He's living in a place where the floor collapsed and eats (good) ramen. If it's 12k or 20k I'm not sure it makes a meaningful difference to the narrative.
A floor collapsing and not bothering to replace it sounds more serious, sure, but that can mean a lot of different things in different circumstances. Imagine, for example, someone who's an expert in DIY but also a devoted procrastinator. That person could leave a roof in the state described for months or years, planning to eventually do it up, and I wouldn't consider anything terribly revelatory about the person's financial or mental status to have occurred.
https://paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html
This is separate from Japanese-style ramen, which you can also easily get at many restaurants.
The narrative is that he isn't living a life of luxury or even comfort.
He has priorities other than his comfort.
That's the narrative and from that viewpoint it isn't important if he's living on 12k a year or 20k a year because of his BTC investment.
But living on ramen + $12k/year + no healthcare + collapsing floor? That's sounding a lot like poverty to me.
- ramen =/= cheap pot noodle type things. Ramen restaurants in Japan attest to this. It'll depend on context what that actually means in this case.
- 12k/year =/= no money, numbers like that make no sense outside of context. It depends on how much of it is disposable. You live in a hut with no rent, you grow food, you've no kids, no mortgage, no car, etc, these all matter.
- no healthcare =/= bad health. How many of the growing numbers of people dying from heart-related diseases in their 50s and 60s had healthcare? Didn't do much for them, in the end.
- collapsing floor =/= bad hygiene or something else actually potentially dangerous, as I said above, the nuisance this causes or doesn't cause depends on lots of actual real factors, it's not some absolute thing. It just sounds wild to people not used to it
