[wpietri]

Broke gets old. Being thrifty is hard. It's easy to judge yourself by comparison with your peers' improving lives. Loss aversion means that any improvement you make in your material circumstances tends to stick. And once you start paying more attention to your circumstances, it's surprisingly hard to always choose not to improve them.

It's certainly possible to keep a minimalist, low-burn lifestyle. But it's hard. At 23, you're at the easy end of it. I don't think it's that most people really say, "Hey, I'd like a busy, harried lifestyle in exchange for nice material circumstances." It's that they don't have a guiding passion or enormous discipline helping them say no to every single physical comfort or material pleasure that society offers them.