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Musings Report 2024-40 10-5-24 A Core Skill Going Forward: Frugality
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A Core Skill Going Forward: Frugality
I ended last week's essay with these two lines:
A hard rain is going to fall, and we serve our best interests by preparing for the coming storm. The core skill going forward--frugality--is largely a forgotten skillset.
So let's examine frugality.
Conspicuous waste is part and parcel of conspicuous consumption, which is a signifier of wealth and status. The more one wastes, the higher the status, as waste implies "I'm so rich, I can waste as much as I want."
This reach for status by consuming (and wasting) more is the engine of the waste is growth Landfill Economy.
In good times, when jobs, stock market/real estate gains and credit are all plentiful, even those with average income earn enough to waste money. Even though we complain about the high cost of food now, there is little evidence that we're no longer wasting up to 40% of the food we buy / order out.
In a deep, prolonged recession, jobs, gains and credit become scarce, and so we have less to spend, and so frugality--eliminating waste--is either incentivized or imposed by necessity: forced frugality.
(So you wanna be a writer/artist/musician? First take a vow of extreme poverty / frugality.)
Frugality has another source: the desire to save income to invest in long-term goals via careful planning and shopping. It's well established that the difference between "rich" and "poor" in middle income brackets is deferred gratification, the ability to defer consumption today (instant gratification) to serve long-range goals, such as buying a house or saving for a child's education.
There is a third source of frugality: genetics. Some of us are naturally frugal by nature, others naturally profligate, others in between. What others consider normal--throwing out the leftover rice because eating leftovers is for poor people--is absolute anathema to us.
Others mock those of us who save plastic bags and rubber bands, while for us it's second nature: why throw something away that can be re-used? We save random screws in a jar (a real treasure for handy people), smoothed out wrapping paper and scraps of wood. Composting kitchen waste is second nature. And so on. (You want to see my collections of stubby pencils, bent nails and plastic bags?)
The frugal take great pride in our frugality--the more extreme, the worthier it is of admiration. Here are few recent examples of my "fix it rather than buy a new one" repairs:
Low-quality toaster handle broke off, replaced with a drywall screw and duct tape.
Low-quality cutting board fell apart, repaired with a a bit of glue and a throwaway bamboo chopstick (of course I save those... look how handy they are.)
Low-quality sneakers from Costco fell apart, glued the soles back on with 50 cents of epoxy.
Cultural values are another source of frugality. It's common for the third generation to remark on the extreme frugality of their grandparents from The Old Country, with the implication that poverty-induced frugality no longer makes sense in The Land of Plenty.
A fifth source of frugality is ideological / ethical: 1) waste is a sin, and 2) wasting one's income enslaves one to the grindstone of the debt-serf / wage slave status quo. From this perspective, frugality is necessary to be free.
As I've noted in previous essays, frugality and self-reliance were core tenets of the Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. Yes, sex, drugs and rock-n-roll received the wide-eyed, sensationalist media coverage, but escaping servitude to The Establishment by learning how to do things for oneself and being frugal were core to the Counterculture. I discussed this in
Access to Tools, Tools for Living: 50 Years of Forgetting.
The book How To Live On Nothing by Joan Ranson Shortney sold thousands of copies in the 1960s and 70s. It makes for interesting reading now because its point of view and value system is so alien to the present-day zeitgeist, which we can describe thusly: 100,000 smart, well-paid people are working feverishly every day to break down our deferred gratification and persuade us to impulse-buy something at full price.
Another 100,000 smart, well-paid people are working feverishly every day to trigger our innate desire to enhance our status with a costly signifier of consumption that we can brag about on social media: look at me!
An even larger army of smart, well-paid people are working feverishly every day to make us believe that "buying now" will "save us money" because "this deal won't last."
Frugality and consumption are relative, of course. If you've been living in a pup tent in a field without running water or electricity for weeks (as we did), then moving into a plywood shack (ahem, a micro-home) you built with hand tools is the acme of luxurious living: life is good, and looking up.
If you've been evicted from your foreclosed mansion on the golf course and are offered a plywood micro-home as your replacement living arrangement, your reaction will be considerably different.
In the old days, eating out was a luxury reserved for birthdays or the once-a-year family vacation. Fast food or a soda were luxuries enjoyed a few times a year. Now we consider eating out multiple times a week as a birthright, and giving that up a hardship that's beyond bearing.
What is frugality? We can start with a simple dictum: waste nothing, not even a grain of rice. Food costs less when none is wasted.
We can then ask: what is the bare minimum we need to survive? Those struggling with everyday life in the wake of Hurricane Helene offer an object lesson to the rest of us. Frugality is both stripping life of non-essentials and also making sure we have essentials on hand. This takes a lot of planning and preparation.
Another useful question: what expenses can I eliminate as the means to meet larger goals?
A related question: what can I learn to do for myself so I don't have to pay someone else to do it for me?
What is the point of frugality? Is it all about saving money? Or is it really about freedom from the invisible shackles of conspicuous consumption and an unrealistic sense of entitlement? Or is it about the confidence of knowing how to do a great many things, and knowing we can get by on much less?
Perhaps it's also about authenticity. There's something iffy about relying on conspicuous consumption for one's identity and sense of self. No longer caring makes one "poor" in appearance but rich in invisible ways.
I don't think frugality is about not spending money per se. It's about focusing on building a foundation we own, control and maintain of life's essentials, a sense of self disconnected from consumption, and freedom from want, debt and servitude.
Frugality is a value system, a lens to view the world and a set of skills that become increasingly valuable should the good times fade and the seven lean years begin.
Highlights of the Blog
Adapt or Die, Or...? 10/4/24
Why Political "Solutions" Don't Fix Crises, They Make Them Worse 10/2/24
Ahead Lies Ruin: The Decay of Social Trust 9/30/24
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Made a basic chicken dish of garlic and sliced onions topped with fresh herbs from the garden: rosemary, lavender, basil and oregano. For Southeast Asian dishes, we have lemon grass, curry leaf and Thai basil in the yard, plus parsley, bay leaf, ginger and turmeric. Herbs don't need much room, and they create such great aromas when cooking with them. Here is a pretty good guide to herbs.
What's on the Book Shelf
Disabling Professions Ivan Illich
The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action Donald Schon
The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire (via Timmy T.)
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
New unproductive forces: the Chinese youth owning their unemployment.
Vietnamese helping victims of Agent Orange used by US troops in Vietnam War among Magsaysay winners.
‘He was in mystic delirium’: was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius whose ideas could transform AI – or a lonely madman?
Gladiator rebellions and bread strikes: ancient Rome’s labor unions revealed: In her new book Strike, Sarah Bond explains how Roman workers banded together – much like labor organizing today.
‘It’s just black sky up there’: 50 years on, the transatlantic flight speed record remains unbroken: the Blackbird SR-71...
The hardest thing about moving is not the people you leave behind – it’s the paths you’ll never walk again.
How Much CO2 Does A Single Volcano Emit?
Physicist MV Ramana on the problem with nuclear power.
We Bought Another Amish Farm. Here's the tour. (25 min)
‘They’d ask me: “Do you want to die today?”’ How I was kidnapped by pirates – and rescued by US Navy Seals
Parkinson’s may begin in the gut, study says, adding to growing evidence: Researchers found that people with upper gastrointestinal conditions were far more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease later in life
The Japanese-American Sculptor Who, Despite Persecution, Made Her Mark-- Ruth Asawa...
"There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs." Thomas Sowell
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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