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No-Buy-Friday. Get out of the ‘hamster wheel’ of consumption & debt! No-Buy back your life! [1]
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Date: 2025-07-03
No-Buy-Friday & ‘buynott’. Climb out of the ‘hamster wheel’ of consumption
— & debt! No-Buy back your life!
With the rise in use of credit cards in the 1960s, the financial philosophy of a generation of Americans that understood the benefits of saving money lost cachet — replaced by another being conditioned to believe themselves privileged to wear the shackles of ‘immediate gratification’.
Due to this transition, many Americans have come to think it worse to be broke than in debt.
Being broke just meant you had no money and was something of a dead end for spending. There were ways to get in deeper, but most people didn’t take them.
Credit card debt, on the other hand, sinks you into a financial morass, but allows you to keep spending. It also abstracts financial loss by its ‘painless’ methodology, which ‘once removes’ the ‘chill’ that counting out cold-hard-cash brings us. I call it my ‘pay later card’.
Spend now, worry later.
While ‘broke’ was the ‘Scarlet Letter’ of the early post-war age-of-affluence, debt, having become all too common, has no social stigma attached.
~~~
After I left home in 1969 to go to college in Manhattan, I lived on a monthly stipend of $100.
This covered my rent, utilities, food, and transportation. On this budget, I couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan, but found decent accommodations in Brooklyn for about a third less rent.
Once I graduated, rather than going off to find a job, I devoted myself to establishing the discipline I needed to pursue my commitment to the fine arts. School had supplied an artificial work ethic by making me subject to the expectations of others, which evaporated when I left.
Nearly all of my fellow graduates stopped creating when they found full-time work. Once free of an academic environment and left to their own devices, they failed to live up to the self-imposed demands required for establishing artistic productivity. To avoid being another ‘dropout’, I took what part-time work I could find and continue to live frugally.
While I ultimately proved it possible, managing to survive on so little required vigilant attention to budgeting and a no-frills lifestyle few thought possible. There were times when this was psychologically brutal, but life ambushes all our choices, and by this means toughens us.
Back then, Manhattan offered a cornucopia of “the best things in life” if you knew where to look… and I was never at a loss for stimulating activities to help stave off developmental stagnation.
Aside from the normal distractions that youth is subject to, developing my ‘gifts’ didn’t suffer from neglect or deprivation, and despite the lack of what those around me felt to be the prerequisite of a ‘good life’, mine was incrementally filling with riches of another ‘order’.
After living in ‘the city’ for over half a decade, during which my interests continued to flourish, I realized that no matter what facet of life I wanted to explore, Manhattan offered a seemingly unlimited strata of freely accessible sociocultural ‘laboratories’.
If cost blocked my path, there were always others of comparable value and free for the taking — the only ‘expense’ was keeping myself emotionally afloat, minimally solvent, and sheltered.
By the time I consciously recognized the open accessibility being offered to the true wealth of the city, I had already been taking advantage of it for some time, even though living at or below the poverty level.
Which is not to say that I managed this free from the errors of naivety and social clumsiness. I was often in over my head and that is how I learned to ‘swim’. With little to guide me and so much to learn, at times it seemed as if I could do nothing other than trip on my mistakes. Occasionally I suffered greatly, but saw that others around me on a more socially acceptable trajectory, suffered as well — perhaps for different reasons, but with no less pain. My awakening grasp of the relativity of existence helped keep me sane and focused.
~~~
I had learned as a child that money gained potency when saved, and although as an ‘adult’ I was in no position for at least a decade or more to save any, the financial husbandry I’d learned back then kept me from sinking into debt.
Not everybody had credit cards yet, but it wouldn’t be much longer before most would.
I would only get one decades later and not until well into the new millennium.
In this way, I was a throwback to an earlier time when people did not buy things unless they’d saved the cash to do so.
By not going to movies, not eating out, avoiding substance abuse, not taking taxis, not indulging in fads, not buying new clothes and learning the pros and cons of risk management— little by little, I was able to save up.
Though meager, this ‘green’, sprouting free of the parched earth of necessity, became enough for me to pursue my interest in collecting antiques, albeit on a very modest level. At that time, even a few extra dollars could buy a ‘treasure’ if you knew what to look for. As buying from dealers was out of the question, I combed my local Salvation Army and whatever flea markets I could find.
Nevertheless, it would be about 10 years before I was able to supplement my subsistence level income by selling off some of what I had accumulated. During all this, I pursued my painting and in whatever spare moments I had, lived in books — exploring literature, and learning all I could about world art — including whatever information I could find related to antiques and the decorative arts.
In this way, although through no deliberate intention on my part, as my income finally began to grow, my ‘eye’ became developed enough to be able to pitch in and help.
What might appear as ‘singleness of purpose’ was more a conglomeration of curiosity, desire, fortuitous chance, dumb luck, compulsion, competitiveness, tenacity and other factors, many of which warred for supremacy. Somehow I had the great good fortune of being able to synthesize this hodgepodge to intuitively make choices — many of which proved good in the long term, while ‘costly’ at the time. The need to be able to live with myself helped keep me on course.
Almost imperceptibly these choices helped free me from the ‘trap’ of low income ‘incarceration’, for without entirely realizing it, overtime I transitioned to financially independent self-determination.
Accompanying me through this process, was a deep sense of guidance by an unknown ‘hand’.
How else to explain finally ‘arriving’ — after 50 years of groping my way through an unmapped course strewn with land mines and more temptations to go astray than Saint Anthony could imagine.
If this was my subconscious at work, the question remains as to what it had to work with and what sustained my attention and focus. Many times when losing sight of the bigger picture I would feel that I’d misspent my potential. It wasn’t until relatively late in life that the ‘investment’ of my various efforts began to bear fruit and were revealed to me as they converged and finally ignited.
Like Lot, I don’t look back.
~~~
I was taught as a young man that many people do not progress in life because they are never presented with the ‘idea’ that such a thing is possible. Often, due to their social strata,
self-improvement appears as a goal that simply doesn’t exist or is so far away, with so many obstacles in its path, that it is deemed unattainable. When I was growing up, it seemed to me that opportunity was for others and my life would always remain at the same level.
On the other hand, ‘betterment’ is an option that requires inclination, aptitudes and determination, so many won’t profit from it for that reason.
But for some, NBF can act the part of both ‘archaeologist’ and messenger, affording those with inclination this option.
As American society has been largely subsumed into the semi-hypnotic state of rampant materialism, this commands our consumer urges to such a degree that they blot out awareness of other more beneficial ways to live a full life. As a result, the possibility of self-improvement has now become a goal unattainable to most, as it inexorably moves out of range, both for want of attention, as-well-as insufficient means, while being smothered by a world increasingly less predisposed to abide it.
For lower income people, the choice is between buying what isn’t necessary, but brings momentary ‘ happiness distraction’, or saving for the possibility to buy their way out of ‘indentured servitude’.
One of the great collateral benefits of NBF and buynotts is that by introducing us to the skill of money management through disciplined purchasing — initiated by the simply act of not buying — our incomes stop getting flushed down the toilet of personal debt. Perversely, the omnipresent threat of going down with it oppresses us to the extent that we accept the shit our consumer lives throw at us.
Money not spent becomes money saved, and in turn that becomes a key to unlocking the cell we’ve
unconsciously allowed ourselves to be confined to.
NDF, boycotts and buynotts are powerful engines for change. They possess the potential to save our asses when other options have crossed their expiration datelines. They benefit the environment, they foster social health and they show us the way to a better life, both collectively and as individuals, by tapping us into the positive side of the power of money.
It’s been dormant for far too long and its long past time to wake it up!
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/22/2304746/-Everything-is-AWFUL-Yet-I-am-FULL-of-HOPE-and-COURAGE-HERE-IS-WHY-GNR
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