I've taught myself to reduce the "things" in my life (impulse items and expensive distraction "things" like cable subscriptions) and to do a lot more cooking at home (fun and a big savings in and of itself). I'd say that at the end of the month I'm likely spending a little less than I would if I were a huge impulse purchaser/had to have every little subscription possible, but the things -> experiences trade has a far better ROI. Here are the differences I've found over the past year and a half:

1. I am traveling more. Unlimited vacation + not insisting on having multiple $x00 payments (like a fancy new car) means a $300 round trip ticket isn't even something I have to plan to purchase. I'm averaging a trip by plane every three months and a smaller weekend road trip once per month.

My buddy has a big fancy truck and he pays the equivalent of two round trip tickets per month but his average round trip commute is about 2 miles. I'll never understand this (if for no other reason than my love of the bicycle).

2. When I go to dinner I eat at better (healthier) restaurants. I've never been a picky eater but I've definitely found myself turning my nose up at food I would have enjoyed six months ago. I have probably only eaten at fast food places maybe 7 times in that period. This so far has been my favorite plus.

3. When I do buy things, I have no reason not to buy the nicer of two items.

4. I can afford a gym membership and personal training sessions. Actually where I go it pretty much works out that if you brown bag your lunch every day you can afford the membership + 3 sessions per week.

5. My apartment looks huge without all the clutter. My aunt lives in the same building and has the same apartment layout but you'd assume mine was at least 50% larger.

Once you declutter, I really suggest painting if you are allowed to. It is really nice to have painted rooms, and you can take the small "apparent size" hit

Thankfully the preceding tenant did that. Having something besides white primer walls is a big plus.

No, the OP is right. The economy would collapse.

70% of US GDP is personal consumption. About half of that is spending on consumer goods and frivolous services. So you're hitting 35% of the US GDP [1]. Let's assume that if people across the nation stopped spending as much on fluff, they stopped spending by about 2/3. You're looking at a GDP fall of more than 22%. For perspective, the Great Depression saw a fall in GDP of 26%. The Great Recession saw a GDP fall of * merely * 5% [2]. And that figure understates the final effect because it ignores feedback loops: consumer goods spending falls, which causes consumer goods workers to lose jobs, which makes every type of spending fall, which loops back, and so on until the entire economy tanks. Which will also, incidentally, make the world economy tank. Domestic and international political unrest ensues.

After a long (decades?) period of upheaval, yes, things would adjust. Keep in mind that it has been 5 years since the most recent recession and neither the US nor Europe have completely recovered. Over the long-term economies are self-correcting. They would self-correct sharply downwards in the sense that everyone would enjoy lower real wages.

I would be wary of indulging in economic fantasies.

[1] http://www.policymic.com/articles/15097/us-gdp-is-70-percent... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

The system would self adjust. If people spent more on travel, travel costs would go higher, even as competition there increased. If people spent more on experience-oriented stuff, that industry would get bigger. If people just spent less, salaries would go lower due to lower demand, not to mention smaller revenues for companies in general (in terms of absolute amounts).

One thing I've witnessed time and time again is that, a lot of times, the price of an item is based on what the market will pay for it.

I'm not an economist so I don't want to state things with too much certainty, but I'm honestly flabbergasted that smart people would say things like this. No it wouldn't, economic activity's not just going to disappear, the money will be reinvested into other things like education or venture or be redistributed through taxes or charity and so on.

The nominal value of GDP is intimately related with the velocity of money, and that in turn depends on transactions; the more of them, and the higher their value, the bigger the GDP. The longer money stays in anyone's pockets or bank account before being transferred elsewhere, the lower the GDP.

Nominal GDP would definitely fall when people move their time "spending" from labour transactions (i.e. working hours) that add to GDP, to spending time instead. So if you measure economic activity by GDP, this alternate working approach would appear to "collapse" the economy.

And the degree to which people who make desirable "stuff" also subscribe to this new lifestyle, the more expensive that stuff will become. Supply is reduced, therefore the price will rise until demand falls and supply rises (because the price is higher) to match one another. In effect, a population following this approach will have lower purchasing power for desirable stuff than a control population stuck in the rat race. Or to put it another way, they will be poorer, and may suffer from envy.

So IMO the approach is currently only realistic for a certain subset of the population - those whose labour is valuable enough - and hopefully doesn't spread to factory workers etc. Ideally factory workers will be replaced by robots, so that we no longer have to worry about using up human lives to feed the "stuff" production machine. (By factory workers, I mean everyone who makes commodity (not bespoke) "stuff" you can touch.)

But I can certainly see a future where unskilled labour, and a lot of skilled labour, is done by machines. A capitalist economy based on scarcity won't work so well then; democracy won't stand for it.

Or just the same types of things, but in lower quantities and with higher quality, to a higher price. It is not strange to buy toys for kids, but buying crap that is added to already large piles of crap and used just a few times is just bad for all humans and the environment (with the only "positive" being short-time profit for the consumer industries).