Category Archives: economy and money

Indefensible

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That’s all fine and well, but what if you desire something that can’t be justified as an instrument of work or creativity? What if the thing you want to buy is indefensible?

By that I mean trinkets and jewellery such as expensive mechanical watches, or fancy cars. If you’re really rich it can be yachts or jet planes, but you get the picture; it’s something that makes no sense in proportion to your wealth and income.

The answer to that is very simple.

No.

You need to control yourself and learn to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish, rather than just follow such stupid and financially destructive impulses. Money is precious. It should be seen as a blessing, as something that saves you from terrible things in this world, and who knows what price had to be paid in order for you to get it. I’m not saying you should feel guilty for having money and give it all to poor people, but you should see it as a blessing from God that was given to you in order for you to do something constructive with it. I don’t know what that would be, because I’m not you; it’s always specific. Insulate yourself from harm; be able to actually do what you’re meant to do, since money is fuel for everything else. I also don’t see anything wrong in spending some pre-defined discretionary spending sum on some trinkets that you actually like, as long as you’re not actually depleting the money that’s supposed to be used for constructive things.

Discipline needs to be learned. It’s fine to indulge yourself to a point. Go buy yourself ice cream. It’s not fine to act like a fucking idiot and spend all your money on a car or some other toy. You need to learn to say no to yourself and not act like a petulant child that throws tantrums when it desires some trinket. Your inner child can eat shit.

You need to say no, and you need to obey.

Justifications

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It’s easy for me to justify buying gear in hindsight: I just look at the things I did with it and it’s obvious why buying it was a good idea. Conversely, if it just sits there and I don’t use it because, for instance, the lens in question produces poor image quality, or it’s a computer that’s crashing randomly and I can’t risk my work, or a camera that’s so impractical to use that I feel PTSD at the very idea of taking it with me, it’s obvious that buying it was a mistake.

The problem, however, is in justifying equipment purchases proactively. I usually tend to think that my current equipment is fine. If it can’t do something, I can just find my way around it. Autofocus on the camera is slow, so I’ll just take pictures of static subjects. The lens is poor wide open, so I’ll just use it stopped down. I don’t have wide apertures so I’ll use a tripod. Basically, adapt in order to make due with what I have. Also, it’s hard to anticipate if something will be useful in advance, and so it’s especially hard for me to justify buying something very expensive that’s of merely hypothetical usefulness.

At some point, I had to stop my thrifty habits and come to an understanding: had I treated another person the way I treated my photography, it would have been extreme abuse and neglect. Need new shoes? Make due with the old ones, the holes aren’t that big yet. Need a new shirt? The old one is still fine. Need winter clothes? Just walk more quickly, you’ll get warm. Need food? No you don’t, you ate yesterday. Need pen and paper? Why do you need those, you don’t know how to write and you never wrote anything before, so you obviously don’t need it now.

Also, a reason why I didn’t want to buy new gear was because I needed a telephoto lens, and I knew it had to be a good one, and I also needed a camera with fast and smart autofocus to go with it, because my old camera couldn’t track insects. So, it wasn’t just a lens; it was a top tier telephoto lens and a top tier camera, all at once. It’s almost car money. So, after months of considering, I decided to buy both, and use it as an experiment that will determine the value of my purchasing justifications for future reference. If the camera and lens turn out to be rarely used, it will mean I just wasted money and my old thinking was good.

But the opposite happened – both camera and lens turned out to be exceedingly useful, and they allowed me to create lots of pictures I would never have made otherwise. Before, I had like three bees in flight in 20 years of photography. Now, I took five by noon. It was a serious, tangible improvement. Also, I could take pictures of landscape details that were out of reach before, also producing new things that used to be beyond my technical capabilities. So, what else do I want to do that’s presently beyond my equipment?

I realised that we go for walks in the evening and we don’t bring cameras along because we don’t have low light capability, or we try and fail with smartphones. So, I got lenses that are great for what we wanted to do, and again, we ended up with loads of photos that would have never been taken before, simply because we lacked the means.

So, now, in hindsight, it’s easy to say that I need a certain lens. I can show the results that would have never existed without it. I can justify a camera in similar ways. But where does one draw the line from this, because it’s easy to justify anything by saying it might be useful. A second car might be useful. A second house might be useful. Sure. But you need to see the downsides. A second car is a serious financial drain. It also introduces additional maintenance overhead, and wastes both money, time and energy. But what if my car suddenly breaks down and I am left stranded? Well, that’s a legitimate concern, but let’s see how it can be addressed. For instance, you can have an emergency fund deep enough to buy a cheap used car in an emergency. It can also be designed to fit all kinds of other emergencies, because having potential energy in form of money is better than betting on what kind of a dark horse might appear and break your plans. So, have an emergency fund, and have most of it in form of gold coins, because inflation is a thing, and also because fiat currency going to shit is a thing, and that’s one of the possible legitimate emergencies – currency collapse and/or hyperinflation.

So, that’s one way of doing it – have money reserves you can use to solve unpredictable failures and disasters. However, when it’s about things that actually help you do work and be creative, that method is useless, and you need to not just be ready to purchase equipment in case of need; you need to have equipment ready in case you want to use it.

It’s a balance between treating yourself and your work with neglect and contempt, and wasting money on stupid toys you got tricked into buying by watching ads that pretend to be reviews. There needs to be a reasonable balance, but where that exact line sits is a matter that needs to be decided by allowing yourself to occasionally fail and go overboard.

Made with the lens I thought I didn’t need.

Right reasons

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I’d just like to make one thing clear.

When one is suffering from material adversity, and they think material solutions are going to improve their situation, for instance they are cold during winter because they can’t afford heating, they are eating bad quality food or starving because they don’t have money, or they don’t have a good housing solution because they are destitute, they are more-less completely justified in their thinking. Money would indeed improve their situation, because the problem is caused by the lack of money. Materialism, in a sense of desiring things for their material properties, such as desiring a warm blanket when you’re cold or a good meal when you’re starving, will indeed solve a material problem. I’m not saying you should not desire material things for their material properties. It’s only reasonable to do so.

What I’m saying is, don’t desire material things for their abstract, ideal or spiritual properties, because that’s bullshit and a trap. Associating spiritual conditions with material conditions is a form of projection and bondage of spirit to the material world, and it’s a terrible idea.

Basically, it’s perfectly fine to want a car that is comfortable, fast, safe and durable. That’s what a car should be, as a physical object, and you’re perfectly reasonable to want one. The problem is when you associate ownership of a certain brand or model of a car with some spiritual state or achievement, and you think owning it will mean that you made it, that you attained success.

In fact, it’s going to have only its physical properties, and its brand-related social-status properties are going to have some effect, but never what you hope for or expect, and sometimes the exact opposite. Illusions of that kind are notoriously fickle.

Buying for the physical properties is, for instance, how I buy lenses. It’s a matter of how sharp, what aperture, how free of optical defects, how heavy, how well built, and how expensive. I make a list of all those properties and the winner is usually the lens that has the best image quality, but not at the expense of twice the mass and twice the money. It needs to be a reasonable balance of properties. Also, brand name doesn’t actually mean much to me. I owned so many brands of gear that I don’t care, but I will prefer the original manufacturer of the camera because of the possible incompatibilities of the electronics, because they are a thing, to the point that I recently had to replace Biljana’s Sigma 105mm EX DG OS HSM macro lens for Canon because the electronics were so glitchy or outright malfunctioning on her Canon RF system, that no amount of optical perfection could make up for the issues. It is one of the optically most perfect lenses I’ve seen, and it was replaced because it’s unreliable and possibly electronically faulty.

I don’t give a shit about mythical brands and their mythical properties. I care about tangibles, about actual performance and what I personally perceive of image quality. I care about the brand being well adopted in the professional circles, because then it’s going to continue to exist and the system isn’t going to die and force me to change it. Also, if it’s popular, the manufacturer is going to earn lots of money, and that means new good lenses and cameras. That’s why I avoid small exotic brands. Give me something that the professionals use as their bread and butter system; if it’s good for them, it will be good for me. And the ultimate test is going to be image quality. If I’m not getting the image quality I want, I’m going to dump it. If it works for me, I’ll be as happy as a hog in a field of corn.

And what brand name is on what, I don’t give a single shit. I used to have a Sony camera, Soligor macro extenders, Viltrox adapter and Canon lens as a singular working system. As long as I’m getting the results, it might be literally anything. Within reason, of course; I won’t buy something that’s better than what I need. Some specialist professional piece of gear that’s super expensive and designed for specialists with needs different from mine will be shrugged at and ignored. I won’t buy it just because it’s great, if it’s not great for my needs. I certainly won’t aspirationally buy Leica or Hasselblad just to look “serious”.

So, materialism, in a sense of buying physical objects for their physical properties and function. I heartily recommend it. Idealism, in a sense of aspirationally buying exclusive branded items for their elusive spiritual properties… fuck that.

Idealistic spending

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I was just thinking how a common interpretation of striving to attain things is that people believe things will bring them happiness. I don’t think this is what we are seeing. I think people buy things for their symbolism, and the entire thing is some kind of magical thinking, or even an unconscious magical ritual, where they think that, by putting symbols of success, wealth or fame onto themselves they will increasingly participate in the desired outcome.

In that sense, they are some sort of idealists, because they see things for their social and emotional value, not their material value, and I’m some sort of a materialist, because I buy things mostly for their physical utilitarian value. For instance, I buy coffee cups in order to drink coffee from them. I don’t care how fancy they are. They need to be the right size, nice enough shape and they need to be durable, inexpensive and locally available. All of those things are physical properties, and emotional or social significance of those cups is zero.

Nothing fancy.

However, when someone buys coffee cups from a fancy brand, and wants them to increase the perceived social standing of the household in the eyes of guests, they are doing it for the ideal, not material properties of the object.

I’m not saying I’m never buying things for their perceived meaning. I do, when it’s useful. For instance, when I need to maintain an impression in order to “pass” socially, I’ll buy a thing or two for their status symbolism, but I’ll try to be reasonable about it and not overspend. This, however, is also mostly functional, because I see the symbolism as part of the utility. I know how people think, what they perceive, what conclusions they will make, and I know what impression I want to make in order to have the least possible amount of issues. So, apparently, sometimes the symbolism of status is a commodity to be purchased.

But this is a completely different thing from believing that, if you buy enough expensive things, you will magically become more successful and wealthy. No; you’ll be poorer, because wasting money on depreciating symbolic assets doesn’t do absolutely anything, other than make people think you’re an idiot. There are people who are so obsessed with things, that you can precisely assess the amount of money they have by whether they bought some symbolic asset or not. For instance, if he didn’t buy a Rolex, you can tell for sure he has less money than the price of that Rolex, because he would have bought it even if he had exactly that much money and not a Euro more. If he had enough money to buy a Mercedes, he would have certainly bought it.

The concept that you can be rational and calculated about those things is, apparently, too much for some people. The “magical” power of material symbols is too great for them to resist, because they actually think this is the way you make progress. You buy Mercedes, wear Rolex and eat lobster all the way to material success. It’s insanity, but that’s how they think. I, on the other hand, think that status symbols are the fastest way to financial ruin, and one should avoid them as much as possible and instead act rationally and frugally, but within reason and until a point.

The limit of frugality, in my opinion, is respect for yourself, your work and your family. If you respect your family you won’t allow them to wear rags and look homeless. If you respect your work you will buy yourself good tools. Also, you will purchase sufficient symbols of status to shield your family from social pressures. So, status symbols are somewhat necessary and you can’t completely avoid them, but if you’re rational about it, they won’t cost you much more than purely utilitarian things of good quality. You just need to know what you’re doing and be purposeful and deliberate about it. Also, you need to avoid growing expenses to match and exceed your income, because that’s deadly.

For instance, there’s a pretty defined amount I’m willing to pay for a watch, regardless of how much money I have. I’ve heard statements that a watch should cost a month or two of your income, but I completely disagree with that. I would never buy a watch that expensive. Instead, my limit for a watch is my monthly budget for discretionary spending. Just think about it: a monthly income isn’t something you can recover in a month. You have expenses – rent, bills, food, fuel and so on. When you remove standard expenses from your income, the rest is what you can comfortably spend on something and not get yourself into trouble. In order to recover a full month of income, you need to pay it off from multiple months’ worth of discretionary spending budget, and depending on your actual numbers, that can be a very long time. So, if your discretionary budget is 10% of your income, it will take you 10 months of that to recover your monthly income, if you burned it on a watch. So, essentially, you’ll have to live on bare necessities for 10 months to pay for a gadget. You see how insane that “rule” is?

So, rather than defining “what I can afford” as the amount I can pay without dying, I define it as the amount I can pay without feeling any adverse effects. This means I can afford much less than people who will go into debt and destitution just to prove a fictitious point. I do, however, prefer having actual money, to creating an impression of having money. Impressions are sometimes useful, but it is my experience that they peak out very quickly.

Illusion over substance

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I’ve been thinking about how I don’t care about the appearance or an illusion of a thing, and would rather have the thing itself, and how often people do the opposite – sacrifice a thing in order to have the appearance of it.

Perhaps that’s too abstract, but let’s take luxury goods as an example. Unlike what people tend to think, they are not something rich people buy because they can afford it. They are something middle class and actually poor people aspirationally buy in order to create an impression of wealth, thinking it will magically attract wealth into their lives if they appropriate its appearance, or something. And sure, there is a segment of rich people who also buy luxury goods in order to create the appearance that their lives are not empty and meaningless and that their wealth did actually help them achieve some worthwhile thing. However, most wealthy people invest in projects that are actually worthwhile, at least in their opinion. Traditionally, libraries, hospitals etc. bear names of their wealthy donors. They finance welfare projects for the poor, infrastructure, science and so on. Sure, they will buy a big mansion, yacht and jet plane, but the majority of their focus usually lies in making something lasting in the world they will be remembered for. Also, unlike the aspirational middle class, the people who think they will be perceived as belonging to the important class by wearing a Rolex and an expensive suit, the actually wealthy people are known by name. You get to be important by doing something that matters, not by puffing yourself up with status symbols that define your status – as that of a desperate wannabe social climber.

So, what do status symbols actually do? They convert actual money into appearance of wealth, and in the case of middle class people, they aggravate their actual financial situation by incurring debt and depleting their bank account instead of that money being invested into something that will actually help them – basically, if you want to improve your social standing, buying LVMH shares will do more for you than buying their products.

Cars are likely the worst, since they cost a significant portion of a real-estate purchase, they depreciate rapidly and need to be replaced with some regularity, and if you want to use a car as a status symbol, you’d have to refresh it every five years or less, and that will be such an impact to your finances, it might actually prevent you from achieving any worthy goals. The expensive cars are for people what Pleistocene tar pits were for wolves and sabretooth cats – an irresistibly attractive fatal thing where their bones get to be found at a later date.

In both cases – cars and luxury goods – you create an appearance of wealth at the cost of wealth itself. It is something that doesn’t matter if you’re so wealthy that this doesn’t actually cut into your wealth significantly, or at least no more than a good dinner cuts into the income of an average person. For instance, if the price of your car is your annual income, such a purchase is literally destroying your financial future. But if the price of your car is one or two months of your income, and you keep the car until the entirety of its useful life had been exhausted, this might be a reasonable and frugal purchase. But have this in mind: a very rich person will buy an expensive car for their pocket money. It will be a fraction of their monthly income. If you try to imitate them, you probably could, but you will have to financially destroy yourself in the attempt, and it will do absolutely nothing useful for you. It won’t make you rich, it will make you poorer. It won’t get you into the company of rich people where you’ll do business and become one of them. You’d still have to figure out how to do that regardless of the car. You’re buying an illusion of wealth at the cost of the actual thing.

There are things other than wealth where this applies as well – for instance, sacrificing happiness in order to obtain the illusion of it, but wealth is the easiest example. The most fatal one, however, is spiritual advancement, where one has to choose between the thing and appearance thereof very early on, and almost everybody chooses to appear spiritual. You can imagine what that looks like – read the right books so you know the lingo, be vegetarian, believe in karma and reincarnation, and so on. Add celibacy and poverty for the next level. Do that for twenty years, and you’re perceived as a genuine spiritual seeker. The problem is, not only did you achieve absolutely nothing of value in the spiritual sense; you achieved things that are making it impossible for you to even start. You made yourself into a circus act. And, most importantly, you have your “achievements” to defend as a matter of ego support structure, which means you won’t listen to good advice and change your stupid behaviour when someone like me tells you’re merely making a fool out of yourself. Essentially, you sacrificed the possibility of getting the real thing in order to obtain the appearance thereof.

Why do people do it?

Because it’s easy to copy the appearance of something; or, at least people think it is, if they believe they know what the real thing is supposed to look like, and in the case of spirituality, they absolutely don’t. They also have “magical thinking”, and they believe that if they become similar enough to something in appearance, this will make them more like that thing in substance. It’s a “cargo cult” mentality.

Let me tell you how you become rich. You do it by having more money and other assets. You don’t do it by having expensive shit on you. You become “spiritual” by having the soul structure and size of the angels and persons of God. It’s not done by trying to make yourself into a stereotypical cultist. I know that children learn by pretending to be, or at least they think they learn, and adults seemingly just keep this up but in the adult version, but it’s not working. It didn’t work for you when your were children, and it’s certainly not working for you as adults. Imitation is not a way of becoming – it’s a way of losing substance in order to obtain appearance. Just stop it.