In this episode, Simone and I talk about the new hedonism: voluntary Austerity. We talk about why this is a bad thing, why it's not, and what it means for us and the world at large.
00:00:00.000Hello, gorgeous. Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be here with you today. And what I wanted to talk about today was just a thought that came to me in sort of the younger groups where I'm like, these are like the cool, competent, younger people I know. And this trend I see of austerity is the new hedonism.
00:00:20.420And then I started to think about this line more. And I was like, well, let's elaborate on this. It is voluntary austerity is the new involuntary hedonism.
00:00:35.520And when I brought this to you, something that you pointed out that I thought was really interesting is that hedonism is always involuntary.
00:00:48.740And austerity is always voluntary. To have less due to reasons outside of your control is just poverty.
00:01:01.620It's not austerity. Austerity is intentional self-regulation. Whereas with hedonism, because it is being driven by your internal instincts, things that you did not choose to want to feel, it is always a thing that you are approaching outside of your control.
00:01:39.060Elaborate on what you mean by that. Give some examples.
00:01:41.300Yeah. Well, I mean, I would argue that the dopamine hit that I get from saving money is similar to the dopamine hit that many people get from spending money.
00:01:51.280And whereas spending money really stresses me out.
00:01:54.240I don't know about this. One of your favorite shows these days, so people who don't know this,
00:01:58.300she talks about it all the time. It's like her core guilty pleasure show right now is a show where people put money into envelopes. Explain this.
00:02:06.740No, no, no, no. Actually, my favorite current YouTube binge is Caleb Hammer's channel.
00:02:14.240He interviews people. He has guests on who need help with their finances, typically because they're in crippling debt and really spending their money poorly.
00:02:22.220And then he creates new, very austere spending programs for them and budgets and talks about how, like, well, for the next, like, year, you're not going to go out to eat.
00:02:30.660You're not going to do anything fun at all. You're going to work, you know, a ton to pay off all this insane debt so that you can get back to a good place.
00:02:36.800And I just find it insanely comforting.
00:03:11.340And, you know, even in their early 20s with insane amounts of debt on really dumb stuff.
00:03:16.700Like, they bought a Tesla totally on finance that they have no ability to pay off.
00:03:22.440And they just kind of, I remember noticing a lot of Americans use credit cards the way that we would use, like, an exclusively for fun budget.
00:03:35.740Meaning that, like, as long as I have a limit on my credit card and I can keep spending it, I can spend this on whatever I want.
00:03:42.480And I can go take my friends out to dinner.
00:03:47.580But, yeah, no, I did discover Caleb Hammer's channel after I discovered the whole genre of envelope budgeting on YouTube, where you don't see a person or an interviewer or anything like that.
00:03:58.520You see just a pair of hands on a desk taking a biweekly payroll or monthly earnings in cash and then putting them into little envelopes.
00:04:08.880And there's this whole cottage industry that has arisen around this with people selling on Etsy, like, shops of, like, their templates for, like, the little, like, money holders you can buy and everything like that.
00:04:21.880And also even, like, templates for, like, forms of budgets and little contests you can create for yourself around saving for different things.
00:04:29.600Because the way the envelope budgeting works, and in fact, we actually do something kind of similar, is you, every time you get a paycheck, put, like, a certain amount of money toward, like, this is for fun, this is for travel, this is for, you know, insurance, this is for bills, this is for whatever.
00:04:44.140And you only spend money that you have, which is what we do, just in bank accounts.
00:04:49.620But I just want to say, like, the rise of these types of YouTube channels, where, like, a lot of people are just watching other people carefully budget their money, or other people build extremely disciplined financial plans, is growing.
00:05:04.080And I find it interesting because these are people with runaway hedonism.
00:05:09.920You can see it in, like, because, I mean, on Caleb Hammer's channel, he'll, like, go through people's credit card statements and go through everything, like, their waxing appointments, each restaurant they'll go to.
00:05:20.640He'll, like, and he'll shit on the restaurants.
00:05:22.660He'll be, like, In-N-Out Burger, like, you can't afford this, and what a shitty burger.
00:05:26.600You know, like, he just gets really, really riled up.
00:06:34.440I mean, one, no, people can't afford this.
00:06:36.740Two, we are in a society that's just pervaded by runaway hedonism where people cannot even bring themselves to think about the future and the pain that they're giving to their future selves.
00:06:46.880I mean, like, the constant theme on Caleb Hammer's channel is you're going to die on a Walmart floor.
00:06:54.800You are completely screwed and you're in insane debt.
00:06:59.280And yet these people, like, who frequently come in for follow-ups don't change their behavior.
00:07:04.860But, but, but there's this growing interest in austerity, which is why I think you're really astute to say there's this increasing interest in austerity because there totally is.
00:07:14.580And people are watching this and people are going on the show.
00:07:17.120Like, they see these plans and they find them very appealing.
00:07:20.880I think in a very similar way that people find, like, tradwifery very appealing.
00:07:25.300Well, I mean, I want to elevate an idea here that you often tell me about how you think about this.
00:07:31.500Like, when you are denying yourself something in the present to indulge in it in the future, whether that is saving or anything like that.
00:07:40.840Like, you indulge in giving it away or spending it on our projects to try to make the world a better place.
00:07:46.400And we don't actually really donate to external charities.
00:07:48.900We only donate to charities we manage because she has worked in external charities and she doesn't believe that they're efficacious at all.
00:07:53.900But we do, you know, give away a significant amount of our money to our charities and stuff like that.
00:07:57.540And what you say is, well, I'm not really Simone in the future, right?
00:08:02.500Like, but I'm okay with sacrificing now for that person, for Simone in the future.
00:08:08.140And with the urban monoculture, this progressive movement, there's this idea, and we've talked about this with, like, the Hayes movement and stuff like that.
00:08:14.540Like, why is it bad to tell a fat person being fat is unhealthy, even though that would help them in the long term, to, like, accept this as a reality, like, an obvious reality?
00:08:23.080And it's because it causes pain in the moment.
00:08:25.480And it is a cultural system that has elevated their in-the-moment identity over their future identity.
00:08:33.000But what's really interesting about this elevation versus the people who do make sacrifices in the present for their future selves, for their ability to act in society, is that these two people are showing how they themselves judge their future selves.
00:08:49.340So the individual who is okay with letting themselves die on a Walmart floor so that they can do whatever they want now, they are doing that because they don't care about that future version of themselves.
00:09:08.940They do not admire that future iteration of themselves.
00:09:11.540They don't see it as something great or good or worth investing in.
00:09:14.040Whereas for you or me, the future version of ourselves is always better than the current version of ourselves if we are doing everything right.
00:09:23.340And therefore, more deserving of the sacrifices our present self is making than our present self would be if we indulged in those things.
00:09:32.100So pushing back, there is research that has looked at how people plan for the future and like the extent to which they're willing to commit to their future selves.
00:09:42.360And a lot of it just has to do with priming.
00:09:44.580And I think what's going on is people are literally not thinking about their future selves.
00:09:49.140They're just, they're like, I cannot, I cannot think about that.
00:09:53.580I think a lot of this is about contextualization.
00:09:55.400So I will dig up those studies and send them to you and we can include links in the description because it is interesting how just getting people to think about themselves in the future or see pictures of themselves in the future can get people to be like, oh, wait, I actually care.
00:10:10.880It's interesting that you mentioned this.
00:10:12.320So something that I've seen talked about a lot recently is like the growing normalization of suicidal ideation.
00:10:21.080But before I go down that route, people are probably wondering what I'm snacking on and it is actually relevant to the topic of this video.
00:10:46.740It tastes enormously fancy to me at least.
00:10:49.440But, and it has this level of hedonism to it that in a historic time period would have been considered like the most indulgent of hedonisms.
00:10:59.000Yet within our time period, it is something that people look at and they're like, that's a fairly cheap cheese.
00:11:19.660Like if you're talking about it versus going out to get like a nice burger or something, an artisan cheese is always going to have more complexity of flavor.
00:11:30.900It's going to be better financially for you.
00:11:33.200And this is also something I was thinking about in terms of the way that people indulge in unique flavors and stuff like that is many of the sort of categories of food that you can indulge in with unique behaviors are either enormously expensive, like cocktails, unless you're making them at home.
00:11:49.000And also alcoholic or wines, which are alcoholic or whiskeys, which are alcoholic or beers, which are alcoholic.
00:11:56.000And yet there's not as many in the non-alcoholic.
00:12:04.620So people understand how people used to relate to cheeses.
00:12:07.080Because I studied medieval Scottish history when I was at St. Andrews, a university in Scotland, where I did my undergrad.
00:12:13.280And they used to collect taxes in cheese because it was a portable luxury good that people could make and store for long times in a sort of distributed area.
00:12:26.300Similar to how the Mayans collected cacao beans and there were even counterfeit cacao beans.
00:12:37.020That is much more flavorful and complex and nuanced in many meals.
00:12:39.900And this is also what I'm thinking of with hedonism is people elevate the forms of hedonism, which gives them status within their society, you know, that can be used for social status or that remove effort from them.
00:12:51.860Instead of the forms of hedonism, like when you're being intentional about hedonism, like I want to indulge in a complex flavor that is very sharp and very, you know, overwhelming.
00:13:04.600Like artisanal cheeses work great for that.
00:13:07.340You don't actually need to go out and do all of this other stuff, which is really interesting.
00:13:24.280So people should know all of our Easter candy.
00:13:26.700Every time after a holiday, we have it marked whenever everything goes on sale.
00:13:29.940And we go out and we buy all the like extra Halloween candy.
00:13:34.280And then we buy enough to last us to Easter.
00:13:36.800And then at the end of Easter, we buy enough for next year.
00:13:40.300But most of the Easter stuff we have out now is all, actually all of it is all from last year.
00:13:45.280Because a lot of these holiday candies, they don't expire for a long time.
00:13:48.640But now I want to talk about suicidal ideation and the role.
00:13:54.320One thing that I hear in these Gen Z and Gen Alpha videos, especially from like leftist influencers, is it is apparently now becoming pretty common.
00:14:02.680And this is especially true in the context of now that they're beginning to accept like pronatalism as a real concern.
00:14:08.760And they're like, look, when people are like, what are you going to be doing when you're old?
00:14:12.720And they just plan to end it before then.
00:14:15.900They're like, I'll do what I can now to be happy.
00:14:19.100But the truth is, is I don't have savings.
00:16:19.220It was much more likely that a person regularly went to a fortune teller than a psychologist.
00:16:24.260And if you go, you know, the Old West or something, I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 recently, which I think is an interesting depiction of the Old West.
00:16:31.880Or, you know, when we read the story about my ancestors, you know, the account of their life in the episode of People Used to Like Their Parents.
00:16:39.160You know, these were not people where anyone would go to a psychologist.
00:16:43.220And yet they had enormously better mental health than individuals today.
00:16:46.460It is this self-indulgence which is causing these negative externalities.
00:16:50.260I mean, it genuinely worries me that somebody could build up half a million followers and still have takes that are so uneducated and so ungrounded from reality to accurately note that, yes, mental health does have something to do with why people aren't having kids anymore.
00:17:06.020But then to think that it's due to there not being enough psychologists, to have no historical context to know that the psychology industry is a completely modern phenomenon that correlates with the mental health crisis,
00:17:20.820i.e. it appears that the mental health crisis is a result of too many psychologists and psychologists like thinking invading mainstream discussions of dealing with mental health instead of just nutting up, which is what we used to do,
00:17:39.840which it turns out is a much more psychologically healthy way to deal with the challenges in your life than to medicalize it and to externalize it and to believe you need to see this sort of secular confessionary class.
00:17:55.460But also, it's an indulgence in a lifestyle and in a cultural system that doesn't really have a plan.
00:18:03.300Because the cultural system is so optimized for in-the-moment hedonism, it doesn't really have a plan for the future.
00:18:09.840And when people begin to realize this, there is two things they can do.
00:18:14.160They can go against their cultural group.
00:18:15.580They can go and say, hey, maybe these religious weirdo-rightists, people like the Collinses, who we say have made up some weird cult for their family.
00:18:34.780And I think that's really interesting because in history, we've never seen this.
00:18:39.040In history, we've never seen a world in which a lot of society was just like, yeah, after my golden years, after I hit 30 or 35, it's over for me.
00:18:53.720I'm not really planning for past that stage.
00:18:56.380Yeah, I mean, although I guess there were people who were like, very happy to go out and die in war.
00:19:08.700I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
00:19:10.340And have you sort of seen this nihilism that's become so common within this generation?
00:19:14.140I think I see more of the examples of the interest in austerity, but then, of course, failure to follow through on it, which is what I find really interesting.
00:19:23.980Because it's not just showing up in financial niches or people getting into being a trad wife or whatever.
00:19:30.780Think about all the weird health diets that are so big.
00:19:34.240Going keto, going paleo, or intermittent fasting is so popular now.
00:19:41.860It's becoming very high class to have a cold plunge pool, to really carefully diet, maybe with the help of Ozempic, but people are actually successfully losing weight now.
00:19:54.040So, it seems to be also that austerity, even among the very well-resourced, is a status signaler.
00:20:03.780So, it's not just picking up, I think, because people are realizing...
00:20:14.380So, when you look at the tech nerd bro culture, and you look at the wealthiest people in the world, you can look at Sam Bakeman-Fried, for example, who was one of the wealthiest people in the world for a while.
00:20:24.540And he would constantly attempt to signal his austerity.
00:20:28.280I mean, he succumbed to hedonism more.
00:20:29.940I can't believe anyone believed that he actually had any level of austerity when he couldn't even resist playing video games and board meetings.
00:20:36.140But, I mean, talk about succumbing to in-the-moment hedonism like a maniac.
00:20:39.320But then the other person who I think actually does live with a level of austerity is Elon Musk.
00:20:44.560At least he aspires to live with some austerity.
00:20:47.360I won't say that he succeeds in it, but you see this in his documentaries and stuff like this.
00:20:52.200It's this aspiration to live a degree of austerity.
00:20:55.600Yeah, like when he sort of decided to not have a home for a long time.
00:20:59.960But, I don't know, he might be a good example of the interplay between those two things, right?
00:21:04.140Because he still does pretty hedonistic things.
00:21:06.800And, like, I think in the biography on him by Walter Isaacson, there was this one part where I think he started intermittent fasting and, like, dieting really carefully.
00:21:17.240But then he wasn't, like, quite going all the way.
00:21:20.160Like, then he'd, like, go to a fast food joint and get really shitty food because he'd be like, yeah, this is my one, like, window where I can eat.
00:22:28.320I mean, you get the impression he genuinely finds it funny, too, and is doing it because he can't.
00:22:33.080But, of course, many things can be true at the same time.
00:22:36.560But, yeah, no, I do think that it's becoming cool to be austere.
00:22:39.800And to me, the fact that it seems that more people are interested in austerity than are actually practicing it or apparently capable of practicing it implies to me that this is more of a status thing than it is a recognition that our current way of life and focus on hedonism is unsustainable.
00:22:59.800But you imply with the thesis of your argument that that's not true and that we will see a significant number of people genuinely become austere and actually follow through, which I doubt.
00:23:12.360I think when you can build austerity into a form of status signaling, which I think we are getting close to doing in a society, right?
00:23:23.720I.e., and this is one of the problems with many wealth or high status people in the past.
00:23:31.560You know, you look like an Andrew Tate or something like that, where their lifestyles are most defined by a lack of austerity and personal industry, right?
00:23:39.000That when we redefine, and this is what masculinity used to be, you know, this is what ideal femininity used to be, right?
00:23:47.340Like there was a masculine form of austerity and a feminine form of austerity.
00:23:50.420When we redefine these as positive qualities, both in partners and people we look up to and people who we signal boost, which is now possible with these new types of platforms we have and stuff like that.
00:24:03.480I mean, one of the problems was individuals who elevated austerity, which we talked about in our most recent track.
00:24:08.880Well, depending on when this goes live, it was track four, is that cultural sources that elevate austerity as a thing of goodness are intrinsically at odds and hostile to the wealthy and powerful in our society.
00:24:22.760Because it devalues the thing that they want to do with that wealth and value, you know, now they've reached this role within our society, now they have all this power, now they want to use it to do whatever they feel like, right?
00:24:35.200And if you assign austerity as a positive moral metric, well, now you're devaluing those that have power, so you are a threat.
00:24:44.420And it's really interesting, you even see this in communist systems.
00:24:47.520Like communists always promote austerity until they have power, and then it's, well, you know, austerity for the middle of the population at least, but certainly not for the people who are running this government.
00:24:59.340I mean, we need our constant caviar shipments and private boats and military parades.
00:25:06.460Yeah, well, I think anyone will start to justify, and I see this in the guests on Caleb Hammer's YouTube channel slash podcast all the time, who are like, oh, well, you know, I don't have time to do this.
00:25:19.080And this is why I get DoorDash, like every single day.
00:25:34.420And I think it's very easy for anyone, no matter how austere or, like, mission-driven they see themselves to be, to, if they do not keep themselves honest, over time start spending preposterous amounts of money on things that they think are necessary and fully appropriate that really are not.
00:25:51.560I think what's interesting is if there could be some way where we can tie austerity becoming a status signaler with the kind of actually effective interventions that cause people to start serving their future selves, which has been found in this research of, like, actually thinking about your future self more, contextualizing yourself as part of this unbroken chain of people, that we could actually see some really positive change.
00:26:16.880For example, like, on a regular basis, you know, I, like, waddle around the house talking to myself all the time.
00:26:37.560Thank you, yeah, I, actually, I need to look into the origins of that, like, is there maybe something, like, associated with a madness-related disease related to accidentally ingesting fecal matter from bats?
00:26:50.820For anyone wondering, it comes from the term bats in the belfry, which was, belfry is a part of a church, and when it wasn't in use, it would get bats in it, and that was like, your brain's not in use, they were saying.
00:27:03.680And then people in modern times just added the word shit to it because it sounds awesome.
00:27:14.440But anyway, so I will walk around the house, and, like, if, for example, like, you know, something has been, like, prepped for me by my past self, I'll be like, oh, thank you, past Simone.
00:27:26.800And then I will take a lot of pride in, like, setting things up for, like, Simone of tomorrow morning to make sure that she has an easier morning.
00:27:34.460Well, you often send letters to these different iterations of yourself, addressed to different iterations of yourself.
00:27:39.680Where she really fully, this is even before we met, sees herself at different frames of time as entirely different people.
00:27:46.760But I'm always working in service to future Simone's, but also thinking back to past Simone's and thinking, like, wow, she, like, deserves a lot of praise and credit for really setting me up well.
00:27:56.880And I think if people contextualize that more into their lives and started seeing their lives like that, they would start to actually gain genuine hedonic satisfaction from austerity.
00:28:08.360Because austerity is almost always an action or a sacrifice that's taken in favor of the future.
00:28:12.960Well, for the audience who may have struggled with, like, what you're talking about here, it's like the ship of Thetia thought experiment.
00:28:20.240You know, like, boards fall off of a ship over time, and they're replaced over time.
00:28:24.060When it gets to the final port, it has none of the original boards.
00:28:26.640Is it a different ship, or is it the original ship?
00:28:29.100You are basically taking the answer of every time a board falls off, it's meaningfully a new ship.
00:28:33.860But it's also meaningfully part of a continuum of ships, and therefore it's serving the future interests of the ship.
00:28:40.080What I'm serving, like, any conscious moment of my life, is the mission of transporting my cargo, my people, whatever.
00:28:49.240Like, it's not about the material composition of the ship.
00:28:53.900It is about the act of conveying passengers or cargo from one port to another.
00:29:00.280And I think when people contextualize themselves as that and seeing themselves in service to that, then it's very different.
00:29:06.080And, again, please remind me to send you those studies, so you can see, like, it does really affect people's decision making.
00:29:13.580I love you, and I love your crazy shows.
00:29:16.320And if you wanted to end on a thought, you could end on the craziest thing that people have overindulged in.
00:29:35.480It's like, if it'd be one thing, if it was like, oh, you know, I bought, you know, a yacht that was, you know, stranded in the middle of the desert, and I was going to create a resort around it.
00:29:45.500You know, like something crazy, right?
00:30:04.720Like, he's blown his money on insanely, insanely risky investments.
00:30:10.120And what's the problem with these people who may end up being perpetually poor is that they pretty much always spend their money on what Caleb Hammer describes as taquitos, which is just like dumb impulse buys.
00:30:22.100Like, you go into a 7-Eleven and you buy taquitos, and he'll just, like, go through people's statements and be like, taquitos, taquitos.
00:30:29.400I kind of like – that's an interesting – maybe someday, even if we have enough to flesh that out, a topic for a future podcast is the difference between, you know, like dumb spending versus dumb spending.