I keep hammering the "frugality" drum here, so much that I'm afraid you'll begin to think that I think frugality is "the point". It's not. Frugality for its own sake is as stupid of a game as affluence for its own sake. Frugality is a method, one tool among many to be poised for maximum advantage to live the Good Life.
Many people find themselves in positions of maximum advantage without the aid of frugality. It's certainly not necessary - many people live Good Lives without a whiff of intentional frugality to them, and that's grand.
But frugality is a bit like having a cheat code or a magic potion. Quaff a slug of this stuff, rest for two nights of aches and fever as the hedonoxins flush from your liver, and starting on the third day fortune smiles on you at every turn. Life gets unaccountably easier. Events that before you'd have considered disastrous are now met with an indifferent shrug. Things that used to keep you up at night with worry now keep you up at night with excited ruminations of how you can seize the obvious opportunity.
For Example
For the first many years of my career, I was not frugal at all, and I lived in a very high cost of living area. I didn't blow my money on embarrassingly stupid things like shaker weights and jet skis, but I was not the wisest of financial stewards. After paying off my student loans, I promptly went into consumer debt. Housing was always more than a third of my income, and the status quo of dropping money on good beer, good food, and good outdoor gear kept me living basically paycheck to paycheck.
When I entered my career, I was very focused on The Mission. Work was never "just a job" to me - it was my purpose, a component of my Life's Work. I was entirely focused on the system-level solution of de-carbonizing the built environment. Worldview fit was very important to me. I would not have been able to tolerate working on something unrelated to my Life's Work of Doing Something about the Metacrisis.
I didn't understand it at the time, but I was in a fragile position at multiple levels.
For starters, my own house wasn't in order. Not only was my personal ecological footprint embarrassingly high due to my consumption level, my life was fragile to disruption. Job loss would have sent me scrambling for another full time position - and only positions with compensation above some certain level would suffice to cover my lifestyle expenses.
When considering paid work, not only did I have to ask "Is this work aligned with my purpose?" I had to ask "Will they pay me enough to support the manner of living to which I have become accustomed?" The higher one's required base pay, the fewer options there are for a good fit.
This is not a good position if your goal is to find a very tight fit between your values and your work. To me, “meaningful and productive engagement in socially valuable endeavor” is a required attribute of the Good Life. The more constraints or risks there are between me and that socially valuable work, the more tenuous my hold on Good Lifeyness is.
Over a decade ago, I'd found a really good fit where I was paid well enough and the work was rather aligned with what I saw as my "life's work". But my vision of what that life's-work is drifted over the years. By the end, I found it difficult to convince myself that what I was getting paid to do was relevant to my Life’s Work. But I didn’t know how to fix the misalignment and pay for my lifestyle. So I didn’t.
So it is very much true that my high cost of living was causing me to stagnate on my progress towards my version of the Good Life. It’s not just that I couldn’t see how to switch from what I was doing to something more aligned - I didn’t have enough “runway” to spend the time to figure it out. I was, in a way, trapped.
But now that I've been insufferably obsessed with frugality for almost a year and a half, my comfortable cost of living is below the federal poverty level. The range of paid-work options available to me is enormous.
The Part Where It Gets Real
I bring this up not as a theoretical exercise. I got laid off last week. A result of Covid-induced economic troubles and a lack of effective internal marketing on my part, which arguably is a symptom of the anomie stemming from a world-view "life's-work" mismatch. Whatever the reasons, my current mental state is a valuable case study in how frugality contributes to the Good Life.
I'm not worried or anxious about my future. I'm not in a rush. I'm not scrambling. I am a bit in mourning for the past twelve years, but that is healthy I think.
I plan to take several months to not hustle at all, to reflect deeply and live in the world a bit, to see friends, to spend days and weeks not looking at a glowing glass rectangle thing. I already am dealing with a flood of inspiration and ideation about what I could do with the rest of my life, a mix of dreams and plans — some new, some resuscitated from before my disillusionment and burnout in the corporate world.
I am far from wealthy by middle class Western standards, but since my cost of living is so low I have about five years before I need to earn another dollar. I have all the time in the world.
Now that I've been granted the gift of a blank slate with all the time and space I need to figure out my next moves, I'm filled with possibility and excitement. I'm re-remembering all of the dreams of what I could reasonably do with my life, but had buried years ago because at the time I couldn't figure out how to make those things pay for my lifestyle.
This sense of freedom and spaciousness in the face of an event normally considered cause for anxiety is the point, and the magic, of frugality.