Firstly, I disagree w/ you. It's not either or. At a macro level, sure you either are within your means or not. However, my point is that "within your means" comes at varying degrees. That is a spectrum. You can either use 50 percentage of your income to support your lifestyle or 1%. That is a huge difference. If someone bringing in 100,000 a year says they live within their means. I do not think it is a bad bet that they mean they are spending 30% to 40% of their income to support themselves as opposed to 10%. I would argue it is in fact far more likely to be the higher figures than the lower. You don't need to be an economist to make that assumption across a generalized population - it's just common sense.

All this is to say, that when you hear the "live within your means" most people are going to picture a more moderate portion of their income going to their life cost as opposed to the bare minimum. So like I was saying, language is going to be interpreted by people as not so literal most of the times ( unless youre a robot)

That’s such an extreme and literal take on it. If Bill Gates says that he’s living within his means who is going to think that he is living on the streets?? Language is not always meant to be taken literally, especially a common saying

I understand what the phrase means. But from the looks of it I just inferred that he made a decent salary but was living in a state of squalor from what he described. I was just saying if you had increased your salary you could also increase your means of living ( obviously not by the same percentage as that would be the lifestyle trap ). However, to be fair I dont have a lot of metrics of this guys situation (e.g., cost of living, etc)

This is not exactly living within your means tbh

That’s my face when I silently fart and am waiting for the chaos to start