[quote=spdrun]See, I don’t dream of being a better person. I want to spend my life in a 1-bedroom apartment that I can sublet in summer and go backpacking. I lack aspirations. I’m like The Stranger … the world is just a moving diorama for me.[/quote]

And there is nothing wrong with wanting to live a more simple life with a much more frugal budget so you don’t need to to put as much effort into earning money , either actively or passively…But then if that’s the case, why in the past was there a constant need for things to crash and burn just so one can finally go “all in” to make a big killing? It seems to be contradictory.

See if simplicity is all you are seeking, then the simple thing to have done all these years is , again , slowly drip a tiny amount of money each month into a no frills basket of index funds and bonds, which over all these years would have slowly earned you a pretty large amount…. slowly….It might not make you a lot right awayz but 10-20-30 years later you’d be laughing all the way to the bank. That certainly seems like it would have been a strategy much more consistent with living simple and not putting that much effort into things than trying to predict when the next market crash will be, moving “all in”, and then making a killing on that one hand. afterall, the latter would depend on more of your luck and timing. For example, right after covid hit and the markets briefly tanked, going “all in” as you previously suggested would have allowed one to amass a fortune. Of course looking back everything is clear 100% of what one should have done. But question is when the markets were trashed, did one move money into the markets in a significant way, or did you think things were going to fall an additional 50%+ and sit it out? Again, I’m just trying to understand and reconcile this inconsistency of wanting to live more simple and frugally but at the same time seemingly depending and wanting a one hit, one large score of being right on a huge downturn in order to financially make it whole, when the slow, drip style passive investing, seems likke it would have been a lot more consistent for this more simple life. I don’t get it.