I live on a beach in my 30s with relatively meager income compared to other people on HN and I constantly meet expats aged 60+ who live at the beach, happy to finally retire after 40+ years of grueling work so they can finally live at the beach.

I'm glad I snapped out of the delusion that you need to waste your youth working so that you can finally enjoy life when you're old and have trouble getting a boner.

We have a cultural problem where we don't use money to buy time. We instead use money to buy everything else. You're usually looked down on for making the time trade, like some sort of deadbeat who doesn't want to work hard. We make day to day decisions as if we were immortal.

Beach bum lifestyle seems appealing, except if you want kids. I'm guessing you don't?

do kids hate the beach? I feel like 'relatively meager compared to HN' could be low 100k and that would be plenty livable, 2-3x the household median income at non super fancy beach towns in the east/south US.

As someone whose kid loves the beach - beach time with small children is very different from beach time as a childless couple. You have to constantly watch the kid to make sure they're not running into the waves, or eating sand, or throwing sand at other beachgoers, or about to fall into the creek. It's not at all as relaxing as going to the beach as a single person or couple is, for reasons entirely unrelated to how much going to the beach costs.

good pt

There's a leisure class at both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Wealthy people have less free time. Most time is spent acquiring the wealth, right?

I'd say a good amount of it is for status.