Frugality

Money buys most of life's essentials but it does not buy happiness. This cliqued adage has been expressed in many different forms by many wise persons. It is however a hard lesson to learn and cannot be fully appreciated simply through hearing or reading it. It is after all very easy to imagine something that would bring us joy or comfort or entertainment and to then conceive a mechanism by which money could procure the imagined thing. It is also the case that a lack of money can be very stressful when bills and dependants are part of the equation. Removing that stress and worry obviously also contribute to happiness. So why is it that so many great minds would have us believe that money really can't be used to acquire happiness?

I don't intend to argue that money cannot purchase happiness however I would assert that the happiness obtained through material ownership and financial procurement is of a fleeting short term nature and suffers from diminishing returns. It is like taking a pill to get pain relief, it masks or distracts from the discomfort but it does not cure the cause of the pain. I cannot offer any proof of this assertion as subjective emotional theories are hard to to quantify. All my beliefs on this matter are born from experience. I used to be quite a collector having numerous collections from cards and models to spirits and guitars, from paints to CDs, I even have a collection of drinking glasses. I had a disposable income from working while living with my parents and invested most of it into furthering these collections. The act of choosing and then buying the next addition to whatever collection brought me joy and so I continued in this vein of working and collecting.

A few things then happened in my life involving realisations and lifestyle choices which vividly illuminated the process of my spending and collecting. I had always known I was quite lazy or work shy as every school report I had ever received said so. I was in the final stages of my education and had decided to put the effort in at the last stage and get an impressive result so as to make getting jobs and good pay easier in later life. I had been testing and practising for some card tournaments which was one of my hobbies and had put in a surprising amount of effort for a lazy person. I had also developed quite a thorough preparation technique for these card tournaments which I was sure would translate well into working for exams and decided to give it a go. After a couple of days getting absolutely nowhere with my exam prep the answer to my laziness hit me like a tonne of bricks. Unlike my card hobby I didn't care about my degree or much of what I was being taught and so could not spark up the enthusiasm to invest any time in it. This further implied I didn't care about the sorts of things my degree would lead me into employment wise. I knew from that moment getting a good degree was pretty irrelevant as any job I would then get with it I would have a similar apathy towards as the degree itself and would progress very little in that role.

There was no point in forcing myself to jump through hoops when all that would achieve is to present me with ever more hoops I didn't want to jump through. I then put in the minimum effort to complete my course and not have what little time investment I had given be completely wasted and started to conceive of ways I could earn a living while also being interested in what I was doing. I remember lecturing one of my house mates who was beaming after they had received a near one hundred percent mark on one of their papers. To pass with the top grade only required seventy percent and so to my mind any extra effort expended in order to raise the mark above that point was completely wasted and so rather than congratulate my friend I berated them for poor time management. This dawning realisation all hinged around the notion of not wasting ones time in inefficient work as a result of apathy or simply needles work.

My card hobby had a professional tournament scene and was one of the only things I had found where I could properly apply myself and so I decided that I would try and get involved in competition rather than finding a job after I was done with the education system. To do this required lots of travelling on an inconsistent and far from certain income. For the next two years I had no fixed abode, no job, no steady income and effectively no possessions. I lived out of a rucksack which had little more than spare clothes and a toothbrush in it. My collections were suddenly useless, I had no place to put them and no way to carry them around. All my possessions got boxed and put into storage or given to people who would make better use of them. It was a truly liberating experience that I fully did not expect, I was suddenly free from all these ties, I thought I cared about these collections and material things but as soon as I had accepted I wouldn't have the money to enlarge them or the house to frame them in I felt less burdened. Cast off thine shackles of ownership for it is a reciprocal arrangement and the inanimate partner is not a loving or caring one! It was as if I had shed an entirely superfluous weight, I no longer had to think about these material things, plan for them or worry about them. It was as if I was an overweight person who by a single choice suddenly lost all the excess. The thin person expends less energy to move around and does so more freely and swiftly and this is exactly how I felt without my possessions.

From this time onwards money has simply been a means to an end for me rather than an end in itself. Money buys food, transport and other consumables and services that allow you to live and act as you chose. I no longer buy things just to own them, if I come by a book once I have read it I will pass it to someone who I think will enjoy it. There is no point me keeping it, I will not read it again and it will just take up space, time and energy, all be it a very small amount. I have stopped playing professional cards as I found it tiring and stressful to do full time and had gained more than enough experience from the time and have been settled for over five years living fairly normally in a house with a job. Practically everything I have now is something I had before I boxed it all away, most of what is “new “ has been given to me by relatives and friends rather than having been purchased new. I live my life by a number of philosophies and the one which relates to frugality and money is that by giving up our time we can obtain money however by giving up money you cannot really buy time. (you can invest in time saving devices or pay for other people to do things so you don't have to which is a sensible use of money when the ratio of your pay and the time saved are right, you can even invest in good healthcare which will statistically increase your life expectancy and these are all pseudo ways of using time to buy money and although they do not discredit my philosophy on the matter they are certainly worthy of inclusion in your calculations as to what is a sensible income and what are worthy expenditures and so will change the definition of “needs”). As such you never want to have more money than you need, much like my house mates exam score, any extra money you acquire in your life is time you have wasted working when you could have been living. It all then comes down to an assessment of what you need to buy to determine how much you need to work. Most people approach this from the other direction, they need to work and so do as society normally does which for the most part is a standard five days a week, eight hours a day. This amount of work provides them more money than they need and so they spend the rest on whatever. Returning to my weight analogy this is rather like being given ever larger plates of food to eat and always finishing everything rather than eating till you are full or eating to your RDA of calories and nutrients. The obvious result of eating everything every time is that you will get fat!

Being work shy as I am I would always prefer to spend more efficiently and more frugally thus freeing up more of my time for other pursuits. The jobs I have ended up doing are ones in which I am able to perform a part time role or control my workload so that I can maintain a good balance of spending and hours worked. I also favour jobs that I enjoy rather than those offering higher pay. This may seem at odds with my assertions regarding the efficiency of time spent earning to free time however that assertion does not account for the enjoyment of the work. If you could rank how much you didn't want to do something on a quantifiable scale it would become mathematically very obvious why one should pay close attention to both pay and enjoyment. If something pays X but I dislike doing it Y amount then a job I enjoy Y/2 I should chose to do in preference provided it pays at least X/2. This is a gross over simplification but does demonstrate how to account for work enjoyment. The more I have lived by my frugal philosophies the more I have come to appreciate their merits, not just for me and my life but also potentially for society. I am happier, more able to spend time furthering myself and am far less wasteful.

Humanity has had such advancements in technique and technology that only a fraction of the required hours of labour per person are now needed to support the basics of life compared to how they were just a few centuries ago. People used to work full time because if they didn't they would start to go hungry. Rather than working less as we have got more efficient and making houses, transporting things and producing food and clothes we have instead redirected that essential labour into non essential jobs. Buckminster Fuller was all to aware of this trend as he describes in this passage:

“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

There are several reasons why it would be pragmatic for society yo adopt a more frugal approach to living ranging from the personal liberating experiences I have described having, to environmental issues, to plain old efficiency. Broadly there are two ways to optimise any process, either you do it as quickly as possible or you do it with the least energy possible. A good example of this is driving where you can try to go as fast as you can such as in a race or by using as little fuel as possible. The way to achieve either result is the exact opposite of the other, to go quickly you should either have your foot on the accelerator or the brake at all times while the most fuel efficient requires you to have the least pedal use possible. Living frugally is like driving to maximise fuel efficiency however humanity seems to act as if it were in a race. This could be attributed to tradition where it has been the case that you needed to race to survive, the workings of the economy or our individual associations of what denotes status.

While I would say all three causes of societies pace are at play I believe the economy is the biggest driver of this trend. It creates an environment where frugality is in many ways punished. If you do not spend or invest capital it will diminish in value as a result of inflation, by doing nothing you are losing out. It is a self perpetuating vicious cycle, banks and investors use the money of others to invigorate the growth of the economy. Everyone has to do this else they will lose out due to inflation in much the same way companies have to be seen to be growing to not be failing. The water level is rising as it were and everyone has to keep swimming faster and faster to stay afloat.

An obvious question at this stage is why is the water level rising, what is the reason for inflation, but this is a hard question. I have covered this to some extent in my series on economics but will try and describe in different terms here for convenience. Consumption of goods, minting new currency, unproductive labour, interest to be paid on loans and investments made using non-real assets all contribute to inflation to varying degrees however it is clear that some of these are the result of people avoiding the effects of inflation. This is why I describe it as a vicious cycle, the causes are also the effects and so a positive feedback mechanism is created and the oxymoronic statement that inflation causes inflation may be made. It is certainly not the sole cause of inflation but it is significant, particularly as it is in the investors interests to maintain the cycle as they are able to skim off the top. No body wants it too high however as it spirals out of control with no one being able to afford loans and no one having any faith in the value of money.

I asserted that there are two ways to optimise a system or operation, either the most efficient route or the quickest and I gave the example of the two polar ends of driving with the least pedal use or the most. Being fuel efficient or going quickly are both merits and the predominant one will depend on the situation. The merits are unfortunately diametrically opposed and mean you cannot have the best of both worlds, if you are fuel efficient you must go slower and if you are quick you must consume more fuel. The same is true of the economy, inflation promotes certain kinds of habit which are beneficial and some that are detrimental while deflation reverses those effects.

Under a moderate amount of inflation the maximum growth of the economy will be seen . Discounting all other effects such as faith in a currency or the relevance of day to day stability greater inflation would cause greater impetus for growth however in reality these many other factors that mean the rate of growth does not carry on increasing beyond a certain point. The growth of the economy is always seen to be a good thing as it implies we have more choice as consumers and more employment. A question few people seem to ask is whether growth is actually such a good thing? What is the cost of growing at the fastest rate possible?

One of the downsides of the fastest possible growth is the creation of work for the sake of work, as Buckminster Fuller alluded to in his quote with the inspectors of inspectors. It is also in the production of commodities which serve little purpose, they do not aid any task nor really enhance the quality of life. Any example of such a commodity will likely make me come off as snobbish and so in an act of self sacrifice in the name of clarity I would suggest that the majority of items that could be procured from your average gift shop to be the kinds of commodity in question. Another drawback of the fastest possible economy is that, much like the fastest possible car, it pays little regard to the rate of consumption of natural resources. It uses as much that is available at the time as it is able to do whatever it can. Overall then the cost that is paid for having the fastest possible rate of growth is that we are very resource inefficient, both in terms of human labour and of natural resources.

Under deflation however the reverse is the case. The value of money will increase over time and so there is no rush to invest or spend it. People and companies will only spend what they need to, any upgrades or improvements to production techniques would need to be significantly more effective than those within inflation to be economically viable and so everything would slow down. Less jobs would exist as less things we being bought and so less things would be produced and so less resources would be consumed and so forth in a self perpetuating cycle. Ultimately a theoretical humanity operating under perpetual deflation would produce, work and consume far more in line with what it needed rather than what it could. We are still full steam ahead with the finance sector stoking the fires as much as they can however the planet is starting to go into the red on the fuel gauge. We are suffering significant diminishing returns of quality of life for our labours yet still seem besotted by the notion of growth. Historically humanities situation has been appropriate for driving as quickly as possible however our situation is changing and a better approach may be to ease off the pedals and try to save some fuel for the next bit of our journey.

This is all a bit easier said than done, while governments do have much control over their countries economy they have very little control over the global economy and must fall in line with how it works or be effectively isolated from it. Global trade is of huge importance to most nations, certainly all of the large economies and so no nation can easily go it alone. Changing the global economy to a deflating one would need a concerted global cooperation and effort. It would likely be far more challenging than implementing a single currency. It would also have to happen very gradually so as not to severally disrupt peoples lives with jobs being lost too rapidly.

I have focused on the economic and environmental advantages to society obtained by a more frugal approach to living. These are significant because of the time we live in, the personal advantages of an appreciation of frugality however will always be beneficial. Living in a society operating with stability under deflation will imbue an element of that frugality to each of its citizens in much the same way that inflation encourages consumerist lifestyles. Freedom is gained by individuals in the more frugal society both by an increase in available time through less work and also from the unburdening of a material life style. One could argue that more freedom is lost by a reduced freedom of choice in spending however that is hard to quantify and really depends on what is lost. I am not advocating a bare minimum living with no luxury or superfluous spending, with most things a balance is best and this is no exception. Living in a society with no growth would be as frustrating as driving behind someone trying to be as fuel efficient as possible! Given that we hover around the point of maximum growth there is only one direction to go in order to find the balance and so I am an advocate of reducing growth by curtailing inflation. I am sure the optimal balance of growth and frugality is impossible to calculate and will change and undulate with the progress of society, one can at least presume it is around zero percent inflation over a long enough time period. At a guess right now the optimal balance would be less than that having spent so long at the polar extreme but that is an immaterial assertion as there is no way to do anything without a time frame.

As with all cyclic feedback loops we do not entirely need the world leaders to get together and work out a sensible economic plan to enhance the global quality of life and curtail environmental issues. The economy is like a democracy in which we vote with our money. If enough people try and live frugally then the change will be driven from the other direction. If we only work and spend as much as we need, reuse where we can and buy better quality commodities that last longer where we cannot then the economy will follow suit and operate more as if it were under deflation imposed by legislation. We may not all control investment banks or write economic policy but we can do our part and live by example. It may not have much effect on the global economy but it will have a more pronounced effect on your life and I strongly believe in a good way.