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Comment by helen___keller | Hacker News Reader

> wearing a $2k Rolex or driving a $70k BMW is frowned upon. But instead they have eccentric "hobbies" requiring $10ks of of equipment, inclusive of "needing" $10k viking stove/range, and $10k subzero fridge/freezer in your kitchen because you are a "foodie" […]

Isn’t this conflating status signal with lifestyle?

The wealthy have always enjoyed expensive lifestyles and hobbies. In and of itself, expensive hobby equipment is not a status signal (it can be, of course, if you plaster it all over your personal social media)

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> The wealthy have always enjoyed expensive lifestyles and hobbies.

Sorry to jump in.

There is a 2003 documentary by the name "Born Rich".

This is about the children from the wealthy people and how they are coping with the boredom of being able (afford) to do anything.

Many are naturally isolated and invent obscure hobbies and life-styles not fitting their "wealthy statuses".

Not sure how it is changing in more responsible adulthood, when it is becoming their turn to manage the estate. I guess this is then mostly about turf-wars among relatives.

(edit: formatting)

> This is about the children from the wealthy people and how they are coping with the boredom of being able (afford) to do anything.

See also the excellent Korean documentary "Squid Game"!

> ...coping with the boredom of being able (afford) to do anything.

That’s mostly a lack of sufficient education and rearing to arm them with enough knowledge and grit to choose and tackle from an infinite number of problems to advance towards a possible solution. Most of those problems don’t take generational wealth scale money to make a dent into, but a tremendous amount of hard work for years and even decades without expectations of acclaim commensurate with their generational wealth background.

Which points out the other problem: most of them want (or are pushed since childhood to want) the acclaim accrued by their inherited wealth also attached to their efforts in whatever direction they choose. It’s why we get the dilettante phenomenon among them so much.

Tightly coupling wealth to accomplishment across generations is possibly a very leaky abstraction.

For example I would contrast the following three scenarios of people in my circle.

* Having professional landscapers plant grass and plants on an outdoor terrace of a penthouse apartment for $100k

* Growing a large vegetable garden from seeds & seedlings, from your vacation home outside the city

* Raising houseplants in your apartment windowsill

All three of these people may describe themselves as having green thumbs or being into gardening as a hobby...

I am into collecting slightly obsolete audio gear, I've spent maybe $600 on the hobby in the last six months.

I know some people would think $120 is a lot for a minidisc player since you can get a flash player for so much less. Other people would think it's a trivial amount of money. Like all these things it comes in multiple scales: back in the day there were people who would spend 50x that on audio gear (there are some $20,000 speaker sets that sound great)

I don't expect to impress anybody: the last person I showed my portable minidisc player was a professor in the music department who's won one more than one Grammy award and teaches sound engineering who I ran into at the bus stop and his comment is "God, how can you listen to something compressed like that?" ("... yeah, I've been wondering about some of the coding tools they use.")

We are probably going to have some people over for a party and I don't expect many people to notice the difference with the 5.1 DTS discs I have in my CD changer but I do.

I love & miss minidiscs :-D

Used ones cost slightly less than they cost new, particularly considering inflation.

I started watching Techmoan and similar YouTubers. I have some nostalgia for compact cassettes and saw a video where they used a Dolby S deck and metal tapes and made very good recordings... Hardware like that came in around the time I was in grad school and went into a hole so it was "better than I remembered". There are Dolby S decks on the market for prices that seem within reach but the metal tapes are like $40 a piece now.

Optimal cassettes might sound as good or better than minidisc but rewinding is a hassle. They still make cassette decks and tapes but they are much worse than what was made 30 years ago. With NetMD you can record audio from your computer to a MD the same way you do with a computer which is easy: there's something to say for media that let you record your own music so you aren't stuck with what got released on SACD or can find on vinyl (which isn't too bad.)

It still seems silly when I've got several devices in my backpack usually that can play music including the Tracfone I use for emergencies.

I’ve been tempted to dig out my minidisc recording deck and player from storage, and use them for to add a bit of friction for more constrained listening. I’m probably projecting other problems onto music streaming services, but I often shut down with the endless choices and frustratingly flippant auto-generated playlists. Of course I can, and do, curate playlists for specific moods and tasks, but I also seem to lack self-control these days to not jump to another music tangent without getting lost from my original intent.

The nostalgia/quaintness of burning/updating a dozen or so minidiscs seems like an “fun”enough construct to build a deliberate ritual that outweighs the friction—similar to friction of making a pour over coffee helps force a nice 10min break and tends to limit number of cups/day to something reasonable. Either way, just more of a thought exercise at the moment.

In my case it is YouTube I am trying to get away from. Really listening to music on YouTube is a pretty good experience, it is great for discovery, and it even does a good job of making mixes for me. For many reasons though I don't want to be plugged into it and I try to listen to files on my computer, jellyfin or minidisc when I use my computer.

Upstairs I have a home theater receiver, I also have one downstairs where the HDMI out is burned out but it is good for music. I have an XBOX ONE plugged upstairs and it works for games but it seems to get worse all the time as a media player, it doesn't even play CDs although it plays DVD and Bluray. Upstairs I have the minidisc player for stereo music and one of these

https://www.crutchfield.com/S-92WonNqYEjS/p_158CDPX355/Sony-...

which is connected to the receiver with an optical cable and is full of 5.1 DTS discs which I am a huge fan of. There are some good 1970s quad recordings such as Fragile by Yes but also a lot of good stuff in the the 2000-2010 period such as Supernature by Goldfrapp and some artists like Donald Fagan who always believed in multichannel. Like stereoscopic cinema I think a lot of people don't see a big difference but I like it a lot.

There are different audiences.

I worked for a company that sold products and services to sales managers. The CEO and his wife (who was also an owner of the company) lived in a house in Rochester that had the biggest kitchen I'd ever seen anyone actually use. We would have holiday parties there and it was clear cooking was a hobby they liked to but that entertaining is also a way to enjoy your status.

Yes I think my point is that they simply signal differently by for example regaling you about how they spent $5000 on custom designed esoteric tiles from a local artisan for their shower.

Personally I don't think things that are 90% purchase/consumption (housing/renovations/appliances) are hobbies in the same way as photography/kitesurfing/gardening/cycling which may be expensive but have some sort of skill/learning/activity attached.

Renovation isn’t the hobby here, they’re not doing it themselves. But a passion for cooking justifies the high end kitchen. An interest in architecture and design justifies bringing good examples of it home.

Sure, if you have the money and interest, spend it.

But people often conflate "investment" & consumption when its anything related to home renovation. I'd still argue these types of "hobbies" are 90% consumption, and for most of the people I know.. usually financed with loans.

No one I know with a $100k kitchen cooks any better than my poor immigrant grandmother did.

Think of it like a machine shop. Expensive tools work way, way better than cheap ones.

I also have a restaurant grade toaster. It costs quite a bit more than the usual toasters do. But the usual ones would always break after a year or two. The restaurant toaster makes better toast, and has worked fine for 25 years now. It was actually cheaper to get the restaurant grade one over the long haul.

> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

On the other hand, if the wealthy person bought the $10 boots and invested the other $40, the investment could throw off enough money to keep him in annual $10 boots forever.

What are you doing to your toasters? My toaster had a good 10+ year run before I ultimately gave it away because I purchased a toaster oven. This was a Target/Walmart unremarkable kit that must surely have cost <$40, most likely something around $20 because I was a broke college kid.

They would just quit. Like my drip coffee maker. The heating element or the switch always breaks after a couple years. It's hard to buy an expensive one, as those always come with lots of buttons and a manual. I just want one that I put the coffee and water in and turn it on.

I worked for a wealthy man.

I remember two stories among many:

He once told me he was upgrading the doorknobs and hinges in this house. The bill just for those items came to $45K.

We were both getting coffee in the office once, and he looked towards me and ask, “My socks cost more than everything you’re wearing.”

And he liked me.

Nono, the price of his socks were more than everything you’re wearing. They probably cost the same as your socks :)

> “My socks cost more than everything you’re wearing.”

That’s a strange thing to waste money on for signaling. It just showed the lack of understanding on marginal utility on commodity items.

> It just showed the lack of understanding on marginal utility on commodity items.

I think you're showing the lack of understanding of marginal utility.

By the time you're spending $45k on doorknobs, $400 on socks might offer equal marginal utility per dollar.

I think a lot of what this thread shows is that everyone has a different utility function.

That's kind of whats interesting about the modern economy is we can all express our preferences in how we spend. The bottom end has gotten much cheaper and the top end has gotten exponentially more expensive, and in many markets the middle has sort of disappeared.

This contrasts a lot with the 1950s boom era where there was a big thick middle end and not a huge range from bottom to top.

I have a t-shirt I bought at the Gap around 1996 that is still wearable, though a bit worn-looking where the collar meets the shoulder seams. Thick, sturdy cotton. It was probably around $15, which would be about $30 today.

There is no such plain ladies’ fit t-shirt consistently offered anymore. Either tissue-thin and less than $20, or involves a silly print and/or ruffles and lace.

> The bottom end has gotten much cheaper and the top end has gotten exponentially more expensive, and in many markets the middle has sort of disappeared.

This enrages me so much. I hate cheap crap, but I equally hate over the top, necessary, expensive crap.

I prefer something well made, with minimal functions, for a middle price. But finding this is becoming increasingly rare as time goes on.

I have a couple clients like that. 40k on this, 25k on that. Doinky little overpriced home-improvement geegaws. And I'm thinking, "I could pay off my credit cards and take a year off for my own serious projects, for what you're spending to upgrade your stupid crown molding".

Two nouveau riches run into each other shopping on the Fifth.

- Look at this, got me this tie for $1000

- Hah what a dummy you are, they sell them for 1200 two blocks away!

How did he create this wealth

A sociologist would tell you that there is no such thing as a lifestyle which isn't a performance of one's status.

I think there are some people who are fine with exhibiting themselves (and their status) as they are without it being performative.

There are but it's considered a personality disorder.

There are folks that are genuinely uninterested in social status, and it usually goes along with being uninterested in social relationships. Think of autistic/Asperger's individuals; certain psychopaths & sociopaths; people with schizoid, schizotypal, avoidant, or antisocial personality disorders; et al. No relationships = no status = no need to worry about social status and social signaling.

It's much like how where there's people, there's politics. Where there's social, there's status. Take away the social and you take away both the performance and the status.

Saying more about their frameworks/models/worldview than reality.

Sure, this is vacuously true in the sense that if you are studying peoples behavior then any lifestyle option is a data point that can be correlated across other metrics, and hence we can call any lifestyle “a performance of one’s status” for the sake of study status and lifestyles.

But that’s not really relevant. From an individuals perspective there’s a big difference between keeping up with the joneses and focusing on what makes you happy.

Even if it turns out that what makes you happy is actually still correlated to your status and you’re not really a unique snowflake.

Reason 5,434 why sociology is a not a science.

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