I’ve been among those who tut-tutted about older people and their obsession with using every little thing they can over and over until it literally falls apart. “Well,” we say with a little shake of the head, “you know they lived through the Depression. I guess they just can’t get over being afraid that it will all go away again if they don’t save every little thing. I wish they’d lighten up.” Ah, walking a few miles in those patched shoes has now taught me WHY these older folks have the mindset they do. And I believe it’s not because they are determined to keep living in the past. It’s because they learned something that many people didn’t for a few decades. But now many of us are experiencing the events that led them to conserve religiously, and I, for one, have had an awakening that I couldn’t have had any other way.
Since I retired from education with little savings due to several catastrophic life events, and I haven’t so far been able to connect with a part-time job to supplement my meager income, I’ve developed, by necessity, a conservationist style of living. Every day I have to make decisions, like whether to splurge and buy three boxes of tissues, or just to take a few out of one box and spread them throughout the house. (Allergies, anyone?) Or whether to go to Dollar Tree and buy a large bottle of generic diet soda for a buck that I’ll have to end up drinking even when it goes flat instead of getting my great Diet Pepsis in little bottles like I love. I’ll decide to use black thread on every piece of clothing I mend that will even come close to matching rather than go purchase the thread that is the perfect color. I’ll watch the free movies on TV even though I’d dearly love a night out at the movie theater for a change. Eating out means choosing which dollar item I want and drinking the Dollar Tree soda with it at home. Our couch came out of the trash and is held together with duct tape, with an old comforter draped over it. I paid $1 for my living room lamp and $10 for the end table. Certainly not the decor I imagined when I was taking all those college classes culminating in one Master’s degree and 39 hours towards another!
But a strange thing is happening. I’m developing a philosophy of life that is cognizant of what constitutes, for me, a luxury or a necessity. To me, a few beautiful things are a necessity for my mental health and to ward off the clinical depression with which I am afflicted. I have to have flowers occasionally. I have to have a new pillow, or vase, or shirt in a beautiful color once in a while, even if they cost a dollar. I have to get a frame so I can hang the photo of my precious granddaughter in her Christmas dress. Without a few simple beautiful things in my life, I don’t want to live anymore. I mean that very literally. When I deprive myself to too extreme an extent, I start to feel that living is less enticing that not being here to face such painful existence and constant unbearable challenges. That’s not healthy and doesn’t make living that frugally worth it.
However, I have developed the habit of examining everything I buy or do to see just how far I can make it stretch, just how much I might make do with something in capacities I hadn’t thought of before, and just how much I might have wasted not only my own resources, but those of the world around me, in times I had more money. I color my hair myself now, as opposed to spending almost $100 to have it professionally colored and highlighted a few times a year. I do my own nails instead of paying $20 to have the luxury of having them done. I buy my clothes, like I did yesterday, on the sales rack at K-Mart for $3.99 instead of paying $40 for a top somewhere else. Once I find a job, I won’t go to such extremes, but neither will I just spend the money for services and goods without carefully considering whether it’s really necessary. Because I would rather have a safety net of money in the bank or else help someone else who needs it than spend even $10 that I wouldn’t have to.
I’m convinced that is what is really behind the Depression-era behavior of some of our parents and grandparents. Not that they are afraid. They rinse and re-use their plastic bags not because they have to but because they learned a way of living that involves really thinking about their habits and how they can be minimized to have more bang for their buck. It gives them, like me, a feeling of control over a whimsical economic environment that can feel overwhelming and leaves them with a feeling of integrity to know they are getting more from less.
Some things I’ve learned by being poor will stay with me even when this situation, which is temporary, improves. I am a different person now. I will always know what it feels like to drive away from a home with no new home to drive to. I can always feel in my gut what it’s like to go into a seedy motel room at night knowing I am not there on a vacation and that I have to go down to the lobby to heat up my one-dollar frozen meal in the microwave, then share a plastic spoon with my son as we eat our last containers of yogurt.. I know what it feels like not to be able to shop even at garage sales or thrift stores when I need something. And the time and anguish it takes to go to a food bank is an experience everyone should enjoy at some point in their life. (No, you don’t just go pick up a box of food. You wait for hours in line first, listening to crazy people shout things at one another. Same thing for riding the bus.)
Most of the time, the only way to truly understand something is to experience it first hand. That can be a blessing as well as a curse. I am being cursed with one of life’s hands while being blessed with its other at the same time. And it’s changing my soul forever in ways I never would have anticipated.
“We do not dare to use even a little soap, when it will pay for an extra egg or a few more carrots for our children.” – an unemployed father in 1930 Oregon
TIP: If you are currently financially comfortable, try this: choose something you like and buy regularly and impose a “scarcity” ban on yourself with this item. See if there is a bare-bones replacement, or force yourself to do without it entirely. See how little money you can spend on this one item. Then try to imagine a life where every single, solitary expenditure has to be played out under these rules!
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