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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