I knew a guy like that and he had a very different attitude than most in this situation. The guy I knew was 100% aware of what he was doing. He said he's not poor at all, but chose to live poor to save his money and invest it instead. He said he was on track to retire at 30. The man had laser vision with his eye on the target, can't hate on him for that. He'll be the last one laughing with that "fuck you" money.

But saving money on clothes and hygiene is crazily short-sighted. Bad clean clothes are maybe a couple hundred dollars a year, generously. I sincerely doubt that outweighs having your co-workers dread interacting with you.

It mostly saves time for washing clothes.

Changing clothes weekly was societal norm before washing machines became common. With washing machines Jevons paradox takes effect - instead of just accepting more free personal time with less time taken by washing clothes, we ramped up societal expectations for clean clothes.

All those little couple hundred dollars a year here and there add up. And some people just don't care to make friends with the people they work with.

Actually you can have the best of both worlds it's a failure of imagination

Why is there no way to relate to people like that?

Like, an individual you get a vibe from, I get it, but all people who are house poor should be avoided? I'm not sure I follow.

Avoid confrontation, not people. Plus, a manager at a company presumably has money to buy a couple of sweaters, even if at Goodwill or equivalent.

I'd have to agree that it's necessary to view the professional sphere in terms of investment and investment is not only financial it's also effort and agency

If you're a professional you ought to have some sort of professional persona that's not so directly tied to your 35 year mortgage

If all your money is tied up in interest payments to where you can't hardly afford a stitch of clothing what fault of it is mine who manages my money differently do I seriously have to see you wearing the same tired old outfit every day for a week and you're in a position to affect my career to boot?

You have no idea what people have going on though. There are so many reasons someone could be short on money that would be understandable if you knew. you simply can't make that judgement easily.

Ed Sheeran mostly wears same red shirt

People always come up with examples of eccentrics who dress like eccentrics

I'm not interested in working with Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey or Elon Musk or Einstein himself I'm interested in working with regular people who know how to shop for value and don't have to piss holding a cell phone or chew loudly with their mouths open

The reason for this is I'm trying to achieve the enlightened state of higher consciousness that comes with practicing my art to its highest form of mastery and with it comes a certain social awareness that requires like-mannered colleagues to realize

He almost definitely has many copies of that shirt and isn't just wearing the exact same shirt every day. Just like Zuckerberg, who was showing off his wardrobe consisting of a bunch of t-shirts that are exactly the same.

No one should have issues with people dressing similarly every day. But wearing the exact same shirt literally every single day without washing it every day becomes noticeable really quickly for hygienic reasons, and that's the part that makes it problematic.