Time, quiet mind, slow mornings, rest without guilt, calm and boring days - are all the same thing - escape from being busy. This assumes being busy is common, which is actually not that common for an age of 60+.
The real luxury, for any age, in general, is in not having dependencies and needs. The need to impress someone, the need to know every ugly news from around globe, the need to read everything and be knowledgeable, need to stay connected, need to be smart, the need to travel and see places, need to taste foods from around the world, need to have many friends, need to be loved by someone, and need to have more money and things.
Those are dependencies that make you weak. Lack of those means you won't be happy. Luxury is being happy without having any of those.
> The real luxury, for any age, in general, is in not having dependencies and needs.
Fewer. Everyone will always have some dependencies and needs.
Personally, I pity anyone who sees a desire to be loved as a weakness. That’s quite literally a lesson taught as a trope about being a good person vs an evil one.
Being loved is not a weakness. But a strong requirement to be loved is a weakness because that means you don't have strength to be happy without being loved.
This is actually a sad comment. How did you ever come to believe that wanting to feel loved, which is a fundamental desire (if not "need") for the vast majority of human beings, could ever be construed as a weakness resulting from a lack of "strength"?
Love is extremely common. It is not particularly much of a weakness because there are plenty of people who will love you. Now, finding that person, or those people, depending on exactly what it means, that could be hard. There are also a lot of people who will abuse your need for love, and so you do have to be careful.
I have to regularly travel to rural villages in Asia and the people that live in these places have only the most basic human desires. They barely know what an LLM is let alone interact with them. They're some of the happiest people I've ever met.
Of course they'll complain about work or money, and they assume that a Western salary buys me freedom. But they get to live through these luxuries on a daily basis. I'd be lucky to enjoy just one of these in any given week.
Beautifully put, and definitely resonated with me as someone who entered mostly-contentedly-frugal retirement a few years back.
One thing you didn't mention is the need to feel useful in some way; would you consider that a weakness too? Is it covered by "rest without guilt"? It's the bit I still have some trouble with.
Not OP, but there's a nuance. In general there's nothing wrong with wanting to be useful, but it is definitely possible to take it too far.
If you get sick and need care, you are typically not "useful". But that doesn't mean you instantly lose all value. I've had colleagues who would feel almost physically ill if they were somehow not able to respond to an incident somewhere, even if they weren't even on call at that point. Almost all of them burned out at some point and were no longer able to respond to anything, even if they'd wanted to. That's not healthy, and it weakens everyone in the long run.
Resting without guilt comes from the realization that you cannot keep the world running all by yourself. Let others pick up the work when you need a rest, so you can shelter them when they are down.
That is quite opposite of weakness. Your entire life is exercising power of your mind. What is left if you take it away? Do the thing you love and you will find your happiness.
I agree with the gist what you're saying, like ditching the ego, the status chasing, etc. But dragging stuff like staying connected, being knowledgable, enjoying good food, and travel is where this goes a bit too far. A rock has zero dependencies, but nobody wants to be a rock.
I agree with some of what you listed here but a few I think are critical to being human. What's the point of not having needs?
Desires are what makes us human. I have kids and family and friends that love me and them in return but I don't believe that makes me weak. In fact it is the opposite, they give me the strength, confidence, and motivation to power through life.
I supoose not having any needs and desires would be an asset for a hitman.
Desires are OK as long as they don't make you unhappy when you can't have them. But that's not usually the case, which means they became crutches, making your happiness to depend on achieving them.
As an example, there are places where people don't see electricity as an absolute necessity. Hours of outages everyday go mostly unnoticed. That's lack of strong dependency.
It's also true that if you raise you expectations enough then you will never be able to hit them.
Keep in mind that it's not always a case of "shoot for the stars but hit the moon if you miss", sometimes it's "shoot for the stars and suffer crippling burnout for 20 years, after which it's too late to recover to anything meaningful".
Being realistic, for all it's boringness, does have advantages.
Brad Feld was the only mentor (out of ~100 we met) during our TechStars Chicago ‘15 program who had sessions with the CEOs of the cohort and told us to take a break each day to call our significant others.
He gave us perspective when all of us were focused on hustling for demo day and raising our seed round. He reminded us that amid the hustle, there’s more to life than your startup. Thank you.
Time with my young adult children. They are all out of the house, recently, and there is nothing, and I mean NOTHING more valuable/meaningful to us than when they come home for a visit or we spend time out in the world.
I lived a short time in my 20s with friends a few blocks from my parents. When I returned to live with my parents for a short period the entire dynamic changed. You leave the house so you don't go to your room, you visit. I started talking more and listening to music with them. I really appreciated my parents more. I hope my relationship with my children will be the same.
What do you mean by listening to music with them? Like, sitting around in the living room playing each other's favorite songs? I don't think I've ever done that with my parents, my kids, or anyone really.
Listening to music with my young kids is a favorite. My wife and I also frequently invite other couples over to listen to vinyl and enjoy a cocktail or two.
We like vinyl just because it has the physicality to it but I think anything here is fine. It's the music and the shared experience.
this is nice to know as someone who is the adult child.
i used to argue a lot with my parents when i was still living with them, but ever since i moved out and we only see each other once every few months, our relationship has improved so much, and we're always happy to see each other in smaller doses
Many parents would gasp at this sentence, but the same parents would likely complain to anyone who'd listen about how negatively their children are affecting their lives.
I never enjoyed spending time with my late parents. I only did so out of a sense of obligation. I have no children and have never really given that choice a second thought.
Its interesting that people value their relationship with their children so much and I assume its due to a deep sense of connection with them, they being "flesh and blood" but I've never given that any weight. I feel much more connected to people who have had similar life experiences and ideas to myself, and that could be anyone. I have quite a few relatives who I've never met or met once and do not see because they are nothing like me.
I suspect this is mostly due to being pretty far out on the pointy bits of various bell curves.
It also depends on the parents and how they nurtured the relationship with the child as they grew up.
I had a a good relationship with mine growing up, and enjoyed visiting, talking and so on as I was an adult.
A good friend had it different. They were not good parents. He, much like you, visit out of obligation and not to get written out of the will quite frankly. If it was up to him he'd never see them again.
One thing that surprised me as a parent is that watching kids grow up provides significant introspective reflection which is nourishing in a different kind of way.
Health is obviously first, you have nothing without it. But real joy is wanting to do something, something that is important to you, and being able to. Without desire there is no joy... just a slow countdown.
Health is a slope, but it makes things much easier. I've had health issues forever, but it's the kind that is fine until you suddenly start getting ill and the surgury and missing school/uni/work for 6 months which really screws things up.
I'd take that any day over getting rheumatoid arthritis, no matter how well managed it can be.
I would put love above health. Suppose you are perfectly healthy and even rich but have no friends to share anything with, life must be meaningless then.
The two are related, bad health makes it difficult to have meaningful relations and lack of meaningful relations fucks up your health. Smoking a pack of cigarettes a day is worse for life expectancy than loneliness.
You will find an audience on an online forum like here ;) Yes, this is my case. I'm sad, it's true, but at the same time I don't see where I did wrong. Yes, there were some blunders that I did — working too much here and there, not dating this girl who liked me in high school; but overall, everyone has to work and I think I would have been even less happy after not dating AND not working enough during those phases. I attribute 40% of my loneliness to lack of skills that I couldn't acquire early enough, and 60% to others, particularly class warfare (you don't have to be rich for people to attribute you the hate that people dedicate to the first-of-the-class, especially if you're working diligently). So I became the cliché that I would have hated to become: Rich, well-travelled, muscular, but single.
Bad luck. I can't regret much, since I've done as much as I could, as early as I could, to steer off it, and I still faced the same result. Would I have committed suicide at 16 if I had known the future? No, because I didn't know at the time how much my suffering was caused by actions of others. The right thing would have probably been to kill everyone in high school if I knew how people were speaking about me.
I'm sorry to read that. In fact I meant love in a more broad sense. There are many kinds of love, it does not need to be having a spouse. I work every weekday mainly for having good relations with people, money comes second.
But coming back to your story of life (ignoring the last sentence) : it's not too late to find love and also: try knowing and loving yourself, being content a bit more. When that succeeds, it is more easy to find love.
The first half of your message led me to write a well meaning reply to tell you you still have time to be happy and meet that girl from high school or someone else. The second part is so dark and evil that I regret wasting my time.
As with many things, it's easier to stay healthy if you are wealthy.
You can buy personal training services, workout gear, a home in traffic-calmed neighborhoods where you aren't jogging or cycling along rural highways, a pool, etc.
You can buy fresh fruit and vegetables instead of highly-processed food. If you're American you can buy imported or certified organic meat instead of the hormone-filled shit on the shelves at grocery stores. You can spend less time working and more time cooking healthy, with no pressure to eat fast food because you're in a rush.
Statistically, yes. And statical health things are the only health things to really worry about (because you can't ever do things to avoid getting cancer, you can only ever do things to decrease your chance of getting cancer).
But then again, the list of things that statistically keeps you healthy while being expensive is actually very short (GLP-1s currently being the most notable item on it).
Supposedly this is going to change in the near to mid future with more wonder drugs incoming. But, for the time being, that's nice!
I mean if I had someone tailoring workouts to me, keeping me motivated to stick with a training regimen, and free time enough to get super fit and look great naked, I'd sure be happier.
I accompanied a family member in an ambulance recently and I had the ambulance rerouted to a private clinic. They needed a €25k payment guarantee but we were able to go into surgery within a day.
Time seems to be one of the most valuable luxuries. AFAIK it is not entirely clear why time seems to pass faster when one grows older. One argument is that the older brain does not form memories as intricate as in the younger brain.
Has anyone experimented with actively making more complex memories to make time pass slower? Seems like the best approach to living longer, at least in experience.
No direct answer, but I’ve personally noticed that having seasons makes a big difference here. After spending the past year on the East Coast with all of the different seasons, I certainly felt like time was going slower and looking back. It is pretty clear cut in my brain as to how much I did during that time.
That’s in contrast to where I normally live, which is southern California where you basically just go between Summer and Winter Lite which does seem to make the time pass quicker and lead to more routine living. I’ve often speculated with my friends around here about how there is a “Paradise Effect” of living here with both how people live their lives, as well as with how we perceive time.
I've found that traveling and discovering new things make time seem to pass slower because I have a lot of memories of those new places. On the other hand when I'm in a routine and keep doing the same thing everyday, it feels that time passes slower at the moment (because I'm bored) but looking back then time seems to have flown by
Exactly my experience and fits with my idea of how time is perceived in general. Ask a young child what they did this last week and they can likely rattle off a whole bunch of things that they've learned/experienced/discovered for the first time - a lot of 'memory milestones'. Ask your average adult and you'll often just get "same same" - no new 'memory milestones' because the week was pretty much just a repeat of a regular routine.
As for how it feels at the time. There's a lot of truth in the sayings "time flies when you're having fun" and "a watched pot never boils".
I’m trying to fight it by journaling more and trying to remember more of the details that make each day special (good or bad). Even the small things. Whether that is something I did with my son, or something I did slightly different for a routine task.
If you spend a year in prison then the time will pass incredibly slowly, but in retrospect (this is what prisoners usually say) the ordeal will seem quite short. Conversely, if you spend the year furiously partying or traveling or trying new adventure sports then the retrospective memory will be full to the brim, but the year itself will pass in an instant.
It all seems quite logical to me. There's no negotiating with the passage of time.
Maybe this is because I'm not a native speaker, but I'm having difficulty parsing this. What breaks? Do you mean time slows down during the retreat, or does the effect persist afterwards?
A clean place to live with minimal clutter opens room for time to enjoy other things. Labor Day and Memorial day are milestones for assessing your hoarding. Or you could just rely on the season change as a reminder.
As others have said in-thread and elsewhere: work to live, don't live for work. Yes, be professional and exceed expectations from time to time, but your in-basket will be full when you exit. Take time as the years progress to do "other things", as the physical abilities or people involved might not be there "later".
The school year, across the US used to be labor day to Memorial Day. No longer the case. My step daughter’s former district started at the beginning of August, her freshman year of college last weekend.
At least here in the states, districts because they pay teachers shit, are getting pushback to add required meetings and learning on the end of the day. Instead there are “short days” for the kids.
It’s no longer an issue for me, but seriously annoying how little k-12 are actually in school these days.
Slow mornings and rest without guilt are very apt and specific but time and health are just general wishes.
I would add work with meaning and flow.
Also life with few... snags, all the issues that are small but extremely bothersome (knocking sound in a car, that one window that doesn't close fully, etc).
because having money isn't the ultimate goal imho. it's what money enables - like a slow morning, a quiet mind, and good health. If money can't provide those or similar things, it loses its value more or less
As other comments already stated and have stated, money should never be the goal, it's the middle. Having money allows you to not worry about some of those topics, or having more time for them. If you don't have more it means you must worry about that. Having money means you don't: you don't have to worry about rent, health insurance, paying for experiences, food, etc. It's true, you don't need that much money, but still.
I don't know, self-reported happiness seems like an awfully unreliable metric. For one, I've noticed that projecting unhappiness is much more of a faux pas in rich circles. On its own this could account for much of this relationship.
Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, is on the record saying he is 'not often happy.' Somehow I doubt he'd give up half his wealth to double his happiness, though that's just a guess based on his other obvious character flaws ;)
My favorite book about this is "The Happiness Trap," because it makes the simple point that we didn't evolve to be happy all of the time. It makes a really good case for learning to live with the range of emotions and suggests ways of creating a contented/good/whatever life with what you've got.
Past being a millionaire or so, making money is a clicker game. It's something you do just for the fun of seeing number go up. And just like a clicker game, past a certain point you're no longer making the money through your own efforts, but by acquiring assets that can make the money for you (like buying the grandmas that bake cookies for you, etc.), so the game becomes determining the right mix of assets that let you acquire more, that you can then plow into more assets for even bigger growth.
The super rich aren't making more money because they think more money will buy them correspondingly more happiness. It's a game to them played at massive real-world scales.
I know a few retired men who labored hard, neglected relationships and health, and conditioned themselves to the point where a quiet mind and a slow morning would take a lot of work. I don’t think retirement means that you get the things on the list for free. You have to work for a long time to get those things.
Would you mind sharing an example of "Working on something meaningful that pushes at the edge of my self actualization"? In my experience, work, even when meaningful, is quite separate from self actualization. I'm interested to hear how you're combining them.
> In my experience, work, even when meaningful, is quite separate from self actualization.
I guess it depends on your temperament - I am very very high in industriousness and moderately high in curiosity, but the industriousness overrides the fragmentation of attention that normally comes with high curiosity individuals.
2 years ago my hobby project turned into a company, and now I run that, so for me I can find self actualisation through work, but I imagine if I was a different temperment, where work didn't overlap so much, it would be harder for that type of person.
I am approaching 40 and in two weeks I will begin clowning lessons with a Cirque du Soleil clown. I am thrilled.
So why clown as a discipline? Something deeply misunderstood and that probably lowers my social status with people who don’t understand it? Something with zero career utility? Because to me it represents extreme vulnerability.
I’m a pretty dignified person. A lot of poise. Goofy, but restrained. If I can debase myself in front of an audience in order to win a laugh then I believe I can do anything.
If I can (figuratively) hang my ass out for all to see then I can move with confidence. If I can blow past my natural inclination to save face, or have the answers. If I can discard the emotional hangups that make me feel embarrassed then I can be the person who I (and I suspect a great number of us) want to be deep down.
I want to (constructively) tear down everything inside of me that restrains me and discover who I can really be.
Ah, thanks for chiming in with your inspiring anecdote. I realize that perhaps I interpreted "working on" as pertaining to career work, rather than just investment of effort.
Your example of clowning shows something that requires real work and, as you laid out, hopefully does wonders to improving confidence, humility, humor, and charm. I wish you the best with that! And happy early birthday. :)
Well yea, it's the luxury that underpins most of the other ones on this list. The real luxury is not having to worry about money so you can focus on things like this. A luxury that is increasingly out of reach..
I humbly disagree a bit. Most items on that list do not have to cost a lot of money (besides a washing machine and a dishwasher) and some of them cannot be bought. It is also a mindset. I adore slow weekends.
I agree, for at least some listed, though many people blow past the amount of money actually needed. Money starts as a proxy measure for attaining these things, but it eventually replaces them as the goal, per Goodhart's law.
This is very true. These kinds of lists tend to be reactive to the author's environment and current state of mind. Work is not the enemy. A lack of autonomy ruins motivation.
Ask someone younger and their top ten is completely different. Too many will dismiss that as naivete while not recognizing their own ignorance.
That is why it is not a "List of things you can have tomorrow" but a "Luxury list".
When you have time, health and no stress - that is the luxury OP is talking about.
You don't even need to make more money if you have all those things. If you know your health is insured and you are healthy, you have a decent place where you can feel safe and sleep until late mornings and you do not have to worry about how much food costs - you basically live like a king.
The real luxury, for any age, in general, is in not having dependencies and needs. The need to impress someone, the need to know every ugly news from around globe, the need to read everything and be knowledgeable, need to stay connected, need to be smart, the need to travel and see places, need to taste foods from around the world, need to have many friends, need to be loved by someone, and need to have more money and things.
Those are dependencies that make you weak. Lack of those means you won't be happy. Luxury is being happy without having any of those.
Fewer. Everyone will always have some dependencies and needs.
Personally, I pity anyone who sees a desire to be loved as a weakness. That’s quite literally a lesson taught as a trope about being a good person vs an evil one.
Of course they'll complain about work or money, and they assume that a Western salary buys me freedom. But they get to live through these luxuries on a daily basis. I'd be lucky to enjoy just one of these in any given week.
Working on desire is a big thing.
Having dependencies or needs is one thing, having them managed for relative minimal impact on one's time might be another way to look at it for some.
One thing you didn't mention is the need to feel useful in some way; would you consider that a weakness too? Is it covered by "rest without guilt"? It's the bit I still have some trouble with.
If you get sick and need care, you are typically not "useful". But that doesn't mean you instantly lose all value. I've had colleagues who would feel almost physically ill if they were somehow not able to respond to an incident somewhere, even if they weren't even on call at that point. Almost all of them burned out at some point and were no longer able to respond to anything, even if they'd wanted to. That's not healthy, and it weakens everyone in the long run.
Resting without guilt comes from the realization that you cannot keep the world running all by yourself. Let others pick up the work when you need a rest, so you can shelter them when they are down.
Don't be evil tho
Desires are what makes us human. I have kids and family and friends that love me and them in return but I don't believe that makes me weak. In fact it is the opposite, they give me the strength, confidence, and motivation to power through life.
I supoose not having any needs and desires would be an asset for a hitman.
As an example, there are places where people don't see electricity as an absolute necessity. Hours of outages everyday go mostly unnoticed. That's lack of strong dependency.
Lacking those things is not a luxury. What is a luxury is time. Time is incredibly precious.
Keep in mind that it's not always a case of "shoot for the stars but hit the moon if you miss", sometimes it's "shoot for the stars and suffer crippling burnout for 20 years, after which it's too late to recover to anything meaningful".
Being realistic, for all it's boringness, does have advantages.
He gave us perspective when all of us were focused on hustling for demo day and raising our seed round. He reminded us that amid the hustle, there’s more to life than your startup. Thank you.
It's incredible.
You learn from each other in unexpected ways.
We like vinyl just because it has the physicality to it but I think anything here is fine. It's the music and the shared experience.
i used to argue a lot with my parents when i was still living with them, but ever since i moved out and we only see each other once every few months, our relationship has improved so much, and we're always happy to see each other in smaller doses
Many parents would gasp at this sentence, but the same parents would likely complain to anyone who'd listen about how negatively their children are affecting their lives.
Its interesting that people value their relationship with their children so much and I assume its due to a deep sense of connection with them, they being "flesh and blood" but I've never given that any weight. I feel much more connected to people who have had similar life experiences and ideas to myself, and that could be anyone. I have quite a few relatives who I've never met or met once and do not see because they are nothing like me.
I suspect this is mostly due to being pretty far out on the pointy bits of various bell curves.
I had a a good relationship with mine growing up, and enjoyed visiting, talking and so on as I was an adult.
A good friend had it different. They were not good parents. He, much like you, visit out of obligation and not to get written out of the will quite frankly. If it was up to him he'd never see them again.
I'd take that any day over getting rheumatoid arthritis, no matter how well managed it can be.
Bad luck. I can't regret much, since I've done as much as I could, as early as I could, to steer off it, and I still faced the same result. Would I have committed suicide at 16 if I had known the future? No, because I didn't know at the time how much my suffering was caused by actions of others. The right thing would have probably been to kill everyone in high school if I knew how people were speaking about me.
But coming back to your story of life (ignoring the last sentence) : it's not too late to find love and also: try knowing and loving yourself, being content a bit more. When that succeeds, it is more easy to find love.
You can buy personal training services, workout gear, a home in traffic-calmed neighborhoods where you aren't jogging or cycling along rural highways, a pool, etc.
You can buy fresh fruit and vegetables instead of highly-processed food. If you're American you can buy imported or certified organic meat instead of the hormone-filled shit on the shelves at grocery stores. You can spend less time working and more time cooking healthy, with no pressure to eat fast food because you're in a rush.
Money really does buy happiness.
But then again, the list of things that statistically keeps you healthy while being expensive is actually very short (GLP-1s currently being the most notable item on it).
Supposedly this is going to change in the near to mid future with more wonder drugs incoming. But, for the time being, that's nice!
I accompanied a family member in an ambulance recently and I had the ambulance rerouted to a private clinic. They needed a €25k payment guarantee but we were able to go into surgery within a day.
Has anyone experimented with actively making more complex memories to make time pass slower? Seems like the best approach to living longer, at least in experience.
That’s in contrast to where I normally live, which is southern California where you basically just go between Summer and Winter Lite which does seem to make the time pass quicker and lead to more routine living. I’ve often speculated with my friends around here about how there is a “Paradise Effect” of living here with both how people live their lives, as well as with how we perceive time.
As for how it feels at the time. There's a lot of truth in the sayings "time flies when you're having fun" and "a watched pot never boils".
It's a paradox.
It all seems quite logical to me. There's no negotiating with the passage of time.
I remember feeling like the days passed painfully slowly, but the years flew by.
Time will hit the breaks, hard.
At least here in the states, districts because they pay teachers shit, are getting pushback to add required meetings and learning on the end of the day. Instead there are “short days” for the kids.
It’s no longer an issue for me, but seriously annoying how little k-12 are actually in school these days.
I would add work with meaning and flow.
Also life with few... snags, all the issues that are small but extremely bothersome (knocking sound in a car, that one window that doesn't close fully, etc).
- Good health
- A calling (something I can devote my life to)
I think getting either is good enough for me.
Are they noticeable happier?
Would be nice to hear from someone who lived both sides of the pond for a long while.
It is a luxury to not have to worry about having enough of it.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-pritchard-on-liberal...
The super rich aren't making more money because they think more money will buy them correspondingly more happiness. It's a game to them played at massive real-world scales.
Any ideas beyond real estate?
While they sound incredible to me, I can't help but ponder that the demographic with the highest suicide rate is retired men.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10227535/
The luxuries I am grateful for:
Sleeping in as much as I need
Working on something meaningful that pushes at the edge of my self actualization
Not ever having to worry about bills
The love from my partner
Having the ability to help others selflessly
The wisdom I have gained over the last 20 years of life
The incredible people around me
I guess it depends on your temperament - I am very very high in industriousness and moderately high in curiosity, but the industriousness overrides the fragmentation of attention that normally comes with high curiosity individuals.
2 years ago my hobby project turned into a company, and now I run that, so for me I can find self actualisation through work, but I imagine if I was a different temperment, where work didn't overlap so much, it would be harder for that type of person.
I am approaching 40 and in two weeks I will begin clowning lessons with a Cirque du Soleil clown. I am thrilled.
So why clown as a discipline? Something deeply misunderstood and that probably lowers my social status with people who don’t understand it? Something with zero career utility? Because to me it represents extreme vulnerability.
I’m a pretty dignified person. A lot of poise. Goofy, but restrained. If I can debase myself in front of an audience in order to win a laugh then I believe I can do anything.
If I can (figuratively) hang my ass out for all to see then I can move with confidence. If I can blow past my natural inclination to save face, or have the answers. If I can discard the emotional hangups that make me feel embarrassed then I can be the person who I (and I suspect a great number of us) want to be deep down.
I want to (constructively) tear down everything inside of me that restrains me and discover who I can really be.
Your example of clowning shows something that requires real work and, as you laid out, hopefully does wonders to improving confidence, humility, humor, and charm. I wish you the best with that! And happy early birthday. :)
That is a luxury not everyone gets even today.
Ask someone younger and their top ten is completely different. Too many will dismiss that as naivete while not recognizing their own ignorance.
I choose: ability not to travel (commute).
When you have time, health and no stress - that is the luxury OP is talking about.
You don't even need to make more money if you have all those things. If you know your health is insured and you are healthy, you have a decent place where you can feel safe and sleep until late mornings and you do not have to worry about how much food costs - you basically live like a king.