I’ve also noticed that people have enormous difficulty understanding COL variance. It’s a bit mystifying. Of course you’re doing fine on your $60K a year in Crotch Shot, Nebraska. Houses are nearly free, hamburgers grow out of the dirt, and you can trade some empty Coke bottles for land. To show that I’m only exaggerating a little, here is a dead average house in York, NE. It’s $200K. In San Jose, that house would be $2 million. And if you don’t mind really living in the sticks (to most people in Silicon Valley, York would be the sticks) you can find a quite nice-looking place in Nebraska on nearly a third of an acre for $130K. Or you could buy 77 acres of land with a house and two outbuildings in Nebraska for $1.3 million. How much you reckon that’d set you back in San Jose?

There will be not-as-large but still quite notable variance in food pricing, gas costs, taxes, etc., between somewhere like York and San Jose. And people just have loads of trouble understanding anything about this.

Humans are more cognitively limited in the general case than we like to admit.