ON RADICAL FRUGALITY AND THE WASTE OF PHYSICAL INTERGENERATIONAL
WEALTH
Inspiration for my dryest-sounding title yet comes from Solderpunk,
whose old posts I've most recently been digging though, now having
reached back to his "or something like it" series:
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/asceticism-or-something-like-it.txt
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/technoskepticism-or-something-like-it.txt
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/radical-frugality-or-something-like-it.txt
I've been spending too much time at the computer already lately, so
rather than attempt to live up to the title of this post and ramble
on all day in a wordy sort of way, I'll start off by simply
referring to some old posts of mine that touched on similar themes
as well as what measures I enlist in search of something like
Solderpunk's dream of a frugal lifestyle:
gopher://aussies.space:70/0/%7efreet/phlog/2020-02-10Living_in_the_Past.txt
gopher://aussies.space:70/0/%7efreet/phlog/2020-03-21.2The_Op_Shop_Economy.txt
gopher://aussies.space:70/0/%7efreet/phlog/2021-05-31Maintained_to_Last.txt
gopher://aussies.space:70/0/%7efreet/phlog/2021-08-08Buying_on_the_Brink.txt
gopher://aussies.space:70/0/%7efreet/phlog/2021-12-18.1Conceptual_Consumables.txt
The thing I haven't touched on before though is inherritance. My
setting myself up to live alone more or less happened
simultaniously with the twilight years of my grandparent's lives,
with the garage sale I mentioned a post or two ago happening in
response to my last surviving grandparent moving into a nursing
home, losing through age the same independence that I've gained. So
far as money goes I haven't often benefited except in going to the
trouble of selling posessions that other members of the family
intended to send to the tip. But what I have gained is a complete
selection of furniture and household goods, and in the latter case
various spares for the future as well.
The interesting thing is that in both cases I've had many cousins
in either family approaching similar stages in life, yet so far as
these types of items go I never had much competition for them,
except with a skip. Obviously situations vary, such as people like
Solderpunk needing to regularly move home internationally, but
it's a strange attitude that willfully dispenses with such wealth
in physical objects. As Solderpunk describes it, these goods
represent the work invested by the past generation, who needed to
make the money to buy them. Simply by taking them rather than
sending them to be buried in the ground, later generations can
potentially save themselves that work. But it seems most often
they don't, and at best the stuff might go to an op-shop to profit
charity.
Very often the excuse for this is simply that the objects are old,
and so devalued as per my Conceptual Consumables post. This, I'd
say, is another approach to the idea that Solderpunk interates of
living in the past - not just avoiding technology introduced after
a certain date, but focusing on the technology of a generation who
are dying out, and taking up life using the goods that they leave
behind.
What it probably doesn't chime so well with is Solderpunk's
milimalist aspirations. In contrast to that, I hoard various spares
for everything. Much coming from grandparents who, through being
raised with the memory of the great depression and reaching
adulthood around the time of the second world war, learnt to do
much the same thing themselves. Even with the few newer devices
that I do buy such as my second-hand router and mobile broadband
modem, I try to keep spares so that I don't one day need to buy a
brand new item out of immediate necessity. In this respect we do
approach frugality in quite opposite ways.
- The Free Thinker.
