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Comment by asr | Hacker News Reader

I think where I disagree with you (and the blog author) is your attitude toward work: Money is just a medium of exchange, right, but have you ever wondered what it is you're exchanging? It's life.

Work isn't a waste of life. My goal in life is not to get to the end having worked as little as possible. Travel is fun, and educational, and good for you, but it's not the only thing. By all means live cheaply enough to allow yourself to do what you want to do in life. But if all you want to do in life is retire, then I don't really understand your goals.

(Living cheaply to do your startup is great. But a startup is not an inherently cash-poor activity, it's just risky. If you knew in advance that your startup would never be successful, and your product would have minuscule adoption, would you do it?)

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This is a good point. Here's something I've found when arguing about similar things:

Some people define "work" as "unpleasant tasks I do to get money," and by this definition I support the OP. Minimise that crap, get it off your plate entirely if possible. These people would never consider a book that they wrote or an app that they made as being real income, even if it eclipsed their other income, because it was fundamentally done out of a sense of fun rather than work.

If you don't think of work in those terms, your argument is true. For instance, I would much rather do an extra hour's work than to save twenty bucks by shopping at an out-of-town supermarket. An hour's work is fun, wading around a big soulless store for an hour is not fun (this is a personal comparison, you may disagree).

This is where I think frugality is overplayed as a tool for personal liberation; instead of finding yourself liberated from money by abandoning the rat race, you tie yourself to it in the piles of bookkeeping and pleasures denied that are the province of the penny pincher. But this wasn't the point that the article was making anyway, rather it seems to be advising to think clearly about what you want, and choose things that will last more than six months.

So yeah, what was the point I was making? Oh yes, moderation is good. I'm not qualified to make any of these statements, I'm hardly an example of good financial management myself. But I've been typing for too long not to hit the reply button now.

nirvana describes a life of traveling the world, buying a new computer every other year, and eating out a lot. Does not sound at all like "penny pinching" to me, just understanding what you actually value.

I don't think you've disagreed, there; you just haven't distinguished two kinds of work: the kind you do because you need money to get by, and the kind you do because you want to, for reasons such as "make the world better" or "build/accomplish something awesome". If you get lucky, those two kinds of work will overlap heavily for you. But still, minimize the amount of the former kind as much as you can to achieve what you want.

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