Is it possible to be frugal in America?

My lifestyle costs $22,552.88 a year which seems reasonable; it is less than the median American household earns after taxes, and given that the personal savings rate in the country is around 1%, it is less than the average American household spends per year. Good. By American standards I am frugal. Should that make me feel all warm and fuzzy?

The global GDP per capita is around $8,241.00, which I think puts the average income (and spending?) of an earthly inhabitant at close to that. By that standard I don't look so good, coming in at almost triple what the average human is spending. If you make the decision to live in the world's richest country, is it possible to consider yourself 'frugal' if your living expenses exceed that of the planet's average resident? Or is frugality a relative concept?

My biggest expense is housing, and I live in a 650 square foot apartment, which is just about the smallest thing around here, but when I look around the world I see the majority of people living in far smaller and less sophisticated dwellings than me:

• In China, hundreds of millions of migrant workers live in shared dorm rooms on company premises
• In Africa, several hundred million rural people live in huts made of mud and sticks.
• Throughout the planet, there are one billion people living in urban slums, basically in very inexpensive shacks.
• Lots of middle class and lower middle class urban people (a billion or two?) worldwide are living basic existences in houses like this.
• There are a billion farmers between China and India alone who live in very basic accommodations

Sitting in our homes in America these are just the faceless masses but the more I travel and have met so many actual people who fit into all of these different categories, the more I realize they are exactly the same as me, largely smarter and harder working than me, with the same hopes, dreams, concerns, worries, problems, and ambitions as me, whose lives are just as complicated, as important, and as individual as mine, the only difference is they don't have as much money, and the reason for that is basically because they don't have the opportunity.

To some degree frugal Americans are the least sensitive people of all when it comes to money, because we get all self-righteous when comparing ourselves to the Joneses, when in fact we should be comparing ourselves to the Wongs and the Perezes. The Joneses know they are Supersized Americans when they haul the LCD big-screen from their Hummer into their 5,000 square foot palace with marble sinks, but how many of us understand how ridiculously extravagantly we are living when we load a bulk order of frozen fish sticks from Costco into our 10 year-old Civic?

I think the biggest barrier to true frugality in America is housing; while I outline a few examples of inexpensive housing around the planet above, none of these are really possible in America. While occasionally you see stories about someone who lives in a log cabin and earns almost nothing to avoid paying taxes in support the war, or lives in some miniaturized custom-built house sitting in someone else's backyard, or lives in their car, these are all people at the fringes of society and comes at the cost of social acceptance and probably has career consequences in practice.

My thinking is that it is not really possible to be truly frugal (spending below $8,241.00) in America, which is not a reason to not try to be frugal, but rather a reason not to live in America. I'll leave America for the big spenders while I create a modest, but comfortable, existence in some lower-cost country.