Lifestyle Creep
Wikipedia’s definition of lifestyle creep looks as follows:
Lifestyle creep, also known as lifestyle inflation, is a phenomenon that occurs when, as more resources are spent on standard of living, former luxuries become perceived necessities.
Me rambling about this definition
To be perfectly honest, I don’t find said definition to be particularly useful.
Firstly,
[…] as more resources are spent […]
expresses a correlation. What I really care about is causation, though.
Secondly, I find it difficult to wrap my hand around the concept of a necessity. I side with what Jakob Lund Fisker writes in his Early Retirement Extreme:
[…] often results in normative discussions of what other people should need or want, which usually degenerate into discussions about what is possible and what is not possible. The fact that it is so hard to agree on which is which suggests that the differentiation has become meaningless and thus irrelevant. There are no such things as needs and wants. […] Needs and wants are different in degree, not in kind.
Therefore I will define my own notion of lifestyle creep as follows:
Lifestyle creep, also known as lifestyle inflation, is a phenomenon that occurs if a given person starts taking former luxuries for granted because more resources are spent on standard of living.
One important aspect of lifestyle creep is its self-reinforcing nature: no longer perceiving something as a luxury makes one more likely to incur costs for it, which increases resource spending, which turns more luxuries into non-luxuries. This can be a really powerful effect by itself; and yet it might still join forces with missing out on compounding of investments not made.
This effect can be seen in the following animation: in the ’no lifestyle creep’ scenario the costs of living don’t increase while the income increases by 10% a year; in the ’lifestyle creep' scenario, costs grow as fast as income. The y-axis represents cumulative costs over the years – its unit being the yearly income at year 0.
3
I would tend to think that lifestyle creep is always very expensive but sometimes justified.
The actual list(s)
Now I ask myself: to what extent am I taking for granted now, what I considered a luxury 5 years ago due to increased spending 1? What is the ‘progress’ of taking former luxuries for granted?
| Aspect | Progress |
|---|---|
| Exclusively buying organic eggs | |
| Having a gym membership | |
| Being surrounded by lighting that I perceive as nice | |
| Exclusively writing on Leuchtturm notebooks | |
| Avoiding flights departing before 7:30am | |
| Going to restaurants | |
| Not crashing on people’s sofas | |
| Riding 1st class on trains | |
| Celebrating the miracle of burrata | |
| Having a solid serving of raspberries a day 2 | |
| Avoiding flights arriving after 11:30pm | |
| Opportunistically buying concert tickets for any show I might potentially go to in any of the major European cities | |
| Taking part in equipment-heavy sports such as skiing or climbing | |
| Having a physiotherapy appointment in less than 48h after the onset of a stiff neck or shoulder pain | |
| Owning a pair of sunglasses | |
| Having and using AC when working in summer | |
| Having a beard trim every other day3 | |
| Engaging in analog photography and having films developed | |
| Having ironed shirts | |
| Buying a vinyl here, a vinyl there | |
| Using a nice4 desk chair | |
| Going to sumptuous hotels5 | |
| Checking in a piece of luggage | |
| Having ironed t-shirts |
No change
To my surprise, the following have not become more or less of a luxury, despite higher spending:
- ANC headphones
- Keyboard
- External monitors
- Phones
Reverse lifestyle creep
Previously, the spending referred to money. Yet, if I relax this restriction to any resource, I notice some ‘reverse’ lifestyle creep: what I formerly took for granted, turned into a luxury due to decreased resource allocation in a given resource dimension:
- Eating many many vegetables a day
- Spending time in deliberate isolation
- Having zero exposure to Windows6
- Having a neat tiling window manager
- Having a neat Arch Linux setup
Of course, I cannot really know what change is due to my change in income and spending or other changing covariates such as age, philosophy etc. I’ll try to guess the causes of the effects. ↩︎
In spring and summer, that is. ↩︎
I do plan on continuing to do it myself; modulo a lucky lottery ticket. ↩︎
In terms of function; I gave up on the form of desk chairs many moons ago. ↩︎
I did the math: in 2024 I stayed in 5 hostels and 10 4 or 5 star hotels. I want to stay a person who feels at ease in both. I also stayed in two mountain huts but I have never and probably will never feel truly at ease there. The smells, the noises, the nervous energy… ↩︎
The resource in question being political/decision making capital (integrity?)? ↩︎