Temporary spending freezes, like 'No Buy January', are ineffective at changing long-term financial habits because they act like unsustainable crash diets.

“Not to be a personal finance scold. These kind of things don't work, right? Like the the the crash diet that my favorite book on this is one of my favorite behavioral books is called Mindless Eating. And the stat they give that's stuck with me forever is 95% of diets people end up gaining all the we”

The current era is characterized by high economic precarity even for those in white-collar jobs previously considered secure.

“I do think what's new that's happening right now is the procarity in what we call like the white collar workforce in this sense of like being a a software engineer or a writer or a marketer or an account. There are a lot of jobs that in for most of our lifetimes have been seen as secure.”