[arp242]

And the very next sentence is: "Despite making a conservative choice, he had panic attacks for a week afterward."

So whatever the "good decision" may be, this is clearly not healthy. This is really what the article is about, not whether a $30k or $60k car is better.

[ryandrake]

I guess it depends on whether he is having panic attacks or "panic attacks". Sometimes people exaggerate and say "I am literally having a panic attack" when they're mildly anxious. Maybe it's just run of the mill buyer's remorse. I know I would absolutely have buyer's remorse if I ever managed to spend $30K on a car, let alone $60K. I don't think that, in and of itself, makes me unhealthy.

[nixnixers]

This sounds like healthy psychology, incorrectly medicalized to me.. Who didn't question their big decisions like a major transportation decision before 1940?

I think there were a few exceptional places/people that lacked both normal scarcity and social norm pressure, but even the wealthiest people worried like these things mattered in most towns.

You can't just erase the entire cultural context of people and expect them to have no worries because there's a few more years to various peaks. They are experiencing the stresses of developing decision skills for a life that probably spans after peak petroleum, etc.

[arp242]

Panic attacks when there is nothing to panic about are absolutely not healthy or normal. Most people agonize over financial decisions such as this without panic attacks.

[nixnixers]

This sounds like anti-anxiety over correction to me.

We don't know how much future planning anxiety is warranted without knowing the future. We certainly know that past societies have a strong survivor bias for people who worried about the most significant life decisions they had.

A very flexible person and a turnip may both be well tuned to the economy at the moment but a less flexible person should be anxious as much for the behavioral effects of making decisions lightly on making future decisions in different circumstances.

[roenxi]

We don't know if it was a panic attack though. The journalist could just be describing pessimism.

> “I have this feeling that the bottom is gonna fall out,” Fox told me.

Take this quote for example. If we take even a mildly evidence based approach, this is rational. Sometimes the bottom does just fall out of the economy. It happens around once a decade. It is entirely healthy to consider spending large amounts of money as potentially risky and consider the possible consequences.

[stubish]

The thoughts described in the article sound a lot like OCD. Which is very common, so may actually be a common expression of OCD.