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I really don’t like how he tries to diminish his partner’s feeling about “falling behind” as some mirage created by Instagram and classism. I think it’s pretty

I really don’t like how he tries to diminish his partner’s feeling about “falling behind” as some mirage created by Instagram and classism. I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that most people don’t want to live on $30k/year for their entire life when they could maybe work and get more. Though maybe this is colored by the relevation that follows shortly thereafter. To me it shows an unwillingness to think critically about this. It sounds like his partner communicated with him changes she wanted to make (go back to work and not live like college students) and he just ignored them because he thought they were stupid.

fossuser 5y ago
It doesn't seem like a huge surprise: https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthlings/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthli... It can come out in different ways, but I suspect it's not that divorced from the above. It's not very attractive to be unemployed and not very ambitious. Maybe the introspection of why is missing, but I suspect that's the reason.
- opportune 5y ago
  See this is still blaming the problem on some kind of externalized illogical other you aren’t willing to understand (just replace “partner falling for Instagram lies” with neckbeardy EvPsych) rather than empathizing with the other person’s opinion. Like if your partner directly tells you they are unhappy because of XYZ, rather than thinking it’s stupid/some part of how the woman brain works (eye roll), it seems pretty clear that not doing anything to fix XYZ - in this case working again and living more luxuriously - is being a bad partner. Doesn’t matter what the genders are or what XYZ is.
  - garmaine 5y ago
    Wife was saying “I feel like we should both work again” and his response was “OK, how about you work? I’m good.” I’m not surprised at all at what happened.
    - balfirevic 5y ago
      Well, it's a perfectly reasonable response.
  - fossuser 5y ago
    I think we agree more than we disagree and you're being more hostile than necessary. > "it seems pretty clear that not doing anything to fix XYZ - in this case working again and living more luxuriously - is being a bad partner." Yeah - and the why is the bit I was getting at. They have a core value disagreement here, it's likely to be a common one given sexual selective incentives and behavior. I'm not making a moral judgement, but that's likely the truth. It also sounded like she didn't want to work again - it's unclear if she wanted them both to work, or just for him to work. The podcast I linked is pretty good, men and women often cheat for different reasons, but her motivation here is a pretty textbook example. His comments are also in the context of her cheating on him and a breakup, so unsurprisingly skew negative.
    - staticman2 5y ago
      It's an open question whether anything in the evolutionary psychology field should be given the label "likely the truth."
olah_1 5y ago
Yeah, this line: > And she wasn’t trying that hard anyway, because she had acquired, somehow, New Life Dreams, which had to do with Conspicuous Consumption and Keeping Up and being Visibly Awesome — dreams which are at odds with my own. The desire to be seen and take part in society is fundamentally human. Yes, you can overdo it, but you can also underdo it. There is nothing wrong with going to nice restaurants, posting about it, discussing it with your friends, etc. My guess is that they simply stopped having a social life with their peers (he hinted at such). That sounds horrible to me. There is a reason that retirement communities exist. Just because you retire, that doesn't mean you exit from community.
- xsmasher 5y ago
  You could say that comparing social status is innate and natural to some people, but to call Conspicuous Consumption "fundamentally human" is overstatement. Different things make different people happy. Some people enjoy having the biggest TV on the block. Other people take pride in NOT having a TV.
  - olah_1 5y ago
    > but to call Conspicuous Consumption "fundamentally human" is overstatement. My take is that what his wife wanted was not “conspicuous consumption” but rather just a healthy social life. Granted that is just what i gleaned from his statements.
garmaine 5y ago
Yeah that was a big WTF moment for me too. It is completely normal and human nature to want to do better and have more. This has nothing to do with social media! I couldn’t imagine being stuck in a rut of a frugal fixed income forever. I post nothing on social media, I care nothing about keeping up with what I see there, and I like being different. But I still want to be advancing, improving, and getting more.
- CleverLikeAnOx 5y ago
  I doubt the author sees being frugal as a rut and I doubt that the author sees "getting more" as advancement. You and the other are both human and normal regardless. The author's outlook on life is completely valid, so is his partner's, so is yours. Your outlooks has nothing to do with social media, but maybe his partner's really did. We only have the author's words to go by for this story.
  - garmaine 5y ago
    I'm not criticizing his own choices. What I'm surprised at is his lack of empathy for his partner's. We have only one side of the story, but it does seem very one-sided.
    - CleverLikeAnOx 5y ago
      Agreed, especially after reading this post https://livingafi.com/post-fire-relationship-disconnect/ https://livingafi.com/post-fire-relationship-disconnect/ It's a dialog he is creating as a summary of many discussions. In his version of the story they both communicate well and seem to hear each other, but not agree on life. Then his takeaway is that she didn't hear him, which was an odd take.
notenoughhorses 5y ago
I appreciated reading about how both of them reacted to the realities of early retirement. I like to think I could be like the author, and be happy without much, but it did make me think if I might be more like his SO, especially when I see my friends upgrading their lives in our 40s. My take away from the post is that they fundamentally felt 2 different ways about it. The author did not feel the stuff his SO felt. But she was on board with retiring on “lean fire” so I doubt she predicted this about herself either. I read this post a few weeks ago, so maybe I’m remembering wrong, but I thought the author was perfectly open to SO returning to work, but she wasn’t sure in the middle of all this if she really wanted to do that? I don’t think it’s the author’s responsibility, and I don’t think he thought it was his responsibility, to decide for his spouse if she worked or not, that was up to her to decide.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  There was definitely some unreliable narrator there. She said she wanted kids. Apparently he did not, since presumably they were not part of the budget. He claimed to be outside the need for more spending and accused her of being fooled by social media, but admits he felt a lot of shame at falling behind his peers in accomplishment. She said she couldn't see herself being with someone who wouldn't work to improve their lives and support a larger family. He said he wouldn't go back to work, even if she did. In his next relationship, he went back to work, increased his spending and is planning on having kids, several large reversals. Seems to me that they weren't so different after all.
  - fossuser 5y ago
    It sounded like she changed her mind on the kids thing - or at least they didn't discuss it as much as they should have. The sense I got was that it was status related and he was pretty close to right. She didn't like being with someone who wasn't working, didn't like telling her friends her SO didn't work, didn't like not having things to talk about, etc. He was low status compared to her friends. Eventually she cheated on him - I think that's wrong, but the motivation behind it is not unpredictable or uncommon: https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthlings/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthli... The new relationship is different in part because his SO is a librarian with a small income, there isn't as much of a status divide and he is high status in that match given his high net worth. There's a lot of evidence that women tend to select people at their level or higher for mates: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/216-being-a-transhumanist-evolutionary-psychologist-diana-fleischman/ http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/216-being-a-transhumani... A lot of this feels like a narrative on top of that core issue without recognizing the underlying problem. Obviously things are more complex than this at the individual level, but it feels like a lot of talking around the core issue without recognizing it. I'm not making morality judgements on any of this (except perhaps the cheating), but it's good to recognize the pragmatic reality of the world you're in when making these kinds of decisions. If you decide to retire early, it'll likely affect your relationship opportunities in some ways you may not understand.
CleverLikeAnOx 5y ago
Seems like fundamentally different ways of life between them. The author seems to have strongly held views that fall well outside the mainstream. Something being "pretty uncontroversial" is not a compelling point to such a person, particularly when it clashes with said strongly held views. I can relate to his outlook. I hope he was more diplomatic during their discussions about this, but now that it's after the fact, we are reading his blunt opinions on the matter. It's hard to know if he is "right" and she really was influenced by status-driven thinking via Instagram, or if he was just being hard-headed. Either or both are plausible to me.
wing-_-nuts 5y ago
I mean, she was down for FIRE. I'm sure they discussed the budget before hand. If things changed, and she wanted to go back to work to live a more luxurious lifestyle, well, she's welcome to? He's under no obligation to do the same. I feel like she wanted him to return to work as well to keep up with the jones's and I can understand him saying no to that.
war1025 5y ago
> I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that most people don’t want to live on $30k/year One thing that I missed the first time this article got posted is that he and his (ex)wife had separate finances. He had an income of 30k/year, she presumably had a similar income. Living on 60k/year seems like a whole different ballgame than 30k/year.
jseban 5y ago
I totally agree, and I also don't think it's a good idea to choose sides here and start to deny the pleasures of accumulating material comforts as something stupid, after all, accumulating nice things IS fun and meaningful! Even though I can agree that it's commonly over emphasized, and that it's not the most important thing after all, it still is really meaningful, and also what gives most people meaning in their lives, after all, so taking a dismissive opinion of this is probably not going to be a good idea..

fossuser 5y ago

It doesn't seem like a huge surprise: https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthlings/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthli... It can come out in different ways, but I suspect it's not that divorced from the above. It's not very attractive to be unemployed and not very ambitious. Maybe the introspection of why is missing, but I suspect that's the reason.

opportune 5y ago
See this is still blaming the problem on some kind of externalized illogical other you aren’t willing to understand (just replace “partner falling for Instagram lies” with neckbeardy EvPsych) rather than empathizing with the other person’s opinion. Like if your partner directly tells you they are unhappy because of XYZ, rather than thinking it’s stupid/some part of how the woman brain works (eye roll), it seems pretty clear that not doing anything to fix XYZ - in this case working again and living more luxuriously - is being a bad partner. Doesn’t matter what the genders are or what XYZ is.
- garmaine 5y ago
  Wife was saying “I feel like we should both work again” and his response was “OK, how about you work? I’m good.” I’m not surprised at all at what happened.
  - balfirevic 5y ago
    Well, it's a perfectly reasonable response.
- fossuser 5y ago
  I think we agree more than we disagree and you're being more hostile than necessary. > "it seems pretty clear that not doing anything to fix XYZ - in this case working again and living more luxuriously - is being a bad partner." Yeah - and the why is the bit I was getting at. They have a core value disagreement here, it's likely to be a common one given sexual selective incentives and behavior. I'm not making a moral judgement, but that's likely the truth. It also sounded like she didn't want to work again - it's unclear if she wanted them both to work, or just for him to work. The podcast I linked is pretty good, men and women often cheat for different reasons, but her motivation here is a pretty textbook example. His comments are also in the context of her cheating on him and a breakup, so unsurprisingly skew negative.
  - staticman2 5y ago
    It's an open question whether anything in the evolutionary psychology field should be given the label "likely the truth."

olah_1 5y ago

Yeah, this line: > And she wasn’t trying that hard anyway, because she had acquired, somehow, New Life Dreams, which had to do with Conspicuous Consumption and Keeping Up and being Visibly Awesome — dreams which are at odds with my own. The desire to be seen and take part in society is fundamentally human. Yes, you can overdo it, but you can also underdo it. There is nothing wrong with going to nice restaurants, posting about it, discussing it with your friends, etc. My guess is that they simply stopped having a social life with their peers (he hinted at such). That sounds horrible to me. There is a reason that retirement communities exist. Just because you retire, that doesn't mean you exit from community.

xsmasher 5y ago
You could say that comparing social status is innate and natural to some people, but to call Conspicuous Consumption "fundamentally human" is overstatement. Different things make different people happy. Some people enjoy having the biggest TV on the block. Other people take pride in NOT having a TV.
- olah_1 5y ago
  > but to call Conspicuous Consumption "fundamentally human" is overstatement. My take is that what his wife wanted was not “conspicuous consumption” but rather just a healthy social life. Granted that is just what i gleaned from his statements.

garmaine 5y ago

Yeah that was a big WTF moment for me too. It is completely normal and human nature to want to do better and have more. This has nothing to do with social media! I couldn’t imagine being stuck in a rut of a frugal fixed income forever. I post nothing on social media, I care nothing about keeping up with what I see there, and I like being different. But I still want to be advancing, improving, and getting more.

CleverLikeAnOx 5y ago
I doubt the author sees being frugal as a rut and I doubt that the author sees "getting more" as advancement. You and the other are both human and normal regardless. The author's outlook on life is completely valid, so is his partner's, so is yours. Your outlooks has nothing to do with social media, but maybe his partner's really did. We only have the author's words to go by for this story.
- garmaine 5y ago
  I'm not criticizing his own choices. What I'm surprised at is his lack of empathy for his partner's. We have only one side of the story, but it does seem very one-sided.
  - CleverLikeAnOx 5y ago
    Agreed, especially after reading this post https://livingafi.com/post-fire-relationship-disconnect/ https://livingafi.com/post-fire-relationship-disconnect/ It's a dialog he is creating as a summary of many discussions. In his version of the story they both communicate well and seem to hear each other, but not agree on life. Then his takeaway is that she didn't hear him, which was an odd take.

notenoughhorses 5y ago

I appreciated reading about how both of them reacted to the realities of early retirement. I like to think I could be like the author, and be happy without much, but it did make me think if I might be more like his SO, especially when I see my friends upgrading their lives in our 40s. My take away from the post is that they fundamentally felt 2 different ways about it. The author did not feel the stuff his SO felt. But she was on board with retiring on “lean fire” so I doubt she predicted this about herself either. I read this post a few weeks ago, so maybe I’m remembering wrong, but I thought the author was perfectly open to SO returning to work, but she wasn’t sure in the middle of all this if she really wanted to do that? I don’t think it’s the author’s responsibility, and I don’t think he thought it was his responsibility, to decide for his spouse if she worked or not, that was up to her to decide.

dougmwne 5y ago
There was definitely some unreliable narrator there. She said she wanted kids. Apparently he did not, since presumably they were not part of the budget. He claimed to be outside the need for more spending and accused her of being fooled by social media, but admits he felt a lot of shame at falling behind his peers in accomplishment. She said she couldn't see herself being with someone who wouldn't work to improve their lives and support a larger family. He said he wouldn't go back to work, even if she did. In his next relationship, he went back to work, increased his spending and is planning on having kids, several large reversals. Seems to me that they weren't so different after all.
- fossuser 5y ago
  It sounded like she changed her mind on the kids thing - or at least they didn't discuss it as much as they should have. The sense I got was that it was status related and he was pretty close to right. She didn't like being with someone who wasn't working, didn't like telling her friends her SO didn't work, didn't like not having things to talk about, etc. He was low status compared to her friends. Eventually she cheated on him - I think that's wrong, but the motivation behind it is not unpredictable or uncommon: https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthlings/ https://samharris.org/podcasts/254-mating-strategies-earthli... The new relationship is different in part because his SO is a librarian with a small income, there isn't as much of a status divide and he is high status in that match given his high net worth. There's a lot of evidence that women tend to select people at their level or higher for mates: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/216-being-a-transhumanist-evolutionary-psychologist-diana-fleischman/ http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/216-being-a-transhumani... A lot of this feels like a narrative on top of that core issue without recognizing the underlying problem. Obviously things are more complex than this at the individual level, but it feels like a lot of talking around the core issue without recognizing it. I'm not making morality judgements on any of this (except perhaps the cheating), but it's good to recognize the pragmatic reality of the world you're in when making these kinds of decisions. If you decide to retire early, it'll likely affect your relationship opportunities in some ways you may not understand.

CleverLikeAnOx 5y ago

Seems like fundamentally different ways of life between them. The author seems to have strongly held views that fall well outside the mainstream. Something being "pretty uncontroversial" is not a compelling point to such a person, particularly when it clashes with said strongly held views. I can relate to his outlook. I hope he was more diplomatic during their discussions about this, but now that it's after the fact, we are reading his blunt opinions on the matter. It's hard to know if he is "right" and she really was influenced by status-driven thinking via Instagram, or if he was just being hard-headed. Either or both are plausible to me.

wing-_-nuts 5y ago

I mean, she was down for FIRE. I'm sure they discussed the budget before hand. If things changed, and she wanted to go back to work to live a more luxurious lifestyle, well, she's welcome to? He's under no obligation to do the same. I feel like she wanted him to return to work as well to keep up with the jones's and I can understand him saying no to that.

war1025 5y ago

> I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that most people don’t want to live on $30k/year One thing that I missed the first time this article got posted is that he and his (ex)wife had separate finances. He had an income of 30k/year, she presumably had a similar income. Living on 60k/year seems like a whole different ballgame than 30k/year.

jseban 5y ago

I totally agree, and I also don't think it's a good idea to choose sides here and start to deny the pleasures of accumulating material comforts as something stupid, after all, accumulating nice things IS fun and meaningful! Even though I can agree that it's commonly over emphasized, and that it's not the most important thing after all, it still is really meaningful, and also what gives most people meaning in their lives, after all, so taking a dismissive opinion of this is probably not going to be a good idea..