Radical frugality, or something like it
---------------------------------------
(Long entry, but not as long as my "technoskepticism" post. This will be the
last in my series of "X, or something like" walls of text, after which my posts
will become shorter and more focussed, and I will try harder to respond more
directly to other people's posts in this conversation - greetings to new entrant
Tomasino!)
My last huge entry was addressed pretty squarely at technology, and why one
might consider being more deliberate and careful in selecting which technologies
one does and does not use. This is just one facet of a big picture of
simplifying life that I have been thinking about lately. As I write these
thoughts up for my phlog, I'm trying to separate them out into logically
distinct chunks as best I can, but I'm increasingly starting to realise that a
lot of these ideas are tied together in messy ways that makes it difficult to
tease them apart. Nevertheless, I persist.
This entry is about "radical frugality", which entails cutting down, yes, on
technology but on a lot of other things too (unless you take a very broad
interpretation of "technology"). My main motivation for thinking about this is
basically the appeal of escaping the "standard life template" in much of the
modern world, where you are born, educated to some degree, and then work 8
hours a day, 5 days a week every week until you retire, leaving you with maybe
20 years, if you are lucky, of life where you are free to do what you want but
not so badly worn out by age, mentally and physically, that you can't really
do what you want. It is presumed that as part of this template you will
acquire a car and a large house, and fill said house with lots of stuff,
including multiple children.
There is no question that this template works, in the sense that many millions
of people have lived exactly this life and not died prematurely, and been, on
average, content. But I also don't think it's a life that many people would
choose if it weren't thrust upon them by some combination of expectation and
necessity. Plenty of people spend most of their waking life, and almost all of
the "good part" of their waking life (i.e. the part when they are healthy,
physically fit, good looking, quick-witted, etc.) working jobs that they may
dislike, disagree with or even downright hate simply because they feel they
need to do this to survive. A lot of what they work to spend money on they
don't actually *need*, but rather have been made to believe they need by
people who want some of their money. To put it succinctly, in the words of
Tyler Durden, "we work jobs that we hate, to buy shit that we don't need".
I think I have made out better following this template than a lot of people
have, but I remain somewhat disatisfied by it. Perhaps part of it, like some of
my comments on technology in my previous post, is about personal autonomy, and a
dislike of the idea that I am following somebody else's plan and not finding my
own way. Another part of if probably just comes from job disatisfaction, even
if things certainly could be worse on that front. Ultimately, I think I really
just want more time to do the things I really enjoy. Radical frugality seems
like one possible option to achieve this.
The basic logic here is pretty simple. If you get a job and your total living
expenses constitue half your income, you can work for one year, save the second
half of your income, and then "coast" for a year on your savings. If you can
live off a third of your income, you can coast for two years, if you can live
off a quarter you can coast for three. Or, you could work for five years
straight and then coast for fifteen! Or work constantly, rather than in fits
and starts, but for 2 days a week instead of 5. The actual distribution is a
matter of taste, but the key concept is that the cheaper your cost of living,
the less you need to work and therefore the more time you have to do what you
really want.
Most people dream of getting rich so that they can retire early. That's very
far from a foolproof strategy if you really want to retire early, in part
because it's hard to get rich, and in part because as you get richer, it's
*very* easy to increase your standard of living proportionately (there's that
hedonic treadmill again) so that you don't actually have a lot of excess to
retire on. The strategy I'm discussing here is the opposite, "living poor" so
that you can retire early. It has the advantage that while getting rich is
difficult and rare, living poor is actually very easy in that anybody can do
it, if they have the dedication and willpower. Nobody can stop you and nobody
can steal or tax your poverty away from you.
I talked about "living poor" above to emphasise the fact this this approach is
the logical opposite of "getting rich", but actually I don't like the term, as I
don't want anybody to think I am making light of poverty. I am aware that
genuine poverty is not a pleasant experience (I recently read Orwell's "Down and
Out in Paris and London", and recommend it). There is a very real difference
between having your power disconnected because you couldn't afford to pay the
bill since you had to buy food instead, and disconnecting your own power supply
because you spent a few years dramatically reducing your electricity
requirements and installing a small solar or wind installation that can supply
all of your needs. So I've titled this entry "radical frugality" as an
alternative. It's less about not having money, and more about not needing
money.
The "radical" part is perhaps uncessary - this idea scales very well, you can do
a little bit of it and reap a little benefit. But I am, I suppose, attracted to
extreme positions, even if I know better, and I got onto this line of thinking
in large part by reading Thoreau's "Walden", documenting the time when Thoreau
lived in a single-room cabin he built himself, living mostly off rice and beans
he grew himself, and I'd call that radical.
So, how far can you push this idea? What proportion of the living expenses of
the average Westerner in 2017 is really essential to keep us alive and not
miserable, and how much of it is "fat" which can be trimmed? Cutting down on
technology is one aspect of this (as mentioned above, it opens the door to
providing your own electricity at minimal ongoing cost. Also, ditching your car
if you have one will save you a fortune on registration, licensing, insurance,
maintenance, etc.), but we've all been talking about that a bit lately, and
there's plenty of interesting questions around e.g. housing and food that I'm
interested in exploring as well.
While thinking about how to radically restructure your life to get ongoing
living costs as low as possible, it's important not to lose sight of the end
goal here, which is basically leisure. When we fantasise about getting rich so
we don't have to work, we usually imagine ourselves being able to spend our
new-found free time doing the same things we do with our current tired weekend
slices of free time, e.g. playing with thousands of dollars worth of music gear in
Jynx's case. Of course, the whole strategy here fails unless you also learn to
entertain yourself on the cheap as well.
This is by no means untread ground. Some people think along very similar lines
for religions reasons (e.g. the Amish, monks living in monasteries), others
(like the off-grid movement) for either environmental reasons or
resiliance reasons (think "preppers"), or both. I think choosing this life for
the sake of, let's say, "economic liberation" is a bit less common, but
certainly not unheard of, and at the end of the day most of the ideas and
solutions work equally well for any of these motivations.
So, in additional to grumpy old man rants about modern technology, I'm hoping to
focus some of my future phlog posts on subjects related to all of the above.
Hopefully this is interesting to some of you! If anybody else here is walking,
or even just thinking about walking, this same path, then I hope you'll share
your thoughts and experiences, too.
