“Trading Up” - Venketesh Rao:
"The middle class script is basically “Trade time (in units of years) for money, invest money to make more money.”; the rich script is more like “trade money and time (in hours) for more money and time at the best exchange rates possible.” The poor script is “Trade time (in units of hours) for money and spend the money.
So to Venkat’s point, Matlab is not considered an asset by Kiyosaki and the middle class because it doesn’t return money; saving time is not considered valuable because it can’t yield more money. To the middle class, pirating Matlab is okay, even if it takes two weeks of spare time, because their money is finite while their time is relatively abundant. To the rich, buying Matlab is fine because the time saved can be reinvested to make more money or time.
I was (and remain to some extent) guilty of what science fiction writer Bruce Sterling calls acting dead: being irrationally averse to spending money where it matters, in a misguided attempt to “save” money to the point that the behavior paralyzes you. A large segment of the middle class is starting to act dead these days. Which makes sense since the class itself is dying. To stop acting dead, you have to resolve to exit the traditional middle class as well, unless you want to go down with it.
Not acting dead involves a strategic spending pattern that marketers are starting to call trading up: buying premium in some areas of your life, while buying budget or entirely forgoing spending in other areas. This effect is a sort of the opposite of what I called Gollumization earlier this year: unthinking, undiscriminating consumption to the point that consumption defines you.
While spartan frugality is a virtue, when it becomes the entire purpose of your life, there’s a problem. For a portion of the dying American middle class, frugality has turned into a life purpose.
An example is extreme couponing, which is why I used that as an example of radical Gollumization. It is saving gone amok: never buying anything not on sale (and therefore never buying things that never go on sale)
The characteristic sign that you are practicing unhealthy acting-dead frugality is that you cut back on core expenses that might help you be more generative, in order to keep up appearances as long as possible
Waiting for Godot is your classic arrival fallacy. You fixate on specific narrative elements (like moving to Bali or working for 4 hours a week), make the few big moves, and spend the rest of your life waiting for the Big Event signifying that it is working, while slipping slowly into destitution and denial. I see a lot of people in this mode right now. They’ve never really stopped to analyze the logic of the script, but accepted it on faith based on assurances from a few for whom it has worked.
In the first two cases, I tried to do it all myself, even though I have an aversion to fussy kinds of technical formatting work and paperwork to the point that they should count as phobias. When I finally pulled the trigger and outsourced the work, it was like a major load being taken off my mind, coupled with severe regret for the time already spent on pointless frustration.
In the third case, it was again about saving money. I spent months mucking around with Python, R and various other open source alternatives to Matlab. Here, the messiness of having to deal with a unwieldy and weakly integrated open-source tools, along with my own serious aversion (similar to my paperwork aversion) to fussy configuration issues, and my generally poor ability to pick up new programming skills, had me wasting months in frustrated spinning-of-wheels.
And in the meantime, I was not doing things I wanted to do, simply because I was too cheap to buy a quality tool that I was familiar with, and could save me months of painful learning (especially painful now due to the Python 2.x to 3.x transition). As with the other two cases, finally pulling the trigger made me intensely relieved.
The middle class financial script is simple really. It involves uniform spending habits within a large class, based on norms that are learned via imitation."