Staying friends with people who aren't optimising anything

The risk register post has an entry called "Becoming Scrooge," mitigation: don't go too far in the pursuit of wealth, focus on the journey. I wrote that it's the risk the FI community is worst at acknowledging, because the behaviour that causes it looks identical to the behaviour that makes the plan work. I left it at that, as a one-line entry on a list. It deserves more than a line.

What the behaviour actually looks like from the inside

Turning down a round because it's not in the budget. Doing the mental arithmetic on your share of a group meal before the bill's even arrived. Being the one person at the table who's read about safe withdrawal rates while everyone else is talking about literally anything else. None of it is dramatic on its own. All of it, kept up consistently enough, is exactly how you end up optimising a spreadsheet at the expense of the people the spreadsheet was supposedly in service of.

The Japan trip was the opposite of that, on purpose

I wrote up what a sixteen-day trip with three friends actually cost, and the honest finding was that I couldn't fully reconstruct it — money moved between four people in a way no bank export was ever going to capture cleanly. I could have prevented that. A shared spreadsheet, splitting every meal to the penny, an app built for exactly this problem. I didn't, and on reflection I don't think that was a failure of tracking. Precision was never the point of that week. Four people having a good time was, and a running tally of who owes whom eighty pence would have been a strange thing to prioritise over that.

What Kinder's questions already told me about this

My answer to the first question wasn't "escape everything" — it was a four-day week, volunteering, a sabbatical, still working, still living somewhere with people in it. The third question's actual regrets weren't financial at all: no identity outside work, no relationship. Money never fixes either of those. Friends do, or at least friends are a precondition for having the chance. A savings rate optimised in a way that quietly costs you the friendships is optimising the wrong variable entirely, and the failure wouldn't show up anywhere in the spreadsheet that caused it.

The actual policy, not just the sentiment

This isn't an argument for abandoning discipline generally — the 80/20 principle from the risk register post still holds, and most day-to-day spending genuinely doesn't matter. It's specifically that the decisions involving other people sit in a different category from the decisions that don't, and deserve to be evaluated on a different basis. The question for a solo purchase is roughly "does this move the plan." The question for a shared one is closer to "does this cost the relationship anything if I say no" — and the second question is usually more expensive to get wrong than the first one, in currency the first question can't even see.

I'd rather be a bit behind on the number and have kept the people than the reverse. That trade doesn't show up on any register I've written, and it's probably the most important one on it.

Not financial advice — I'm not qualified to give any, and this one's about people rather than money, which is rather the point.