, hip restaurants and cafes, etc.
"Wasting" your time and money is sometimes an effective way of investing in yourself.
Note: I don't think this post applies to everyone but I believe it's often true of myself in my current situation.
I think we ought to require unusually high burden of proof from arguments like these, as it's very easy to use them just to rationalize unnecessary selfish spending.
ReplyDelete> Whether or not you are materialistic or superficial, most other people are. Possessing nice stuff makes you come off as more impressive, more competent, more self-aware, and more attractive. ... Overspending on nice stuff has social repercussions that most EAs could probably use.
There are many people who want you to believe this, but I think most of them work for companies that make nice stuff. I think it's basically an illusion. You can get stuff of average niceness--enough to at least stave off the anti-halo-effect--for a basically trivial amount of money. Beyond that, the halo-effect returns diminish rapidly.
(I guess it's not totally obvious that you can get average-nice stuff for a basically trivial amount of money, so maybe we actually agree on the optimal level of stuff-niceness to have. But if you live with housemates a lot of things become very easy. As for clothes, I went through a period of trying to optimize them, realized it didn't really do very much, and switched back to mostly nice t-shirts and jeans, for an annual budget of about $200 plus some upfront investment.)
Aside from achieving baseline niceness, if you actually want to come across as impressive, competent, self-aware, and attractive, there are much better ways to optimize these directly. Only a tiny part of these things can be manipulated by buying nice stuff, *especially* if you're buying nice stuff in an attempt to manipulate these things (people can tell). The rest of it is from, like, actually doing impressive things and understanding yourself and stuff.
I think there's a better case for spending your time on non-altruistic things than your money. I guess this is probably because not everyone wants to separate you from your time the way everything wants to separate you from your money. We aren't consumerist about time the same way we are about money, so the norms about how to spend your time aren't as badly wrong.
I think my argument is pretty dependent on context. I'm a recently graduated college student, my career is in film, I live in a hipster part of town, and almost everybody I know works in the arts. Different people probably have different baselines for how nice their stuff needs to be in order to avoid negative judgment. There's also a disparity in what people's peer groups are impressed by. Personally, I feel disadvantaged by having mostly cheap, generic stuff and divergent interests. Maybe this post isn't very generalizable across EAs but I stand by the main claim: "I don't think pinching pennies is the necessary way to live as an EA."
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