[looseyesterday]

People are different and so it makes sense that they'll handle death differently. Loneliness is a big problem. But I am surprised how often people fall for an anti-materialist view, yeah money's not everything, but I think its a privileged view to have. Its easy to say money is not important once you've made alot of it. I think its helpful to have some, but obv. spending all your time in its pursuit is a waste.

[javcasas]

Money is not everything. But when you don't have it, everyone is so nasty at you. You are not allowed to have food, or shelter, or health, all those things cost money.

It shouldn't be a surprise that, as a result, many people prioritize having enough money to not have to care about not having money.

[dappermanneke]

there is a very large amount of forgetting and memory rewriting for most people who make it that far. for most of us who survive until that old age our life will be more of an idealised narrative that factual - so yes, not very useful for others earlier in their journey

[sanderjd]

Yeah. It has been very helpful to me once or twice in my adult life to get uncomfortably close to having no savings and negative cash flow, because it has taught me that I hate that. And that there are things I truly value - like living near amenities, traveling to see family, having a coffee and pastry in a coffee shop, going to a sandwich shop for lunch, buying books, going to the movie theater - that are costly, such that I am not nearly as happy living an ascetic as I am when I can afford those things. It has helped me feel a lot less guilty, a lot less like all the compensation I receive and ask for is just greed.

What I have landed on is that achieving "financial independence" is important to me because it buys time, but beyond that point I don't care. Or maybe a better, though jargon-y, way to put it is that it buys optionality, and that I value that very highly (and I think most people do).

I really like working. And I really like spending time with my family. What I really dislike is when I have to spend more time working, rather than being with my family, than I want to, in order to avoid that asceticism that I hate. And, having not yet achieved financial independence, that's pretty much always the case, because I need to work full time, and that's more than I want to work.

Financial independence also buys optionality in what kind of work I can do. Right now there is some stuff I'm really interested in that I would love to be working on in an academic setting, rather than a commercial setting. But I can't afford to do that, because the pay would not be good enough. And at other times, I've really wished I could afford to do work I would find valuable but which is just not well compensated; teaching, tutoring, community / public sector work, etc. But I haven't been able to afford to, thus far.

But of course the problem with all this is that "financial independence" is a very fuzzy line, and is a function of spending, and spending is often itself a function of income. So avoiding that trap is also important to me, and I'm not as good at that as I'd like to be.