I don't advocate living like a monk. I play in a band and play football every weekend, play chess, you can go to church, most of that is practically free.

I'm very much in favour of participating in culture, real culture though. You can ditch the 1k Taylor Swift tickets, Disneyland visits, and high end gym for the 20 bucks local jazz festival.

I think the people who live socially like ascetic monks are ironically the people who build themselves a home gym for 10k and then complain about not having any time for friends because everything is too expensive

Well, I'm neither of those extremes. Like most people, I'm somewhere between two ends of a spectrum. ;-)