Harold Geneen, Coco Chanel, Peter Sellers, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, and Cole Porter lived in hotels for many years of their lives. Harold Geneen, the CEO of International Telephone and Telegraph in the 1960s and 70s lived in many hotels and kept a complete set of clothes in each one.
I wrote a book called Simple Living Investments in 1979. It still sells. The theme was Simple Living for non-religious or spiritual reasons. My strongest arguments for simple living were that owned objects clutter the mind and life is freer with many more ways to live if one has a simple daily practice.
At one point I had less than 100 objects in my van and lived as a house sitter. That is much harder to do with a spouse and children. It makes a conventional lifestyle more difficult. But I made the point that having or accumulating money was not in conflict as long as it wasn’t used to buy objects like houses and cars that divert attention to maintenance and worrying.
I’m a pilot and a sailor. But I never owned a plane or a sailboat. For fifty years I was an active pilot with a single-engine plane that I used as a member of a flying club and sailed as a partner in a 30-foot sloop where I paid the moorage fee and paid for repairs resulting from racing.
I was always impressed with creative people who lived in hotels for the simplicity of daily living that that made possible.
Many prominent mathematicians seem to live with virtually no possessions, just living on friends' couches and thinking about math. There is Elon Musk who seems to own no houses but lives with friends and on the airplanes where he spends much of his time.
The subject comes up because of my friend Alex who is handsome and very bright but lives in a modest apartment with very little furniture. Alex has plenty of money. Many women rapidly stop dating him after they see his modest apartment.