I think that, somewhere north of $1 ~ $5 million is life-changing on its own. There’s no need for someone to have tens of millions or hundreds of millions. Tens of millions is like, changing multiple lives in a family with how much that can stretch.
Whenever someone has billions to their name, it is boggling to think about. That it becomes just ‘fuck you’ money at that point because more often than not, not a lot of billionaires out there being charitable. When they know they’re set for a few lifetimes just by a single billion alone.
No single person should ever have that amount of gross wealth.
In America midwest, 100k is plenty to own a couple acres and a few cars and buy most things you want and travel.
On the coasts, about $250k yr to live like this, maybe 350k.
On the flip side, plenty of us don’t want to own acres or cars. None of that sounds appealing to me.
We should all figure out what is actually important to us, and where that stuff tends to be cheaper, relative to what we can earn in that place.
I like a variety of nice restaurants, a good butcher shop, good bakeries, a good coffee shop/roaster, farmers markets, and other specialty food sellers within walking (or at least biking) distance of my home. I like the option of seeing live music and standup comedians, preferably also within walking distance of my home. I like having multiple playgrounds and parks and libraries and even museums within walking distance of my home. I like that my kids can walk to and from most of these places, too.
So I pay a shitload to live in a place like that. It comes with tradeoffs: it costs more, we have less space, we can only have one car in our household. But that stuff isn’t important to me (we have money to spare, we don’t like too much space, we hate driving).
Most importantly, though, the thing I like about living in a high salary, high cost of living city is that when set aside 10% of your income for savings and 10% of your income for travel, those are types of things where a dollar is a dollar, so that 10% of a larger number goes further. Someone who lives in a big house on a big plot of land in the Midwest still has to pay the exact same amount that I would when they’re getting a hotel room in London or an Airbnb at a ski town in Colorado.
Thats good! I wish I could be more minimalist but im not. Im a maximalist for sure lol.
Most things about living in town just require spending money all the time (not that im not spending it other places but still)
Like fancy eateries or bars etc, just drains money away so fast and you dont actually “get” anything out of it. (Except experience, which my memory is so bad ill forget it anyway)
Good point on the high salary area however one could argue there’s actually more opportunity here where I could buy land to rent out, or buy a house to flip etc. Big money makers. But I am too lazy to want to do that right now haha. And while trips are fun and i like to do them sometimes, having my own big garage is more fun and more useful to me. Plus I love driving (more sport type driving events, but I go for cruises on open roads a lot too). I feel like a trapped animal in cities, not for me.
I think you’re misunderstanding my point. Mine isn’t minimalism. I’m not denying myself anything that I want. Or even owning less stuff or spending less money. Mine is just steering things into what I like rather than what I don’t care all that much about.
And for my preferences, that maximum for my own happiness is going to come from living in a dense city with a lot going on.
I’d rather we were each and all free to have spaceships.
Much more ecologically savvy than petroleum powered cars and all the road infrastructure they require.
Spaceships for everybody.
Spaceships that are zero-point energy powered, capable of zero-inertia propulsion, sustaining human life indefinitely, printing another of itself instantly, and safe enough for a 2 year old to fly home. I hear these exist, and have for decades before we saw the TR-3B (in 2014 or earlier), and at least as early as a decade after the foo-fighters and the bell (“die glocke”) during WW2.
Or even just the aeros of the mid 1800s, like Charles Dellschau drew from what he saw at the Sonora Aero Club in 1850… that’d be better, for a start, even if they’ve not been made spaceworthy yet, at least they’d be clean powered, energy efficient, and spare our landscape being cut up by roads (freeing up even more acres for each our farm holdings individual and communal), freeing us to travel where there’s far more room (in the sky), no traffic, and cant crash by driver error or strike wildlife, the em-inertial field just slipstreaming us past anything, and able to stop instantly, with the internal inertial reference frame separated.
Lets wind back this over 175 year lost progress for the common people.
It’d even be a nice start if more people merely started looking into this, beyond their circular-reasoned unwittingly conditioned-presumption that it’s not possible or true.