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The unifying insight behind many of the examples is that what many people including me really enjoy is spending time with friends. A lot of expensive activities—like going out for drinks and food or weekends away—are 80% about getting to socialise, which can be done at much lower cost if you want.
Other things in this direction I’ve enjoyed:
Learn how to fix things, especially expensive things. Working on your own house can save an enormous amount relative to hiring someone.
When thinking about hobbies, prioritize ones that don’t have large consumable costs
Social dances (I like contra dance: trycontra.com) are really cheap for how much enjoyment I get out of them
Many events will let you in free if you volunteer to help. I’ve taken money at the door for an hour at many dances in exchange for admission, and it’s a great way to meet people.
Get good enough at a hobby that it makes you some money (for me, playing music for dances)
Learn how to cook: if you get to where it’s fun then it’s not housework anymore
Get excited about optimizing things (for me, recently: house cooling without AC, bulk groceries)
If you have kids, figure out how to get things done while also watching them. Bring them to the grocery store, cook with them, etc. It’s fine if it takes a lot longer that it would if you did the thing without the kids, because the time is coming out of childwatching-time and not childcare-time
Learning how to make the components of your hobbies instead of buying them can be a lot of fun, and can allow much more creativity later as you understand more about the things you’re working with.
A lot of this depends on what you enjoy, what you’re good at, and what your situation is. A lot of people would find many things on my list not fun at all and probably actively unpleasant.
(On the other hand, I think EA has generally overemphasized frugality. If spending more on transit, or buying food instead of making it, or getting a better internet connection, etc means you have more productive hours on valuable work that can easily be worth it even if it means spending more than your ‘share’ of world income.)
Thank for recommendations
The recommendations for sharing others Netflix/Steam accounts and downloading books from LibGen seem like they’re in a different category from the rest of the stuff here. There’s an enormous debate on piracy out there, but I wanted to flag this.
I was going to say the same thing. I found the majority of the advice to be good, but don’t agree with pirating things to save money.
Interestingly, the folks at Netflix and HBO don’t seem to mind people sharing accounts:
“”We love people sharing Netflix,” CEO Reed Hastings said Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas. “That’s a positive thing, not a negative thing.”″
Presumably because i) it makes more people subscribe because they get more value for money by sharing, and ii) eventually people get their own accounts if they like it.
More comments on what the various services think about password sharing here: https://www.thesimpledollar.com/is-it-ok-to-share-your-netflix-account-the-lowdown-on-log-in-sharing-at-nine-popular-services/
I appreciate this. A lot of smart ideas.
I know this isn’t meant to be universal, but just a note that for me, eating out is one of the best activities on the fun-per-dollar scale.
I don’t think eating out ranks highly on the “fun per dollar” scale for me personally simply due to the amounts of dollars involved, but still I find it really difficult to imagine a world without me going out for dinner relatively regularly. It may be my most expensive “hobby”, but still it seems to provide quite a lot of value. I’m not quite sure why exactly, and if there are less expensive ways to obtain the same gain.
Could you maybe expand a little on the details of why it ranks so highly for you? I’d be interested in a more detailled perspective.
Thanks for sharing!
The consistent item on my budget that I find we struggle to keep low is eating out, largely because that’s the only way we see a lot of people (close friends and family). I wrote about this in my blog post when I limited my food to <$2 a day for a month, food is social and that’s a tough thing.
Also, I read your other post about setting your salary based on world’s average GDP and was shocked to see rent that low – rent is at minimum 5x that much in Sydney 😳
Fwiw, rent does seem a bit more expensive in Sydney than Vancouver (https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Canada&city1=Vancouver&country2=Australia&city2=Sydney), though only by about 27%, so still in the same ballpark. It looks pretty similar comparing on Craigslist too (I’m also a Vancouverite). I acknowledge you’d need to pay substantially more than 220USD per person, if you weren’t splitting costs with a partner or room-mate.
really appreciated this piece. Especially the parts about defining what one thinks is fun (and how much per unit cost) and mentally orienting yourself to have fun in many ways. Thx for taking the time to write this up. I’m new to this site so appreciate any karma points anyone is willing to send. Thx
I would recommend to not consume alcohol at all. (In my experience, a total abstinence is much easier than trying to not exceed a small limit.)
Vipassana meditation retreats are all over the world, and they are free. The catch? You need to attend the full ten days the first time to learn the technique. (You can always leave early, but you will only learn part of the technique.)
dhamma.org/en-US/maps#001
Also, prayer is a meditation technique. In Buddhism/dharma, we call it metta.
Be free.
For people looking to get into CBT, Spencer Greenberg and co. are developing an app to walk people through it: https://www.uplift.us/
There are so many incredibly fun video games these days.
Read free stories online. The biggest cost is the effort to find the best 10% among all existing free stories. But those are very much worth reading and you can spend countless hours quite entertained, effectively free of cost.
Great framework!
I was wondering how people calculated “expected fun-hours”. I was considering an alternative approach such as considering how many hours of sleep would I trade for one more hour of this activity (of course there may be some point at which hours of sleep given away impedes your ability to do the activity!), or maybe how many more hours of your least favourite activity would you do to gain one extra hour of this “fun” activity.
And as an another example, similar to sharing steam or Netflix accounts I think sharing/borrowing physical items from friends/colleagues is also useful. I’ve borrowed a friend’s mountain bike & surfboard and have lent him my road bike. This may mean that one values the activity without the friend more than some other activity with the friend at a time when they are free.
Minor question, but when I tried downloading something from libgen.io my internet browser blocked it and didn’t give me any obvious options for allowing the download. I’m not exactly techy and so this sort of thing scares me—how confident are you that I can download things off the site without giving my laptop viruses etc?
If people use other sites to access free books I’d also be keen to know!
As long as you use a good adblocker (such as uBlock Origin) to get rid of any sketchy ads, I’m fairly confident that the site is pretty safe. If you’re unsure if the file you downloaded is safe, you can upload it to virustotal.com. If you’re using Chrome and that’s what’s blocking the download, apparently you can go to your downloads list and click “Recover malicious file.”
I get ebooks and audiobooks through my library’s online system. https://www.hoopladigital.com/ is the one our library uses, but check your library’s site for which one is local to you.
This system seems to assume that all fun activities give you the same amount of fun. Is that what you mean?
Fair point. I actually generally try to model it as points (out of ten) happier per hour, but I didn’t want to go into tons of detail in the post. I definitely think you could make a much more complex model of maximizing fun than I do. Especially if you find that sort of activity fun!