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.