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.