![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Meet the Frugal Woods
3/5. Brief memoir from the blogger who realized she was unhappy in her career and life, cut her spending to the bone, achieved financial independence, and moved to the middle of nowhere for . . . some . . . reason? As you can tell, I'm with her until that last bit. Random thoughts:
-The best part of this book is the beginning, which is a lively and oh-so-accurate description of the hard comedown some of us overachievers experience in our 20's when no one is giving us A's anymore and we start looking around going, "….this is it? This can't be it." My solution was to go to law school and trip sideways into a truly incredible career. Hers was to short-circuit the entire question by opting out.
-She's super into frugality as a philosophy, in addition to a tool. I mostly agree with her overarching points, but it's the sort of agreement where I go "yeah, but," a lot while reading. E.g. her contention that used and secondhand stuff can make you happier because it frees you of the paradox of choice where having a zillion product options makes us less happy about the one we ultimately pick. I mean, yeah, but. But I replaced all our shitty old secondhand kitchen stuff over the course of a couple years with carefully-researched, thoughtfully-chosen new products, and my god am I happy about it. You just have to be thoughtful about what money is good for in improving your life and what it's not. I mean, I believe in secondhand, too – it's ecologically and economically sound, and you wouldn't believe the amazing stuff you can get off craigslist for pennies around here. But she says in one breath that it's so much easier to get secondhand because you don't have to do all the work of figuring out the exact thing to buy, and then explains in the next breath how much research she did to verify the safety of the secondhand crib they got, complete with sourcing replacement parts. Hm. I think what is really going on here is that she doesn't see that part as work, for some reason, even though it obviously is.
-What I'm getting at here is that this is not a person who understands moderation. Her frugality is as compulsive as the spending of a lot of people I know. It makes me uncomfortable in the way watching people be compulsive is uncomfortable, which was hard to tease out because I kept being like, "why is this weird? I believe in frugality too." Case in point: she believes in a zero dollar budget. As in, once you account for core living expenses, she treats her budget as zero and every dollar spent as a failure. Which strikes me as a terrible way to frame it. But it seems to make her happy? So okay then. And yeah, if you put them on a spectrum, I'm definitely less horrified by her than I am by most of my colleagues, many of whom are vocal about the fact that they spend every dollar of the $400k-$800k their households bring in every year (why?! On what?!?!). But that just means I'm closer to her end of things, not that I'm totally with her.
-Okay, real talk. I read this book because I found her blog, and I found her blog because we, too, are socking away gobs of money in order to, in a few years, quit the rat race and do whatever the fuck we want. (Shh, don't tell my boss). And we, too, believe in frugality as an ethic: it's good for the environment, it's psychologically useful because it makes it harder to fall into the hedonic adaptation must-buy-more-bigger-better-stuff trap, etc. etc. (Though our version of frugality involves a lot more money than hers does). But I still found this book kind of irritating. And I think the fundamental problem is that she, like everyone else in the world, is not very good at explaining happiness. It's not her fault. No one can do this. I genuinely believe in the value of designing your life for happiness, and this is a solid, short book explaining how someone went about it. But it can't explain the alchemy of it. It can just say that they did x and y and z and then . . . happiness, or something a lot more like it. So it's not particularly useful in the project of designing my own life, which is still in progress.
3/5. Brief memoir from the blogger who realized she was unhappy in her career and life, cut her spending to the bone, achieved financial independence, and moved to the middle of nowhere for . . . some . . . reason? As you can tell, I'm with her until that last bit. Random thoughts:
-The best part of this book is the beginning, which is a lively and oh-so-accurate description of the hard comedown some of us overachievers experience in our 20's when no one is giving us A's anymore and we start looking around going, "….this is it? This can't be it." My solution was to go to law school and trip sideways into a truly incredible career. Hers was to short-circuit the entire question by opting out.
-She's super into frugality as a philosophy, in addition to a tool. I mostly agree with her overarching points, but it's the sort of agreement where I go "yeah, but," a lot while reading. E.g. her contention that used and secondhand stuff can make you happier because it frees you of the paradox of choice where having a zillion product options makes us less happy about the one we ultimately pick. I mean, yeah, but. But I replaced all our shitty old secondhand kitchen stuff over the course of a couple years with carefully-researched, thoughtfully-chosen new products, and my god am I happy about it. You just have to be thoughtful about what money is good for in improving your life and what it's not. I mean, I believe in secondhand, too – it's ecologically and economically sound, and you wouldn't believe the amazing stuff you can get off craigslist for pennies around here. But she says in one breath that it's so much easier to get secondhand because you don't have to do all the work of figuring out the exact thing to buy, and then explains in the next breath how much research she did to verify the safety of the secondhand crib they got, complete with sourcing replacement parts. Hm. I think what is really going on here is that she doesn't see that part as work, for some reason, even though it obviously is.
-What I'm getting at here is that this is not a person who understands moderation. Her frugality is as compulsive as the spending of a lot of people I know. It makes me uncomfortable in the way watching people be compulsive is uncomfortable, which was hard to tease out because I kept being like, "why is this weird? I believe in frugality too." Case in point: she believes in a zero dollar budget. As in, once you account for core living expenses, she treats her budget as zero and every dollar spent as a failure. Which strikes me as a terrible way to frame it. But it seems to make her happy? So okay then. And yeah, if you put them on a spectrum, I'm definitely less horrified by her than I am by most of my colleagues, many of whom are vocal about the fact that they spend every dollar of the $400k-$800k their households bring in every year (why?! On what?!?!). But that just means I'm closer to her end of things, not that I'm totally with her.
-Okay, real talk. I read this book because I found her blog, and I found her blog because we, too, are socking away gobs of money in order to, in a few years, quit the rat race and do whatever the fuck we want. (Shh, don't tell my boss). And we, too, believe in frugality as an ethic: it's good for the environment, it's psychologically useful because it makes it harder to fall into the hedonic adaptation must-buy-more-bigger-better-stuff trap, etc. etc. (Though our version of frugality involves a lot more money than hers does). But I still found this book kind of irritating. And I think the fundamental problem is that she, like everyone else in the world, is not very good at explaining happiness. It's not her fault. No one can do this. I genuinely believe in the value of designing your life for happiness, and this is a solid, short book explaining how someone went about it. But it can't explain the alchemy of it. It can just say that they did x and y and z and then . . . happiness, or something a lot more like it. So it's not particularly useful in the project of designing my own life, which is still in progress.
