> No, you are being influenced by media, which convinces you that things are a proxy for happiness and good relationships

The Fight Club line has always really resonated with me:

"We work jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need"

Live below your means. Tune out from all the consumerism. Suddenly you find that you have enough savings built up that you could support yourself for multiple years without working. Now you are no longer willing to put up with as much at work. Oddly, this builds a sort of respect from people and they bother you less. Now you have excellent work life balance and more than you could ever want.

And really the key to it all is just not wanting so much.

(Also try to keep the freak-accident / illness destroying your life type stuff out your mind.)

Think of this equation:

happiness = things_you_have - things_you_want

It's much easier to reduce your desires than it is to buy new stuff. Your resources are scarce and your desires infinite. If you can convince yourself you have everything you want already nothing can touch you. Write down a list of reasons to not buy the new hotness.

Stoicism has more to say on this, for example negative visualization. If you feel upset with your spouse or kids imagine them being hit by a car and dying in your arms. Car or truck? Did the car stop, or speed off? Burial or cremation? What will you say to your family, their friends? Manufacture details and explore their emotional impact. The frustration just evaporates.

It sounds corny, but happiness is something you decide, not because of something. In all situations, you can choose to embrace your experiences and do everything you can about them to the fullest, or not. This can take an instant, and it can take a lifetime. Whenever we can't feel comfortable, we can do stuff we know further the constructive narrative of our lives. This narrative when nurtured and fed, will grow as exponential potential, unseen until unleashed on the world. The nurturing and sharpening of your own willpower, requires to leave outcomes to the higher good, trust and faith in that you've put in your part and that you continue to charge up.

I think I can sum up your point as: happiness and satisfaction are two different things. Satisfaction is fleeting, and happiness can be had anytime except when someone actively opposes us - moves us when we want to stand still or stops us when we want to go.

We're happy as long as we're going vaguely where we know we should be able to, to get what gives us satisfaction

It's a very basic principle: If someone is immobile, sitting and only resting, not doing what they're supposed to do, they may become deeply depressed and unhappy people.

If you go for your quest in life, you may become very fulfilled and happy even when failing to obtain any end goals.

There are of course no guarantees or strict rules in life, so are just very general cause-and-effects in play.

This works without kids. If you have kids, then typically you desire to give them the best available options, and that then means living in higher priced neighborhoods with higher achieving student populations. And then your kid befriends another kid whose parents are doctors/lawyers/engineers/business owners, and they want to don vacation or camp with them and you need to pony up a few hundred or thousand dollars and so on and so forth.

As a parent I have experienced that people always try to guilt you into spending too much on your kid. Too much for education, too much for health, too much for entertainment and enrichment. Because you love them, and it isn't you, it is hard to know where the line is. So people exploit you ruthlessly.

Even so, there’s a lot of decently affordable “good enough” where the difference between that and “best available” is marginal compared to the cost increase.

The most obvious and probably biggest expense item (at least in the US) would be tertiary education, but having been out a few years I don’t really notice what the additional benefit was of top-tier private university vs cheap state university, since I know plenty of state schoolers making FAANG money and plenty of Ivy Leaguers struggling to find jobs.

Though at least for me the primary/secondary property race you describe was not an issue, since I went to school in NYC, which has district wide school choice for middle school and universal school choice for high school. (NYC is a million kids so the city is split into districts for ease of administration.) Elementary school was geographically defined, but I also went to a school with a C rating, and plenty of people from that school ended up fine.

I like to think of this "good enough" thing by calling everything beyond "good enough" as irresponsible, and actually sabotaging those very same kids' future needs by squandering your (their) resources today on things which can not actually be justified.

That way, even if you were subject to feeling guilt over not providing the very best of everything, you can satisfy it this way.

"good enough" and "justified" must consciously and explicitly include some pie slice for "non-essentials" though. Some amount of "non-essentials" are in fact essential. Anything else is simply not living. So, once in a while, you do splurge on the expensive weekend.

It gets pretty subjective when talking about which benefits are worth what, but in general, the more resourceful your network is, the more resources you have.

There probably is a point where "best available" isn't worth it, but I think for many people, they still feel that they need to do whatever they can. NYC is a great example, where unless your kid makes it into Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech or equivalent, many higher income parents feel compelled to move to the suburbs. Or even the current uproar where they diminished the testing to get into those schools.

Agreed. The sort of critique in this article feels a little stale. It's easy to convince someone that buying luxury cars is wasteful status-signaling. It's not so easy to convince me that raising kids in a safe neighborhood with good schools is wasteful, or that it is getting any cheaper to do so, or the consequences of failing to do so are getting any better.

Imo it’s the same thing. It all goes back to the individual, the parent in this case. The parent needs to teach and model to the kids that a focus on wealth and material “stuff” is meaningless and leads to unhappiness. Not saying that’s easy—-it’s hard to teach yourself and live these values alone—- but it’s an extension of the same idea. It’s spreading the values out to your own personal community starting with your family. It’s a really noble goal because it has a ripple effect.

The goal is to surround your kid with the other kids who will be as good of an influence as possible. I'm not saying you won't find kids like that everywhere, but generally, the higher the income of the parents (up to a point), the likelier the parents are to have taught their kids to value education and other things that will help them succeed.

And so to maximize this probability, people stretch themselves to live in neighborhoods bidding against other people also stretching themselves to live in the "best" neighborhood they can afford.

I teach my kids that it might be a poor ROI to work for material stuff, but I do teach them the importance of wealth in being able to obtain resources in the future.

Yeah it's not like living this sort of life without kids is good and pure but with kids it's neglect. If you raise your kid with the same mindset as you, you now have a kid who also doesn't want for much and is able to live a happy life unencumbered by needless material wants.

> This is fine, until you have kids

I have three.

If anything they have more options, they just have less concrete things.

Perhaps, but the common wisdom is to buy the "cheapest house in the best neighborhood", or "its who you know, not what you know" or "you are the friends you keep".

Maybe those aren't true, maybe they're true up to a certain point, but in my experience, people will stretch their budget to put their kids in the better schools, and the rat race starts there. This might not be an issue if you're already a dual professional household earning $200k+ or something where you're deciding between $600k vs $1M houses, but more for whether or not a $80k income family should stretch and buy a $400k house or stick to a $300k house.

(numbers aren't accurate, just trying to show that there exists a tier of society that does have to make those tough choices between living comfortably within their means and offering their kids a meaningfully higher probability of future advancement).

I used to meet people in the NYC area who commuted 1+ hour each way everyday to work 8AM to 6PM at least, they were all doing it so their kids go to the best school district they could afford. I felt sad for them since it basically meant very little time with the kids during the weekdays, no gym, no visiting friends/family, cooking, but they all did it.

> This works without kids. If you have kids, then typically you desire to give them the best available options

Let me quote you one of my favorite posts: "You say 'I can't do XYZ because I have kids and a mortgage?' - well maybe you should have thought about the long term ramifications of your actions."

Long term ramifications like the continued survival of the human race or a working economy when you're old and retired? It's in society's best interest that a reasonable amount of children are born each year.

You certainly know the concept of externalities, like pollution. If you don't, it's like how fixing your car exhaust brings you very little personal benefits. But if nobody did, smog would make your life miserable.

Kids are just the same - except the other way around!

So personally, when I'm old and retired, I plan to depend on the work your kids (and the kids of other people who also generously considered the "continued survival of the human race") while in the meantime maximizing the benefits that come from the freedom of not having kids.

You may not like this freeloader spirit, and governments generally encourage people to have kids by various means ("working economy, GDP growth and all that are important after all!).

But as it's not illegal to "abstain" from the rat race, I do not care much :)

This can backfire for you later. Read about what older people think about life choices... rarely who say they are glad they don't have children...

How do you deal with paying rent to live within a reasonable distance of your job in the meantime?

I live in the Midwest, so cost of living isn't really an issue.

Well, not more than you could want...

Very likely you are being heavily influenced by the media when you consider the average American, for example, consumes eight hours of it a day:

https://www.eaj.io/eight-hours-a-day/

Sleep, Work, Consume Media...

> Your "selfish gene" would do better directing you toward fundamentalist communities where reproductive rates are higher.

That's not like the selfish gene theory work at all. In species where sex is involved, the "quality" of the genes of your partner is as much as important for the destiny of your genes as the fact you are reproducing. That's why sports stars and millionaires marry and have kids with beautiful models instead of getting pregnant 1000 plain Janes.

It does not make so much sense since in modern society the survival rate is pretty high, but as the usually repeated mantra says ;"we humans are machines living in the current world with a 200k-year-old firmware "

Would advertising be so effective if we weren't bored?

A deficit of things we "have" to do have made boredom a common thing in modern life instead of a rarity reserved for monks or nobility. And so so many of these things we do are seeking stimulation and novelty, not reproductive success.

You have to find other answers to the "what do you want to do" and "how will you mentally satisfy yourself" problems if you opt out. They won't solve themselves.

Hasn't Human nature itself been crafted by evolutionary forces? It is conceivable that our ancestors that were more laid back and content were more likely to be out competed by those who were hungry for power and prestige.

In fact, as an example, isn't there some often quoted statistic about half a percentage of all living humans having descended from Genghis Khan?

Human nature may be crafted by evolutionary forces, but that doesn't mean that human behavious do is always in service of biological evolution.

The idea about people coming from Genghis Khan is unrepresentative in a couple ways. First, that a large number of people have a common ancestor does not mean that the common ancestor was in fact Genghis Khan. It could have been someone else associated with the Mongol conquest.

Second, six hundred years from now you or I may have a lot of ancestors, assuming you have kids (I already do). There is nothing remarkable about that.

Fair point. I see what you are saying. I was focusing on the innate human nature side of things, but I have to agree, the behavior that actually manifests through conspicuous consumption is being heavily influenced by media and advertising.

More on this topic in a recent HN submission and its associated discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24686904

I had a libertarian coworker who didn't understand why people didn't just vote with their feet on all of this stuff.

The closest I got to explaining it to him is that Advertising as a profession in the US is the successor to WWII psychological warfare. People are being paid to use your instincts and your worst impulses against you. All day. Every day. It started out weaponized, and now it's industrialized.

To opt out requires a level of enlightenment (literally and figuratively) that few invest in, and some doubt they could achieve even if it were a priority.

We have black hat hackers attacking our brains, and only occasionally do the white hat hackers get any sort of publicity, and some of those have less substance but are more approachable than the real experts. These people are almost always standing on the shoulders of giants, and thus their work feels derivative (eg, Marie Kondo), which is off-putting to people. Their style-over-substance makes them in effect hyper-palatable people, which is a form of cognitive dissonance with the message.