Living Off the Land

We are (alarmingly but maybe predictably) tumbling into holiday shopping season early this year.

Tidal waves of deals are flooding the market as not-good back-to-school sale figures alarm analysts, and as a looming potential global recession triggered by a slurry of sky-high inflation, upwardly careening interest rates, supply chain hangovers (and mismatches) from the pandemic, and a land war in Europe threatens to upend balance sheets for the next year or two.

All of which means it’s even more important than usual to have a good sense of what’s valuable (for your priorities), what’s not, and to assiduously filter potential purchases through that heuristic so as to avoid spending on dead-weight or liabilities instead of assets.

To that end, some things to be thinking about:

What have you purchased recently that didn’t end up being worth the expense?

What have you purchased recently that has been even more valuable than you thought it would be? More than worth what you paid?

Do you really need anything new right now, or would a purchase mostly introduce novelty into what might otherwise seem to be a boring, stagnant routine/home setup?

And if the latter, how might you tweak, rearrange, rethink, or repurpose things so that you spark change and a feeling of new-ness without having to buy anything?

Also worth considering:

You can achieve a sense of novelty by getting rid of stuff, too—not just acquiring new things. Freeing up space in your home, in your life, in your mind, can feel great and liberating, and can unveil new possibilities.

You can acquire stuff via Buy Nothing groups (or cheap and secondhand at rummage sales and donation-based shops), and you can donate to such communities and establishments, as well (there’s something very satisfying about imbuing old things with new life, and that’s true whether you’re doing the imbuing or someone else is making use of your old, not-being-used things).

You can also “live off the land,” in the sense of finding new utility for things you already own.

In many cases we buy stuff not for the thing itself, but because of what we imagine it can do for us.

That new piece of furniture, we imagine, will become a place where the family gathers together to watch TV or play games, that new computer or other device will allow us to finally learn to code, and the new art supplies/exercise bike/snazzy jacket will help us learn to draw, work out, and look good.

In reality, though, we can usually achieve the same or similar outcomes with what we already have on hand, it’s just easier to unload those potentialities on stuff rather than acknowledging that we’ve already got what we need to move forward, and have just been putting off the effort required to achieve these goals—using the theoretical lack of proper gear as an excuse to not invest ourselves in these desired outcomes.

In some rare cases, a new tool or other possession truly will empower us to do things we cannot, no matter how we try, currently accomplish.

But push-ups and jumping jacks are free, while an exercise bike is not.

Doodling on notebook paper with available pens and pencils isn’t the same as working on fancy-pants paper with high-end, pro-grade utensils, but we can go a long way with already-owned equipment before we actually need to upgrade to reach our full potential.

Most of our clothes are perfectly fine, and though pop culture may tell us we’re not good and attractive unless we have all the snazzy new whatevers, digging through one’s closet (or digging through a friend or neighbor’s closet while they dig through ours) can catalyze the same feeling of having an upgraded wardrobe, without participating in expensive and wasteful fashion industry excesses.

None of this will be applicable to everyone, and none will be applicable 100% of the time.

But these are things I try to keep in mind for myself when the ads in my experiential space become overwhelming, when the world seems especially uncertain, and when economics go haywire, making it increasingly prudent to be intentional in how I spend and consume.

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