Comment by rekabis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rekabis | Hacker News Reader

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> 5) You don’t need as much house as you’ve been lead to believe.

For living arrangements, you are mostly correct. I can exist very comfortably in about 1,000ft². Heck, even 800ft² would be comfy and cosy.

My problem involves my hobbies and domestic activities: I need a 200ft² cool room for the enormous amounts of fruits and vegetables I harvest every year, canning all that shit needs a 150ft² summer kitchen so I don’t seize up my regular kitchen with all that processing (I use that summer kitchen consistently at least six months out of the year), I need a library the size of a master bedroom (at least another 200ft²) for my books (including the movable stacks on rails), I do enough woodworking to need a garage-sized shop (500ft²) , and my IT work requires no small office (180ft² and an attached server room (80ft²) with its own cooling. Plus, I regularly use a wet sauna, which needs the same amount of room as a laundry.

So that balloons my requirements by _at least_ another 1,500ft², to say nothing of the needs of my wife.

Many of the needs seem like wants and then it just depends on how much you these things are worth to you.

> Many of the needs seem like wants

This is true of initial 800 sq ft as well.

True of anything beyond simplistic shelter that barely keeps you alive.

Everything is a want when you want it to be. Is even living really a need? After all - you can just die and then you don’t definitely don’t need/want anything then for sure!

240m2 is a compromise... Consider the possibility that you're out of touch.

You don’t “need” any of that.

You don't "need" very much of anything. People get by with a 100-200sqft room shared with other people, but that doesn't mean it's what I would want to live in.

I feel like it's kinda missing the point of the article to say that you "need" 500sqft for canning. That is a want, plain and simple. Wants can be expensive. Indulging wants like this is something that rich people can afford to do, and if you are rich that is good for you! But indulging this want is far from economically efficient, especially in a high cost of living real estate market. It's basically the exact opposite of the point of the article.

You don't strictly speaking need indoor plumbing, a private bedroom, windows, or paint that doesn't have lead in it. If you're rich enough to afford windows, a bedroom you don't share with another family, and to not have your kids die from heavy metal poisoning, then good for you! But indulging many of these wants is hardly economically efficient.

Are you seriously suggesting that the need for a "summer kitchen for canning fruit" and a "private bedroom" represent the same human needs? Because if you are that might be the funniest, most entitled thing I've ever read on HN.

Nope, I'm suggesting that wants and needs are a sliding scale with no clear dividing line except subsistence, and that it's therefore a bad idea to argue for lowering your standard of living to only what you strictly need.

This is pretty obvious if you don't take a deliberately uncharitable perspective on what I wrote.

Anyone who thinks the privacy to sleep in your own bedroom and the luxury to have a second kitchen to use for canning fruit because it'd make using your first kitchen a little harder are two points on the same scale is just plain wrong. They aren't. One is a point on the scale of "things you need for basic human dignity", and the other is a point on the scale of "amusing shit deluded rich people think is normal." Those are definitely different scales.

Arguing they're just two points on the same scale makes me wonder if you have some sort of agenda to argue that people don't really need bedrooms because they don't really need summer kitchens.

It seems like you're creating a scale of things you believe everyone ought to have and calling it "needs". If you're defining need in such a subjective way, then telling someone else to divide their life up by what they need vs what they want is telling them to live their life with only the luxuries they're unwilling to compromise on.

That's a great way to live and I approve of it, but I remain steadfastly convinced that it's good for humans to have some unnecessary luxuries.

I remain steadfastly convinced that it's good for humans to have some unnecessary luxuries.

It'd be amazing if everyone had things they don't need. I'd love to live in a world where everyone had what they need and more. That's a no brainer.

The problem is that you're saying "the luxuries they're unwilling to compromise on" should be considered needs because some entitled rich idiot isn't able to accept that they could actually live with just one kitchen. That's stupid. They're still luxuries, and absolutely not equivalent to actual needs.

Needs and wants are not the same things. Arguing that they are, and that they're just two things on a scale of wants, or that they're two things on a scale of needs, ignores that there are things people actually need and things that people can live without.

I'm not arguing that rekabis shouldn't have their second kitchen. I'm only saying that they could live without it, and that they would probably give it up before giving up the privacy of their bedroom. Maybe that's wrong. Perhaps they could put a bed in it and sleep there. I don't know.

All of those things I listed are things I've either done, or that someone I know has done. Arguing that you need windows or a private room is ridiculous. You do not need them, though they're a reasonable want that nearly everyone has. Not having a private room to sleep in didn't kill me, it doesn't kill the billions of people who do it, and it wouldn't kill you.

The broader point here is that whittling away everything nice about your life to be "economically efficient" (as per the original comment I replied to) is a terrible idea unless you've got no alternative. People should have nice things, like windows and kitchens, and they should have better reasons than economic efficiency for giving them up. I don't think you or I disagree on this.

Needs are things that people need in order to live with dignity and respect; they are not simply "things you'd die if you didn't have."

You don't need dignity or respect to live.

You should learn what it means to live. It's more than simply "being alive".

> You should learn what it means to live. It's more than simply "being alive".

This goes full circle to what you were arguing against earlier.

It is indeed true that humans always strive for more than minimal subsistence and this is part of living. Thus it is not illogical to have things which go beyond the bare minimum to survive. They're technically "wants", but that's what it means to live.

My argument here is that people have needs that are more than things that are "the absolute minimum necessary for you to not die" in order to live a decent human life with dignity, but that don't extend as far as "a second kitchen". That isn't hard to understand.

Everyone posting to say "but if you accept that needs are more than air and water then you must be saying a home-based cannery is essential for the human condition!" are just being idiots.

A lot of people with good life outlooks and plenty of dignity have their entire family sleeping in the same bedroom. Your "basic human needs" are actually on a scale that isn't "basic" or "need" at all. I've spent 2y in such a setting, my wife grew up like that. Probably more than half of the planet lives like that.

I am certainly posting in the capacity of having a Western outlook. I didn't make that clear and you rightly point out that the particular need we're talking about isn't a universal one.

Technically we can adapt to a lot and contemporaries with our same biology still routinely make do without much in the way of permanent shelter. However, a summer kitchen is on a different tier of requirement from food safety. If it doesn't seem so to you then we just have a different notion of what is a reasonable baseline to expect from life in this country.

My apartment is 325 square feet. I wish I had a bit more but I have a washer and dryer in my unit too and it’s awesome and cheap for the area. Ideally I’d have 450 or so.

You also don’t “need” a second home for diversified income.

Prioritising your finances over a satisfying and interesting life sounds dull, and like a great way to make yourself mentally unwell if you do it for too long.

Not everyone’s preferred life “needs” much space but when yours does, not having it can be very stifling and stressful.

Easy solutions: $10 sauna bag and a Kindle, get your veggies canned from an efficient factory.

And here I was thinking 950sqft was going to be cavernous for my family and my hobbies. We're currently in 750sqft and that's fine, in the Oakland/Berkeley area.

Some might call it trolling…

I am so tempted to get rid of my books.

I will keep the 1st editions, and most reference books.

I feel can toss everyone of my computer books. (Not one did I find well written, or worth keeping. If anyone decided to write a computer/programming book take out every unneeded word. Maybe take a technical writing course if you live near a good university?)

It's just hard to get rid of reference books.

Yeah, get rid of those computer books.

That's what the internet + ebooks are for.

Unless a book has a special meaning to me personally or is considered life changing, I rarely keep any physical books.

The same is true for music with me as well. It's either Vinyl or free car radio/streaming.

Interesting—I find I have a hard time reading technical books on my ebook reader. When I read fiction, it’s usually a linear process, making the reader ideal: read, swipe, repeat until done.

With technical books, I often need to jump to another section, which is so much slower and more painful than with dead trees. Code formatting also tends to be abysmal on my reader—although books are not the best for this either. Maybe I’m not using my device to the fullest?

I have never found a solution for this. At my desk, with multiple extra screens and a keyboard and mouse for searching and rapid navigation, a PDF is sometimes a decent enough alternative but for non-computer based hobbies as well as reading reference books more casually / when not actually needing to be at my computer I have been unable to find anything close to paper books.

My father got old, and had to downsize from a large house to a small flat, which didn't have room for all his books, so most of them went to charity shops. A year later, he advised me "Try not to get rid of your books; you'll regret it."

He's died now, I took over the flat, and moved from a family home into the same flat. I also had to shed a lot of books in the process. I ripped my large CD collection to a media server. I miss some of those books I got rid of; but I like this small flat, and I don't want to dedicate a small room to a library.

The first books I got rid of were computer books. They were all manuals for some obsolescent technology; like, I thought the "Rhino" Javascript book would be useful forever (um, no). I got rid of a few feet of books on Buddhism, and several more feet were books on Western philosophy from my undergraduate days. These were books that had been formative for me, but I was honestly never going to open them again.

So I don't really agree with my father's advice. If you regret ditching a book, you can just replace it.

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