You're kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you save up an emergency fund instead of paying a downpayment then you're spending money on rent that you could have in retirement, and it's not like rent is consistently cheaper than mortgage payments anyway so if you can save up when renting you can save up when owning.

So the gamble is, do you spend 2 years saving up for 6 months of income as a buffer and send tens of thousands of dollars down the drain in the meantime, or do you roll the dice and hope nothing bad happens in the next 5 or so years? The people who end up in the best position will be those who take the second option, and most of the time it will work out.

The short answer is probably everything in moderation if you're reasonably young. Maybe don't put every penny you can get your hands on into a down payment on a house, especially if you're also a bit uncertain about future income streams and life situation. But maybe you also don't really need a year or two comfortable emergency fund.

At some point, it probably makes sense to buy a place if you can if only for the stability as you get older.

The problem is that many people view home ownership as a cultural / political statement beyond all else. They desperately need to stop being a rentoid and become a landchad. The reality is that renting is often a better financial decision than buying, especially short term. Plus, in this economy there is no guarantee that you're going to be employed in one city your whole life.

Maybe. It's very situational. Beyond the spreadsheets for a given location, there are times in your life when you want to be able to pickup and move fairly easily and there are times when you want to be able to put down roots and be in a pretty stable situation that lets you tailor things.

"Putting down roots" is the wrong way to look at it. You have to ask yourself if you're certain that you will be in one area for a long time. Everyone wants roots in LA or NYC, many of them wash out.

Sure. but what isn't cultural? Being cultural does not mean it is irrational. It would probably be a better financial decision if people lived cells and ate nutrient paste.

The goal is to maximize your happiness. Putting yourself into a precarious and stressful financial situation because of memes is irrational. Buying a sleeping pod might be rational for some, not for others. Those aren't cultural though, they're personal.

I dont really understand the distinction you are drawing between cultural and personal. Personal opinions are shaped by culture and memes.

Your personal preferences are influenced by culture, but they include your material realities. If you're making decisions about your finances/housing without considering your material reality, you've been meme'd into a decision. A lot of people have been influenced into believing that being an owner is always better than being a renter, so they make stupid decisions.

Im not going to argue against the idea that stupid decisions are stupid or that some people make them.

My point is rather that preferences, including the material reality that you seek, are almost entirely cultural. There is no culture vs reality, but rather some cultural values vs other cultural values

You're entirely missing the point. It doesn't matter if wanting to buy or live in a pod is cultural. What matters is how happy you are at the end.

For a majority of people, buying a house has a large emotional component that is hard to ignore.

Nah, people know those "common" pieces of wisdom. What people bringing them up often miss is, they're also unachievable for most people. Life isn't a MMORPG where you can check out of progression at any moment and spend some time grinding to build up savings. Life has a clock to it that doesn't stop, and most can't afford falling behind it much.

> MMORPG where you can check out

Had this same type of idea cycle around recently quite a bit lately. Similar issue, if this experience actually had the "uninstall", "quit", "leave", "exit", or red X in the corner, it would have been hit a long time ago. Much rather drop and go bodily join some fantasy or sci-fi land than the perpetual grind of meaningless, mundane, superficial, banal America. There's a reason millions spend almost every waking moment staring at a screen, playing a game about a fantasy or sci-fi land where you can actually feel like you accomplish something than interacting with the human race.

Frankly, a lot of MMORPG economies almost look preferable these days, and nearly as believable. At least in quite a few you can personally manufacture something and at least have a possibility of making money that's relevant. On Earth, rather challenging. Etsy for example:

  Only 26% of Etsy shops are successful and run as full-time businesses, or 74% of all Etsy businesses eventually fail.
  Average Etsy seller makes $2,900 per year

Almost every part of the world economy seems designed to punish every member for not being born rich and a celebrity at birth. What's the best way to get followers online and be an "influencer"? Already be a rich celebrity who's influential. Most followed on Instagram - Christiano Ronaldo (635m), Leo Messi (504m), Selena Gomez (425m), Kylie Jenner (398m), Dwayne Johnson (396m), ect ... The top 50 is pretty much universally previously known athlete, actor/actress, musician names. "Normal" influencers are an order of magnitude or further away down in the 10m, 1m, 500k range. It's simply another way to make even more money, have even more fame, be even more self involved, and take even more of the same photos.

One part that's been really bothersome lately is how many games actually seem better implemented than the "real" world. Farming Simulator being one of the perennial cases. The equipment is implemented down to the individual bolts and seals on the engines, and you can probably print out the CAD models and manufacture your own tractor they're so detailed. Yet the game actually implements numerous technologies that the "real" farming consistently refuses. Quicker iterations, quicker development, quicker releases and responsiveness to customers. Intermediate cost farming equipment for the starting farmer, bicycle and human powered equipment with low yearly input costs. The "real" farming sector appear unable to do little other than offer the same $500,000 super-rigs they've been offering for years. There was a post a while back where the Farming Simulator people actually complained to the John Deere's of the world "common guys, how about some entry level stuff, we don't have anything to offer our players."

Anyways, TLDR, would have quit, uninstalled, and then burned the computer in the yard a long time ago.

> Almost every part of the world economy seems designed to punish every member for not being born rich and a celebrity at birth.

> Most followed on Instagram - Christiano Ronaldo (635m)

Christiano Ronaldo was not born rich. He was born in a poor family in a poor region of one of the poorest EU country in the 80's.

Winning a lottery (and then winning a lottery of not mismanaging your good fortune) is great when it happens to you, but it's not an effective strategy you can plan for.

> One part that's been really bothersome lately is how many games actually seem better implemented than the "real" world. Farming Simulator being one of the perennial cases. (...) the game actually implements numerous technologies that the "real" farming consistently refuses. Quicker iterations, quicker development, quicker releases and responsiveness to customers.

Oh yes. Game designers - and same goes for any fiction authors, really - have two things going for them here. One, they can skip the grind; the boring and annoying distractions from the goal that are also necessary to achieve it in the real world. And two, as you noticed, fictional worlds can be designed to work.

Like, what's the difference between a tractor in Farming Simulator and in the real world? The simulated tractor is meant to work - to do the stuff the tractors do. The real tractor is first and foremost meant to make money for manufacturer; whether it works and can do the tractor stuff, that's incidental.

Or in short, games implement the child's view of the world, where things are what they seem to be. Bakers bake bread, firemen help people, singers sing so everyone has fun, etc. Everyone plays their role straight. The real life, unfortunately, has people doing whatever to survive in a more or less structured matter; it may manifest in bakers and firemen and singers, but their roles and value provided are incidental and they're not fulfilled and they'd all rather be somewhere else.

The child's worldview is a lie. It's honest, it's good, it makes sense, but it's a fucking lie. I'm still having difficulties processing that it's a lie. And it's all too easy to immerse yourself in sci-fi/fantasy videogames or shows or books, because they all assume the world makes sense, that things are what they seem, what they're supposed to. When things are not what they seem, that's a goddamn plot twist.

So yeah, I can't help but daydream about how the world could look like if we could just do stuff directly, instead of incidentally as a way to make money to survive (and eventually, enough money to tell the world to GTFO, so we can live out our own fantasies of a world that works).

Emergency fund is useless when expenses are 5k/mo, and that's just sitting in my room working in 15C with my food costs and expenses as low as can be. Burned through 40k already.