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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

The term is "Lifestyle Inflation". It's seductive.

Now you don't have to slum it in an economy class seat. You're now able to afford a real laptop. You can treat yourself to...

Near enough everyone does it. If you've ever thought "I'm going to buy the brand-name [pasta|batteries|phone|insurance]" you're susceptible too.

The thing is, it's not much fun living as though you were poor - cutting coupons, spending time working out which vegetable gives you the most nutrition per Kg, scrimping and saving. So for every extra $£€ you make, you can give yourself a short-term dopamine hit at the expense of long-term planning.

It's one of the reasons why, in the UK, we're moving to mandatory pension provision. Unless you take action, a fixed percentage of your wage will be placed into a pension scheme. As your wage rises, so will your long term savings.

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> If you've ever thought "I'm going to buy the brand-name [pasta|batteries|phone|insurance]" you're susceptible too.

I'm not so sure. Recently our dishwasher crapped out. I've already repaired it once, but this time something else broke and we decided we were done with it. So, time to buy a new one. I reckon myself to be a pretty good value shopper, but shopping for a dishwasher got to me. Knowing that there are many fewer manufacturers than brand names, I set out to find what I though was the best value. I wanted to find a good quality one that will last a long time and I wanted to pay less for it than an average consumer would. It was overwhelming, I'm sure I could have done a better job, but I had other things to do as well; I couldn't/wouldn't make this task my primary job. In the end we just punted and bought a Miele, a fairly expensive brand with a good reputation. I'm sure that given enough time we could have saved 30% to 50% of the money we spent, but it would have taken a lot more of my time and we risked paying too much for a substandard appliance.

> If you've ever thought "I'm going to buy the brand-name [pasta|batteries|phone|insurance]"

I think that's the key. You stop needing to think about lots of things. There's a real cognitive cost of being poor.

One could argue that is the point of currencies, to exchange labour for comfort. You exchange your work to spend cognitive power as you'd prefer instead as what you'd concretely need

> If you've ever thought "I'm going to buy the brand-name [pasta|batteries|phone|insurance]" you're susceptible too.

Of course I did. The thing is, in many cases it's totally right. Smartphones are a good example - you really don't want to buy the cheap ones. Not if you value your mental health. One has to approach this pragmatically though. Branded pasta is usually little different than unbranded one, for instance. And branded clothes - that's literally making money on people's vanity.

> It's one of the reasons why, in the UK, we're moving to mandatory pension provision. Unless you take action, a fixed percentage of your wage will be placed into a pension scheme. As your wage rises, so will your long term savings.

Great to hear that! It's one of the few things that are better for everyone if they're opt-out.

> And branded clothes - that's literally making money on people's vanity.

For people without aesthetical education, may be. Fashion viewed as "stupid people getting skewed out of money for no reason" is as informed as non-programmers asking "why is hot tech from 10 years ago suddenly obsolete now".

Once you spend enough time dealing with bugs introduced by mutable state, you understand what's so good about languages where immutability is default, and why it's worth it to invest to learn and switch. Once you spend enough time on activities which sharpen your visual aesthetic sense, you see a clear difference between mainstream bland models from H&M and Topshop on hand and small designer shops on another and understand why it's worth to spend more on them.

Only if you value those differences. I'm not even the type to shop at H&M, so it's really hard for me to see value in boutique fashion.

>Once you spend enough time on activities which sharpen your visual aesthetic sense, you see a clear difference between mainstream bland models from H&M and Topshop on hand and small designer shops on another and understand why it's worth to spend more on them.

Fair enough, but it makes little sense for someone who hasn't 'spent enough time on activities which sharpen your visual aesthetic sense' to shop for expensive clothes; the result is usually going to be terrible.

Of course. Im not saying that everyone should do it; I'm just saying that when you see people doing it, it's not necessarily vanity or stupidity.

I guess my point is that those people often also haven't 'spent enough time on activities which sharpen your visual aesthetic sense' - fashion is mostly a group signalling phenomenon. I.e. people do it, because everyone else in the group they want to identify with does that.

you can say this about any single aspect of existence. more expensive food is generally healthier (BIO, non-GMO, free-run chickens, wild salmon etc.), driving more expensive cars tends to transform driving experience from necessary-evil -> OMG-so-awesome-joyful-beautiful-thing-I-want-to-do-for-rest-of-my-life. And so on.

It's all about priorities. Some people, for whatever reason, need to impress others by all costs, appearance including. Hence they dress as they dress. Some consider quality of personality much more important, if appearance is not outright disgusting. Some look at cars in similar way. and so on..

It's not about impressing anyone: it's about aesthetics for it's own sake. And carefully chosen wardrobe says a lot about it's owner's personality, of course.

carefully chosen wardrobe tells you only that given person cares a lot about the impression he/she is trying to make on others. like with makeup it isn't hard to "fake" the impression in any direction you want, although the underlying person is still the same person.

personally I like to know people as they are, not the masks they put on. sometimes much less nice, but closer to true themselves

> Once you spend enough time on activities which sharpen your visual aesthetic sense, you see a clear difference between mainstream bland models from H&M and Topshop on hand and small designer shops on another and understand why it's worth to spend more on them.

Maybe expensive clothes are prettier, but there is a hidden assumption in your conclusion, namely, that one wishes to wear clothes that are aesthetically more pleasing. This is not an obligation: you can also not care about it.

No, I only assumed that some people want to. There's a lot of folks who are quite happy working on Cobol systems too, and don't see what all language fuss is all about.

It's the notion that you only buy expensive clothes because you're stupid victim of fashion industry that I disagree with.

> The thing is, it's not much fun living as though you were poor - cutting coupons, spending time working out which vegetable gives you the most nutrition per Kg, scrimping and saving. So for every extra $£€ you make, you can give yourself a short-term dopamine hit at the expense of long-term planning.

This is true to some extent, but if I don't minimally optimize my spending it makes me guilty, not happy. I feel I would be giving the wrong signal if my money went to goods/services optimized for my cognitive biases rather than for actual utility (or estimated utility). The duty of voting responsibly with your money does not go away when you get richer, in fact it even tends to increase.

I also disagree with the notion that spending less means resisting the temptation to buy more things, or to settle for things that are worse than the best. It depends a lot on what you want. If you don't even think that you could be spending more, if you have a minimalist lifestyle and no expensive tastes, I find it can be quite natural and not at all frustrating to spend less than what you earn, even if you're not deliberately trying to save money.

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