I graduated college in 2012, grad school the following 6 years.

It's not counting all spending as costs of living.

This is a term of art. An "ordinary expense" are categories of expenses required to live a decent average life, as evidenced by the fact that most people actually spend money on them. This includes housing, transportation, clothes, food, healthcare, utilities, taxes, etc. It makes no judgement on how the money is spent in ordinary categories e.g. buying a BMW is an ordinary expense because it is transportation. It isn't prescriptive and it includes pretty much everything you would expect. Ordinary expenses include a lot of luxury and non-essential spending.

If you look at all the categories that are "non-ordinary" because most people spend no money on them, they are pretty obviously lifestyle flexes. For example, if you blow your entire paycheck on a bar tab, that is not classified as an ordinary expense because most people don't do that.

Subtract the median ordinary expense from the median income, you are left with more than $12,000 per year as a surplus. This is called "discretionary income", money you can spend on fun, hobbies, or -- relevant to this thread -- savings. If we restricted it even further to ordinary and essential spending, the income level that no longer generates any surplus is in the region of 15th percentile IIRC. That is still 20 million households in the US with no ability to save but that isn't the experience of the vast majority of households.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve publishes surprisingly detailed statics of what people spend money on and how income surpluses are used.

Read the results of actual basic income pilot programs and you'll see that people are far from idle.

Those experiments are worse than useless for predicting what would actually happen in a "true UBI" environment. I say "worse than useless" as opposed to just "useless" since they make people think they have some insight into what a UBI world would look like, but they really don't.

Giving a small number of people an amount of money below what they'd need to actually survive, with them knowing perfectly well it won't last forever has effectively zero in common with UBI. Give an entire contained population of people enough money that they can have all their basic needs met just with that money, and guarantee them it will continue for the rest of their lives, and I'd bet quite a lot that the results would be drastically different.

Also, not a big deal since you also provided two reasonable links, but many people will see that you linked motherjones and likely discount your comment entirely. It's on the same tier as OANN and breitbart.

I feel the absolute same way. I’ve learned to be satisfied rather than passionate/excited about work. It’s much more sustainable in the long run.

Guess its a normal part of aging, but maybe its not normal to not get excited by stuff you used to like

Part of that might be that you lack the time or energy to properly explore new things though, and that lack of time or energy probably has something to do with getting that pay check.

I mean also maybe not, but I find it hard to devote time to things I know I am interested in because I work 9-5, 5 days a week. I spend time with my partner of an evening and have housework and exercise to take care of and after all that it feels like there is very little time and like I don't have a lot of energy to learn new skills or pursue hobbies, so what I end up doing is the things I know I like but that are not draining. Ultimately I spend a lot of time reading or playing video games or goofing off on reddit.

Even taking a week or two off isn't necessarily a good indicator, because you won't say, go and buy a bunch of paints and an easel and go "right I'm finally going to get stuck into painting" when you only have two weeks off and know you won't have time for it once they are up

I totally recommend everyone read Dave Ramsay's work to understand how to approach money. It was an eye opener for me.

But you have to understand that consumerism is pushed down our throats from all around starting at a very young age. Dave Ramsay doesn't just come into your consciousness like advertising does, and unless one is close to someone who is very anti consumerism and advertising you will likely be subjected to an onslaught of messages aimed at your subconscious that you are completely ill-equipped to fight.

I think many people in these comments are speaking on behalf of the general population who does not have the luxury of taking a year off.

This comment of yours drips with privilege.

Edit: I was introduced to dave Ramsay's work in my 20s by a close friend who was wealthy and had businesses and homes. He volunteered with some organizations to provide financial literacy classes. I was lucky to have been given that reference.

Can speak for myself, I don't live paycheck to paycheck now but I grew up in a household with a lot less money than I make now in comparison - Involved lot of sacrifices and accumulating modest savings over a lifetime to help the next generation to live a bit better and make fewer such sacrifices.

> Most people pay $100+/month for cable, eat out multiple times per week, have thousands of credit card debt, and an unexpected $400 bill would ravage them.

There's also a cohort that might not earn a lot but is financially responsible, frugal and makes modest gains towards big goals e.g. education for kids, home ownership which can take almost a life time. There's a big spectrum from being poor due to being financially irresponsible and being lucky enough to be in their 20s, debt free and paying off a mortgage instead of rent (with help for college, down payment etc from family to have a healthy head start). Not everyone who doesn't have the means is in such a place because they are lazy or is financially irresponsible. Simply stating that most people are a certain way without evidence is just disingenuous and judgemental, perhaps exposes a bias more than anything.

This is called the myth of overconsumption.

It creates a simple fairy tale that financial success or failure rests solely on the individual.

It allows people to ignore wage stagnation, inflation, rising costs of critical goods and services, rising inequality, and fundament structural inequities with society.

Here's a more in-depth academic paper that provides data beyond unsourced colloquialisms if you're interested.

https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol82/iss4/8...

Do you actually know anyone like this, or are you basing this off of what cable news personalities say?

I know plenty of people with no cable, no Internet other than their phone, living paycheck to paycheck... This idea that poor people just need to stop wasting their money is propaganda used to justify starvation wages

Better than Dave Ramsey, check out Bogleheads.org.

You (and everyone else) really do own your financial life. There can be curveballs-- a catastrophic illness, for example-- but for the vast majority of people, having money or not is really a series of personal decisions made over a lifetime.