| ▲ | simonw a day ago |
| Terry Pratchett once wrote about the concept of "horizontal wealth". Vertical wealth is where you spend money on rich people stuff - yachts and suchlike. Horizontal wealth is where you spend more money on the things you liked before you got rich: https://chibuikeani.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-price-of-happin... "But horizontal wealth means not letting your increased income dictate your tastes. You like books and now you have money? Buy more books! Change those catenary bookshelves for good hardwood ones! In my case, build a library extension to your office. And, of course, you buy what will be useful for that most wonderful of pursuits, blind research, which is research without direction for the sheer joy of it." (Original source is his book A Slip of the Keyboard - this linked blog post quotes that bit.) |
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| ▲ | jebarker a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| I like this mindset and have tried to adopt it as I’ve made some money. What has proven more insidious than being tempted to buy yachts though is just the daily creep of spending slightly more on everyday things or when you travel. |
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| ▲ | cite_please a day ago | parent [-] | | Traveling is a strange phenomenon that has mutated into a narcissistic behavior. Not sure where it comes from. | | |
| ▲ | numbsafari a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Care to explain more? Humans have been traveling pretty much their entire existence. Being sedentary seems to be a much more recent development. | | |
| ▲ | throw0101d 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Humans have been traveling pretty much their entire existence. Being sedentary seems to be a much more recent development. With the development of agriculture, people staying in one place seems to have been the normal for a while now. Even with the hunter-gatherer societies we know about, AIUI, they tend to have a village/community from which they go out from, i.e., they are 'non-migratory'. | |
| ▲ | wkjagt 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think you're referring to the agricultural revolution, before which humans were hunter-gatherers. But even when people were moving around a lot, they didn't go very far, and I don't think it was for the same reasons. > Hunter-gatherers tends to have much greater home ranges than pre-industrial sedentary farmers. It has been estimated that pre-industrial English people living in small townships would have had a home range of 900 hectares (9 km2), close to that predicted for an omnivorous mammal of their same body mass. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution | |
| ▲ | lanfeust6 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sedentary isn't the word you're looking for. | | |
| ▲ | pjscott a day ago | parent | next [-] | | One of the dictionary definitions of “sedentary” refers to living in the same spot and not traveling, usually used in anthropology to talk about non-nomadic populations. | |
| ▲ | localhost8000 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | what word would you suggest? | | |
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| ▲ | jebarker a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Traveling is something I live for. It’s been a great joy in my life to see and experience the variety of nature and culture around the world. You can certainly warp it into an extravagant experience though. I’m struggling to see where narcissism comes in though - maybe travel with the intent of showing off on social media? | | |
| ▲ | wkjagt 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not sure if I'd call it narcissism, but whenever I hear about friends of mine (mostly friends of friends to be fair) going to Japan after they'd just gone on a cruise to Antarctica, and the trek through the Alps is also already planned, it makes me feel uneasy, but I can't quite put my finger on why. I've always felt uneasy around people that spend so much money on themselves and their own pleasures. | | |
| ▲ | jebarker 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Would you be less uneasy if those people earned less money or gave more money away? | | |
| ▲ | wkjagt 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm unsure why I feel uneasy, but I guess I'd be less uneasy when someone has a lot of money and they spend it on things that others can enjoy too. That's just me though, I'm not trying to influence what people do with their money. |
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| ▲ | Symbiote 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What do you, or friends you are not uneasy around, spend your money on? | | |
| ▲ | wkjagt 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | I give away a lot, or buy people things I know they'd enjoy. I feel bad spending a lot on myself if I know other people need it more. Or maybe it's a selfish thing to make me feel less bad when I do spend on myself. |
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| ▲ | wcunning a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I bought a house, lived there for a couple years and then bought a better tractor (Kubota L45) than we had on the farm growing up. Now I can get 10 truckloads of woodchips from ChipDrop and mulch a whole acre of my yard in an afternoon. |
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| ▲ | roenxi a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Interestingly; that goes to whether someone is a hedonist or not. Dumping money into personal pleasures would defeat the point of the wealth for many. The idea of bettering themselves is expressed through boosting social status rather than hedonistic pleasure. If you gave the average man on the street more money they'd buy yachts and whatnot because they know that people have yachts generally have a higher social status than people who do not. They don't have a strong concept of wealth independent of status. |
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| ▲ | vntok a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This documentary of a French nouveau-millionaire perfectly showcases this mindset: https://youtu.be/jK4wnCLuBtI?is=2Q2QYQyfoCnaObhv (AI powered English subtitles available) > "I bought 10 Kangoo vans" > "I used to drink one bottle of [awful] wine a day, now I drink 10" > "He bought 1500 pairs of the [horrible] shoes he wears everyday" > "I used to spend a month a year camping, now I can spend 10 months a year camping" |
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| ▲ | prmoustache a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Note: this is not a real documentary but a satirical one. | |
| ▲ | boothby a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > "I used to spend a month a year camping, now I can spend 10 months a year camping" Okay but most of those are contemptible and that one sounds like a marked change in one’s commitment to enjoying life. |
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