(no fun vacations, very hard time finding a partner, no gadgets or new cool stuff, no fancy dinners out).
Those are trivialities in my subjective opinion.
Those are trivialities in my subjective opinion.
Your reply made me realize another way to think of it though. If all these things we spend money on are trivial, then that supports the notion. Money is a poor measure of one's productivity.
I think his point is that most people don't work for fancy holidays or trinkets or whatever.
Most people work to put a roof over their head and eat. Everything else is secondary - both trivial in terms of desire (it's less important), and trivial in terms of cost (a new 24" LCD might cost 3 days rent in some areas)
Most people work because they want to live in an expensive neighborhood and like to have new cars, new clothes, new electronics. Otherwise they would move somewhere where house is extremely cheap and where they don't have to commute every day.
I don't know how it is in the US, but here in Germany you can have an apartment in a medium sized city and food for 500 Euro a month. You don't have to work for 40 hours a week to make that much.
Fundamentally that's the only thing that stops me from leaving the UK this second.
You make it sound as if it's an innate desire to feel important by living in a fancy place.
But that desire for importance is a thing, too. How else do we explain all the transplants moving to drastically-overpriced Williamsburg/Bushwick without knowing a soul?
So, to put a roof over their head. Hey, no one said they had to go for the cheapest roof! :)