Hint: Your friends may be a big part of whether you can live (and love) a more frugal lifestyle.
When I worked as a corporate lawyer in Manhattan, I spent a small fortune on shoes, clothes, restaurant meals, and other upscale accoutrements of urban professional life. Now I live in a New England college town, working as a freelance writer. My expenses are a fraction of what they once were, and yet, I’m happier.
What accounts for the difference?
It’s not that I’ve become a better or less materialistic person. I’m pretty much the same. What’s changed is who I hang out with, what academics call my “reference group.”
As Boston College sociology Professor Juliet B. Schor explains in The Overspent American, what we buy tends to be heavily influenced by “people we respect and want to be like, people whose sense of what’s important in life seems close to our own.” In other words, we are social creatures, and our spending habits reflect that.
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