Lifestyle Creep: How It Started, How It's Going
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. Let’s look at these two examples to illustrate what I’m trying to get at:
| Scenario A | Scenario B | |
|---|---|---|
| Person | Anne | Bob |
| Monthly expenditures | Rose by 100% over the past 5 years | Rose by 100% over the past 5 years |
| House cleaning situation | Hired a cleaner 2 years ago | Hired a cleaner 2 years ago |
| Perspective on hiring a cleaner | No longer considers it a luxury | No longer considers it a luxury |
| Is this change of perspective considered lifestyle creep according to the definition? | Yes | Yes |
| Substitute for time saved not cleaning | Spends more time watching tennis | Looks after elderly mother |
| Do I deem the change in perspective useful? (i.e. do I consider the lifestyle creep ‘justified’) | Not at all | Very much |
My point is that many things are correlated to higher age: higher salaries, higher expenditures, more responsibilities, more people depending on one, more societal pressure. What I really care about is the following:
Is my change of perception, me no longer considering something a luxury, arbitrarily caused by me spending more resources?
and thereby excluding the case in which more resources are spent on standard of living, but the change of perception being caused by something else, itself merely correlated but not caused by the increased spending.
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 discussion of what other people should need or want, which usually degenerate into discussion 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, because more resources are spent on standard of living of a given person, this person starts taking former luxuries for granted.
Now, even with this definition the presence of lifestyle creep doesn’t imply poor decision making1. For instance, is it reproachable to […]?
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.
So in short, I would think that lifestyle creep is always very expensive but sometimes justified.
The actual list
Now I ask myself: with a change of spending in resources, to what extent am I taking for granted now, what I clearly considered a luxury 5 years ago?
Lifestyle creep list
TODO: This list still assumes the former definition (correlation).
What is the progress of taking former luxuries for granted?
| Aspect | Progress |
|---|---|
| Exclusively buying organic eggs | |
| Having 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 pack 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 | |
| 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 this have not become more or less of a luxury, despite higher spending:
- ANC headphones
- Keyboard
- External monitors
- Phones
Reverse lifestyle creep
Reversal (fewer resources spent on it; former necessities turn into luxuries)
- Eating many vegetables a day
- A week of deliberate isolation/solitude per year (Resource: time)
- Arch Linux (Resource: time and decision making capital)
- Having zero exposure to Windows
- Tiling window manager
Assuming that one doesn’t consider it a poor decision to take anything for granted. ↩︎
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 so far I’ve 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… ↩︎