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Comment by Aaargh20318 | Hacker News Reader

Aaargh20318

> I know too many people that use their money to consume.

All those dumb poor people wasting their money on food.

Well, if you really use money only for basic food and essentials, I think you can survive with very, very little money. I did that when I was a student. Life can be just quite dull if you eat that kind of food from day to day.

What I see is that most people just appreciate the luxury today more than the savings which would enable more luxury tomorrow. I think there's nothing wrong with that. You might die any day in a traffic accident, so why bother saving all that money? Those are quite subjective decisions.

Hyperbolic discounting is the term economists use to describe people liking things a lot more now than later:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting

The hedonic treadmill is, in a nutshell, the reason we become complacent to newly acquired luxuries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

So not only do we want fancier things now, but we don't really appreciate them when we have them! Humans are silly.

Maybe you are misunderstanding what the term consume means?

Consuming means using resources on things that immediately loose their value. If you for example buy a house, that's not consuming since the house has inherent value.

But if you yourself the newest gaming rig, the gaming rig is consuming the money. This is what Americans mean when they talk about consumer society.

> Consuming means using resources on things that immediately loose their value.

You mean like food ? It's literally the first definition of 'to consume' on Google.

Expending resources (i.e., money) for food doesn't cause the food to immediately lose its value. Expending resources (i.e., physical energy) for eating the food also doesn't cause the food to lose its value, as it almost certainly provides more energy and nutrition than is expended in its digestion, thus maintaining the consumer (i.e., a net gain); it may also have additional value, which probably attracted an additional cost to begin with (e.g., superior flavour, scarcity, etc.)

It's an overloaded term, sure, but it's clear that consumables -- i.e., things that need to be consumed to release their value, such as food -- only fall under the category of "consumption" when there's a surplus of value that becomes illiquid. For example, eating a balanced meal when you're hungry is a net gain, while eating 50 pizzas when you don't need to isn't!

The word has a dual meaning.

You can consume food, you car consumes gas and your girlfriends expensive holiday consumes money.

When Americans say "consumer" they mean someone who spends money on things that they are not going to sell again. That can be smartphones, luxury cars, drugs or food.

You could also say a consumer is the opposite of an investor.

As a side note, a house also has inherent cost. If you're thinking of a house as an investment, you have to factor maintenance in, which can be hard to calculate in advance.

I don't think the GP meant "consume" as eating food.

Consume here means non-essential needs such as always buying latest gadget (while previous one still works), changing your car early for no good reason (less than a few years), or even buying one if you don't need one, going out often at expensive activities etc...

There is a difference between consuming and getting what you need to live.

To consume, verb. 1. eat, drink, or ingest (food or drink).

Philosophically, perhaps. Economically? No.

The commenter didn't say that.

They were talking about the people (of whom I've been one, earlier in life), who have been privileged enough to have earned a lot of money but wasted it.

But you have to eat, don't you?

Exactly. So why criticise people for spending money on consumption when they need it to stay alive.

The vast majority of Americans aren’t being held back from building wealth because of their spending on essential food. Americans actually spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than many developed countries.

That's an extremely tiresome interpretation of the comment you replied to.

If you give them just the tiniest little benefit of the doubt, it's easy to see that they are talking about the money they had available after meeting their needs and that they probably aren't criticizing people that don't have a lot of such money.

> it's easy to see that they are talking about the money they had available after meeting their needs

And the point was that many people do not have money available after meeting their needs.

Yes, I understood your point. My point is that it is tiresome to bring it up anytime and every time someone makes a comment about saving money. They weren't being dismissive, they were replying in context (people that save their way to riches sort of obviously have had money that fits into the 'savable' category).

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