The Totality of Frugality

My parents did a good job of making sure I had everything I needed growing up. This included material things like enough food and decent clothing to wear, but it also included a good education and an emphasis on following my curiosity around.

We were solidly middle class—there wasn’t a ton of extra money for frills middle school kids cared about, but we also didn’t have constant worries about where our next meal might come from. In other words, I had it pretty good overall.

Even still, when I moved out of my parents’ house to move in with my punk friend Jay, an intense frugality coursed through my veins that seemed central to my very identity. What happened?

I’ve asked this question a lot recently, especially as my writing has become more introspective lately. That’s because we are each the lens through which we see the world, and understanding yourself means you can better calibrate how you’re interpreting things.

I need to set the stage a bit. This experience happened during the calendar year of 1994, and I had already been going to the university for a semester by the end of ‘93.

I wrote about this experience during the mid 90s, when I was putting together a punk zine that I actually still have. These quotes from three decades ago far more accurately describe the situation than my memory can.

To save money, we would watch T.V. in the dark instead of turning on the lights. At night, we would go to our separate beds and bundle up in blankets and quilts instead of turning on our crappy, inefficient gas heater. In the summertime, we would take showers that consisted of 100% cold water because they were free.

Somehow, I had inherited some of the intense frugality my grandparents had. Clearly, they needed some of this scarcity mindset in order to survive the Great Depression, but did I need to go this far?

At the grocery store, we would get milk that was about to expire (or, in the case of Kroger, milk that had already expired) for 50 cents, or sometimes even a quarter per gallon. Same with bread. I also remember eating a lot of spaghetti, and, of course, that punk rock staple crop, ramen noodles.

If that sounds maddening to you, you’re not going to believe what my brain just now did. It felt just a little pang of nostalgia for these bargain-hunting days.

Nostalgia? Sure enough, going through some tough experiences can lead you here, but I think I was also role-playing someone who was much poorer. In reality, I always had the ability to go back home to stay with my parents if I absolutely had to, and I knew they would help me if my financial situation got dire… but I also recognized that there were limits.

So, there was a feeling of having a safety net while climbing up the side of a cliff. It was exhilarating.

At the same time, there was something more. This experience wasn’t about trying to survive as much as it was about trying to live life on my own terms. In this sense, 1994 was an incredibly important year for me: I had proof-of-concept that I could survive by living the way I wanted to.

I understood on some level that if you gave up comfort now, you could have the things you wanted later. I understood how to pass the Stanford Marshmallow Test well enough, but I’m honestly not sure if time arbitrage had any bearing on my decisions to live poor, so to speak.

Instead, I saw my frugality as a conscious trade-in for freedom, but not necessarily freedom in the future. I was 18 years old, and I wanted freedom right now, punk you very much.

Freedom can mean lots of different things to people. Some folks view financial freedom as a worthy goal in life, where you can have and do all the things you want without worry about income from somewhere else. This was not the type of freedom I had in mind.

Instead, I was very keen on not being a part of the system. “The system” was the existing power structure—the dominant paradigm in the US, but also in the world. If freedom can mean a dozen different things, “the system” can mean hundreds, but for me it was a simple calculation.

Society was judgy. Decisions were made based on how someone looked, not on how they acted. It’s easy to see how racism and sexism could be embedded in legal frameworks, but it was during polite conversations with regular folks where the rubber truly hits the road, where ideas become reinforced.

I wanted badly to break that link. I was desperate to break that link. I was consumed by the idea of breaking that link.

I wanted anyone judgy to take one look at me and #nope their way right out of the conversation, because I wanted nothing to do with a society whose basis for decision-making was utterly superficial. Therefore, I doubled down on looking even more punk, even deliberately smelling bad so as to offend anyone so inclined to be offended by something so trivial.

Being poor was the cost of not working for someone else beyond the absolute bare minimum. I quit my pizza shop job and, when I wasn’t going to school, went out to explore the world in ways that weren’t possible before. I even traveled to Richmond, Virginia as a part of a road-trip adventure, and I’m still here today.

I think I remember this period with nostalgia mainly because I knew I could do it, and I did. I survived (and even moved to a new city) on a wing and a prayer, on nickels and pennies and on Ramen noodles.

I took a principled stance, and it really cost me a lot of social comfort. I no longer feel the sort of discomfort if I look different from everyone else, but this took a few years to get there.

This is very much who I am today, and I’m not sure any of this would have been possible if I hadn’t chosen to live brutally frugal for a while there. After Jay and I went our separate ways, we each had roommates and partners we lived with, and we both carried these traits forward with us.

It is easy for me to spend beneath my means today, largely because even very minor frills (like this delicious cup of coffee) bring me so much delight each day. I’m not sure I would have gotten here without this.

At the same time, a scarcity mindset only takes you so far, and I had to overcome some of the limitations of that type of thinking in order to help my businesses find a sustainable path forward. Fortunately for me, I had boundless energy during my twenties, so being frugal was like a superpower. Unfortunately, when it came time to take bold risks with money, I had a long way to go.

How does this compare to your own life’s experiences? Are you frugal today even if you don’t absolutely have to be, or has your cheapness manifested later in life?