Frugality tends to involve a lot of policy decisions. We tightwads have a lot of systems and guidelines we follow, and while they seem self-explanatory to us, they aren't quite so obvious to newbies. One of the things I routinely do when contemplating a new purchase is to estimate the cost per use. For clothing, that's cost per wear. This calculation can really help in making decisions, saving money, and also saving closet space. For simplicity's sake, I don't include externalities like laundry soap, water and electricity, square footage for storage, or other costs that pertain to the purchase. I would definitely include dry cleaning, but I don't buy clothes that require dry cleaning as a rule. There are other "dingers" involved besides associated expenses and storage requirements; the big one is maintenance. I don't buy clothes that need ironing, either, and I avoid anything that needs hand-washing. All anyone has to do is glance around. Do you have a pile of ironing? A pile of dry cleaning? A pile of high-maintenance stuff that needs hand-washing? If it's piling up, that's a sign that you don't dig spending your spare time taking care of your clothes. Pay attention to that because your time is worth a lot more money than your clothes are. Liberate yourself and donate the whole stack. Clothing, like any other purchase, should be a value-add. Owning it should level up your life, rather than complicating it. Debt and chaos are not on this list. Back to the number-crunching. I've been using the guideline of "one dollar per wear" for twenty years. My husband says it's time to change this, because of inflation, but it's easier for me to mentally calculate the $1/wear figure. Say I'm looking at a pair of jeans. They're $50. I can say, would I wear this pair of jeans fifty times? That's not quite once a week for a year. Yeah, they'll probably last that long. I do wear jeans that often. In actual fact, I don't wear jeans six months out of the year because it's too hot where I live. But, the last time I bought jeans, they were still in good shape two years later. I know because I'm wearing them right now. If I'm also looking at a $100 pair of jeans, I can ask three questions. 1. Would I wear them 100 times? 2. Are they really twice as good as the $50 jeans? 3. Would they last twice as long as the $50 jeans? There is a bottom threshold below which we don't want to go. If I'm looking at a $5 t-shirt, I really have to ask whether it would hold up for five washings. I have to ask whether the garment quality is so poor that this item may ruin some of my other clothes. This happened to me this summer. I had bought a cheap swimsuit cover-up, and I threw it in a drawer in a hotel with my other dirty clothes. (I use the bottom drawer of a hotel dresser as a temporary laundry bag). The dye on the swimsuit cover-up stained this cute pair of capris I bought retail. I tried every stain removal technique I've ever used, and those dye spots are not coming out. Blue on pink. Is it irony that the dye won't stay where it belongs but it will stay where it doesn't? This is not the first time that an inexpensive garment has caused a laundry disaster. I swear, one of these days I'm switching to togas. Universally flattering and no dye transfer. There are a lot of high-maintenance clothing features that I avoid, because I want my clothes to continue to look at least somewhat acceptable. Sequins tend to rip off and bend, scratch up my dining chairs, and catch on other clothing. Eventually, the metal finish wears off. Beads always come off. Lace tends to run and tear. I'm not paying extra for something that creates extra labor for me and looks shabby that quickly. That's what accessories are for. If I want to be blinged out, I'm doing it with jewelry, not with something that takes half an hour to clean. Fashion designers know better than to market this stuff to men. The dollar-per-wear rubric can help to clarify decisions in a closet purge. I can hold up something well-worn and ask myself, have I gotten fair value out of this purchase? It can be really emotional for me to let go of favorite items, like my old size XL running shorts, even after I started wearing an XS and the old shorts wouldn't even stay on my body anymore. It's probably more common for people to want to hang onto things they've rarely or never worn. We tend to feel that we haven't gotten our money's worth. That very well might be true! The prime purpose of many purchases - and all impulse buys - is the act of shopping itself. Shopping makes many of us feel lit up with sensory delight, excitement, astute bargain-getting, and the thrill of the hunt. The moment the item goes in the bag, it loses its value. I've never done a clearing job in which we didn't uncover unused items with the tags still on, still in the original shopping bag. It's okay. We're building awareness, attention, and focus. We're planning more purposefully and we're getting more out of the things we buy. Moving forward includes letting go. Another way to calculate value is to ask, would I buy this again right now? As we assess our belongings, we can see that certain items were a real steal, and others were more of a meh. For example, our bed, couch, phones, sunglasses, and toothpaste get used every single day. Cost per use is going to be far lower than a dollar per day. Will I use my expedition backpack a total of one hundred and fifty days? Possibly. Not there yet, even though it's six years old. I would definitely buy it again, but I have to accept that certain hobbies are more expensive than others. Possibly the best way to calculate value is to ask, would owning this provide the leverage necessary to improve something else in my life? I hemmed (see what I did there) and hawed over buying a discount $80 suit for a job interview. Went back to the store no fewer than three times before I bought it. Got the job. Got a promotion and two raises, and made Employee of the Quarter. That suit paid for itself many times over. Another way to look at it is that I could have spent the same $80 buying four $20 items, or eight $10 items. None of those cheaper pieces would have been likely to help me level up at an important job interview. They would also bulk up my closet with 4-8x greater volume. The more items I have, the lower the chances that I'm getting full use or full value out of all of them. Calculating cost per use has tended to help me ease into buying better-quality items that I would normally consider outside of my comfort zone. Spending money does not come naturally to me. I've been known to walk six miles to save $1.50 on bus fare. Cost per use helps remind me that buying cheap, fall-apart clothing can cost more in the long run. It gives me permission to buy nicer things that don't bleed dye in the wash. It also helps to keep my closet under control, as I buy fewer, more durable things. The end result is easier on the wallet, lower maintenance, and tends not to result in closet rods snapping under the weight of too much fabric. I'm kicking myself for not having read this book sooner. It has got to be one of the best self-help books of all time. After finishing it, I immediately felt this surge of energy that I wanted to direct toward every scary thing I could think of. Start a new business! Learn to snorkel! Wrestle a bear! Well, maybe not wrestle a bear. You know what they say: Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger, except for bears. Bears will just kill you. So if something scary happens, just think, at least it's not a bear. Susan Jeffers' book Feel the Fear... and Do It Anyway is motivational, sure. There's a lot more to it than that, though. Confronting fear means going to some dark places. One of the exercises involves listing all the payoffs we get from stuck situations in our lives. For instance, when I still got migraines, which I wouldn't wish on anyone, I had a built-in alarm system telling me that I occasionally needed to spend a day resting in bed. I haven't had a migraine in nearly three years, but I can give myself permission to lounge around without that as my reason. My husband and I almost decided against our backpacking trip to Iceland because we were both afraid I wouldn't be physically able to handle living in a tent for three weeks. Fear would have kept us from one of the best experiences of our lives. We did the trip, and I didn't get a migraine, and I was fine, and then we went to Spain for two weeks, and I was fine then too. Now neither of us worries about what we used to consider a significant problem. This book does a terrific job in discussing grief, loss, pain, and resentment as well as fear. One of the key messages is that what we are really afraid of, in most situations, is 'not being able to handle it.' "I'm afraid I'll get a migraine while we're traveling in a foreign country, and I won't be able to handle it." Recognizing that tends to lead to the realization that I probably CAN in fact handle the situation. Some quotes that stood out to me: "OUTTALK YOUR NEGATIVITY" On waiting for someone who is always late: "It gives me a rare opportunity to do nothing without feeling guilty!" "Think about this: If you see that your purpose in life is to give, then it's almost impossible to be conned. If someone takes, they are simply fulfilling your life's purpose, and they deserve your thanks." "If you have no concept of how the world can look without fear, it is hard to know what you are striving for." I loved this book, and I wish I'd read it sooner. The message that "I can handle it" is going to stick with me. This is something that should be taught to everyone, starting with the tiniest kids. I can't remember a time when my life didn't revolve around books. There's a picture of me at a family gathering, sitting alone on the couch with an oversized book in my lap, at the tender age of two. My mom used to drop whatever she was doing to read to me, because I would interrupt her with a book in my hand. Often I would ask her to read the same book again. We read The Party That Grew four times in a row one day. When I was seven, I tried to teach myself to read one book with each eye. Not much has changed; I just checked my phone and I am carrying no fewer than six audiobooks, forty-one e-books (with sixteen more on my tablet), and about a thousand news articles. Not to mention a physical library book. I hope books aren't the very meaning and substance of my life, but it's starting to look that way. I'm not an introvert, but I play one on TV. I'm a shy extrovert, and I'm awkward in many social settings. I like meeting people and being in groups as long as I feel like I understand the group dynamic. I absolutely understand the innate preference for the company of a good book rather than some random stranger. The known versus the unknown. The comfort of sitting in the GO AWAY I'M READING bubble. The inherent attraction of the book itself. The book, I can choose. The stranger, not so much. I don't have to read annoying books, but I do sometimes have to interact with annoying people. What I've started to realize is that everything I love about books is something to love about other people, as well. Unimpressive cover art may be hiding a fascinating story underneath. I might be swept away by a story that didn't seem all that interesting at first. This may be my first encounter with a singular voice unlike any I've known before. I'm going to learn something I never knew. For a short while, I can slip into another perspective and learn about life from another point of view. Books are each the unique product of another human being's experience. This was brought home to me recently on a plane flight. The woman next to me asked me what I did, and when I told her I was a writer, she immediately asked me if I knew any ghostwriters. "That's the question of someone with a story to tell," I said. Sure enough, she had, and if she sold it, it could be a blockbuster. She had grown up in the world of boxing, had a picture of herself as a young girl with Muhammad Ali, knew some mafia figures, had traveled all around the world, and now judged dog shows. I asked her if she had ever ridden a camel, as a random guess, and she said yes! To think, my plan for that flight had been to finish a true crime book I was reading. Nothing whatsoever about my seat-mate's external appearance would have led me to guess any of the wild stories she carried inside. Reading is like listening. We passively sit back and absorb the story, asking only that it hold our attention. Listening can be like reading. We can actively seek out a listening experience, anticipating that it will be interesting and worth our time. Maybe it will be fascinating. Maybe it will be so totally absorbing that we forget the passage of time. Maybe listening to this story can change our lives. As a budding novelist, I've started to see listening to strangers as a supremely valuable opportunity. The better I get at my quest to be a world-class listener, the better I get at drawing great stories from unlikely sources. I'm not a naturally confident networker. I'd far, far rather stand at the sidelines and observe the proceedings. What I've started to try to do is to see myself as a rescuer of fellow shy people. If I see someone else who looks as uncomfortable as I feel, I will go over and try to break the ice. As long as we're both stuck there, we can spend a few minutes together. Maybe we can each get a book recommendation out of the conversation. Maybe this person is one of the roughly forty percent of introverts in our society, and a one-on-one conversation would be preferable to trying to mingle with a dozen strangers. Maybe this fellow shy person is an extrovert like me, who only needs a bit of encouragement to open up. Maybe we have all sorts of things in common, and maybe we can make friends. When I say that books are people, I mean that they are mere artifacts of another human mind. Getting to know a book is inextricably linked to getting to know another person's perspective and manner of expression. Anything we can enjoy from reading can also be extracted from conversation, with enough imagination and skill. What I'm really saying is that people are books, waiting to be discovered and read attentively. People work out for different reasons. Some do it because they're training for a sport. Some do it for stress relief. Some do it for physical therapy. Some do it for status. Some do it for mood repair. Some do it for the social opportunities. I have my own reasons, and one of them is that my husband asked me to go to the gym with him. He's an Upholder and I'm a Questioner. I thought I'd explore our different takes on the gym and physical fitness in general. He's been an athlete since before he can really remember. He thinks he started at age 4. He has a big box of medals, ribbons, and trophies that he keeps trying to throw away, because of course those things are just silly byproducts of something he does for its own sake. He's an Eagle Scout, naturally, and he has played on at least seven different sports teams that I know of, some as an adult. Upholder motivations include following through on your commitments, doing things because that's just what one does, believing something is the right thing to do and then doing it, finishing what you start, and never letting anyone down. Sports are just one area where he commits to excellence. Show up, work hard, do what you said you'd do, and win. Other options? What other options? I can only wish that anything, at any time, had ever appeared to me with such perfect clarity. We're total opposites in many ways. He's tall, I'm short. He has a big frame, I have a small frame. (My wrists are 5 1/4"). He has a high pain threshold, I have a low pain threshold. He's fascinated by sports, I find them confusing. He can learn any new motion or dance step after seeing it done for a few seconds. I had to have my own teacher in step aerobics, fell off the step, and almost blacked out from pure exhaustion. I accidentally slapped someone once during ballroom dancing, and I fell during the polka and my skirt flipped up to my waist. I once sent my bowling ball backward, where it bounced onto the ball rack. Proprioception exists, I've seen it, but I don't seem to have much of it. To give myself some credit, part of the reason I do so many ridiculous things is that I'm always ready to try something new. Questioners are easily bored. I have no emotional problems with being a complete novice and making a spectacle out of myself. This is my way of controlling a situation. If I'm going to be the focus of attention whether I like it or not, I'm going to get some comedic value out of it, for my private amusement if not for others. "It's for my blog." One of the things I like about the gym is learning to use all the multifarious contraptions. We were working in, and as I was waiting my turn I saw a guy pushing a big red sled with weights on it. He pushed it all the way across the gym, and then he pushed it back. I couldn't take my eyes off it. I knew it was inevitable that I would one day push this sled. I pointed it out to my husband, who grimaced. "That's hard." "I know, it looks hard!" Rational assessment on his part, foolish enchantment on mine. I like running uphill in the mud. What can I say? "What did Santa bring you?" "Heavy stuff." I don't need accountability to exercise. I used to be fat, sedentary, and chronically ill. I accidentally cured myself of thyroid disease through exercise, bicycling to be precise, and the lightbulb went on. I have the power to control my body in ways that doctors tried to convince me I could not. I unlocked an access panel with a bunch of switches, levers, dials, lights, knobs, and ports, many of which I don't yet understand, because there's no instruction manual. Part of the attraction for me in going to the gym is in seeing other people at higher fitness levels, doing awesome things. I see people older than me who have more muscle definition, and I think "Aha." The more I learn about physiology, nutrition, and fitness, the more I realize how little I know, and the more interesting it gets. Action-oriented people are temperamentally very different from the more cerebral or artistic people with whom I usually associated, so the athletic mindset was yet another new thing to learn. As a Questioner, I work out because it satisfies my curiosity, it involves lots of mysterious tools and buzzwords and classes forever just outside my skill set, and because it's proven to be a terrific outlet for my high energy level. I dig it. I tried it thinking I would hate it, I was wrong, and now it's sold itself to me. When I can't work out, I feel progressively more cruddy, and I long to get started again the minute I can. The Upholder jam seems to be different. Upholders have a sort of checklist of things they do. If it's on the checklist, they will do it or they will show you the missing limb that prevented them from doing it (for a while). If it's not on the checklist, well, it doesn't count. For this reason I think Upholders are a bit more vulnerable to loopholes. If an Upholder's priority is career, exercise may not be on the checklist, along with sleep or regular meals. We'd like to suggest that the priority be 'rational self-care.' Caring for your body makes you more productive. But then that's Questioner logic... We like different stuff. My Upholder husband likes the weight machines, because they're efficient and he can get in a full workout in 20 minutes. He has outsized stamina and he's physically fearless. I've known him to crank out a 90-minute workout that would have taken me a month. The intensity can be an obstacle, though, because he isn't as comfortable with a 'drop in the bucket' approach. He doesn't always want to be bothered if he doesn't have the time or the energy level to meet his own standards for a "real" workout. That's why I'm there, because if we have a gym date, we'll both go. I like lifting weights because TOYS, and I like yoga because there are a million postures, and I like running because I can catch up on podcasts. Sometimes lifting weights interferes with my desire to engage in my other exercise preferences. Right now, there's this fascinating feature of my dear hubby, teaching me how to use all the machines. It could quickly fall apart. We've had memberships at the same gym during two other times in our lives. Each time, I quit, and then he quit going. The first time, I felt like I had reached my goal and I believed I wouldn't need to go to the gym anymore. (Pfft). The second time, I had just discovered trail running, and our gym kept playing "Teenage Dream," and it didn't make sense to me to pay for a membership when I would run in the rain and cold regardless. I "feel like working out" at various times of day, and I've done a workout every minute between 6 AM and midnight at one time or another. Following a routine in the same place, at the same time, doing the same workout, will eventually break me. Knowing this, I know I need to either do my own, separate workouts on my own recognizance, or I need to keep upping the ante and training for a specific goal on a deadline. I'm not at the gym for myself, I'm there for my mate. Solidarity. My husband taught me everything I know about developing an athletic mindset and training like a champion. He made a parasomniac with chronic pain issues into a marathon runner. Without him as my coach, I'm not sure I ever would have freed myself from illness or become an athlete. Probably not. It was my desire to know his heart that helped me open myself to the idea. What would it be like to enjoy exercise? What would it be like to hone my body the way I always tried to hone my mind? Could I hold myself physically to the same standards of excellence that I esteemed in other areas? I found answers to all these questions. I owe him. My mother-in-law was also an Upholder. There's a chain of at least three generations of them in that family, and I think Upholders train one another into that tendency. She taught me that exercise is just like any other chore. I understood that this advice came from a sincere wish to reach me in a way that would make sense to me, and I realized what a sweet gift that was. She got me. A motivational speech about fitness from her would probably have been different if I were anyone else. After all, she had coached weight loss for forty years and she knew what she was doing. That's what it comes down to. We do what we do because it makes sense and because it works for us. Or at least we think it does. I was perfectly convinced that illness was something that just happened to me, and I believed my doctors when they said there were no lifestyle inputs. Others will be convinced that their personality is not compatible with this kind of activity, or that they somehow genetically lack willpower or motivation. What is needed is some compelling reason that feels convincing. Why would someone like me do something like this? Answer: Because. Dear Future Self, what are you wearing? What is in your closet? Also, what's your phone like? Just asking. In ten years, I'll be ten years older. Yeah, duh, you might be thinking. Obvious things can often be more revealing to think about than non-obvious things, though. I'm 41 today, and in ten years I'll be 51. Assuming all the clothes I have today could somehow survive another ten years of washing and wearing, would I still want to wear them as a fifty-one-year-old? The first question is one of size. What size will I be in ten years? There are three distinct types of answers to this question. I have no idea - how could I possibly know that? Same size I am right now, obviously, because I am a marble statue I will have reached the fitness goal for which I am currently on track. Ten years ago, I was 31. Yes, yes, you can count too. Past Self: Age 31 was coming down from our top weight at age 29. At that time, we had at least four different sizes of clothes in the closet. Our goal weight was 18 pounds heavier than I am today. We hadn't yet bought into the concept that there is a method of being at Healthy Weight for My Height and deviating only over a small range. We were still caught in this idea that body weight is either genetically determined, or a function of the weather. It just happened. I've worn eight different clothing sizes in my adult life, and spent at least a year at each of those sizes. Now I've been the same size for three years. I have a solid understanding of exactly what behavior patterns on my part will eventually result in physical changes that are reflected in each of those clothing sizes. Size 14 involved a lot of fried food. The Pepsi and Pringles Diet worked for me! I didn't get below a size 6 until I learned to cook vegetables. (NB: and eat them) I can look around my yoga class at the gym, see that there are ladies present in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, and surmise that if I keep doing what I'm doing today, I will probably look a lot like them when I reach that age. In ten years, I will probably be very similar to the size I am today, only with better posture. The second question is one of style. Will I still like the same stuff in ten years? Will it still be somewhat fashionable? If I have one wish as I get older, it is that I will care progressively less and less what other people think of me. That includes clothes. If I want to wear something woefully out of sync with the trends of the day, I most likely will. That's never been anything that stopped me before. On the other hand, I've already started to feel sad when I find myself contemplating clothes meant for younger women. At my size, dignified, professional clothing is vanishingly rare. Everything is meant for going to the beach, hanging out at the mall, or going to high school. That's my impression anyway. If I change my mind ten years from now and want to dress like a teenager, I can always go to those shops and find something. For today, when I look at what's in my closet, I can ask myself, Does this look like something 51-Year-Old Future Me would want to wear? The third question is a simple one of climate. Will I still be living here? Am I likely to move north and need warmer clothes? That's possible, and that's an issue I can resolve if I decide to make that change. In the meantime, I have only to ask myself how often I wear what I have now. I only need to dress for extreme cold for a few days a year, so I don't have to keep as many coats and scarves as I used to when I lived in Oregon. Other people may find that they don't need nearly as many pairs of shorts, tank tops, etc. The fourth question is one of use. Are these clothes going to be usable in ten years? I loathe shopping. Always did, and I loathe it even more now that it's so hard to find smaller clothes. When I find something I like, I now wear it into a rag. When I split the back seam of my favorite jeans, I seriously contemplated trying to patch them before acknowledging that they were a lost cause. There is no way any of the clothes I have now will survive another ten years of use. Not the socks, not the pajamas, not even those rarely worn winter clothes. The fifth question is a bit more complex. If I am so emotionally attached to a particular item that I intend to hang onto it for another ten years, no matter what, will it still work with anything else I have? Certain garments only wind up being worn in combination with certain others. That includes jewelry, shoes, specialty undergarments, and anything else that makes it feel like an 'outfit.' If any elements of the prize outfit aren't going to make it, does that reflect on the wearability of the treasured piece? The purpose of this exercise is to reexamine our wardrobes in terms of our future needs. We tend to want to keep things because we feel that we made a commitment to them in the past. We invested money. We liked being that size, or at least, we liked it better than the size we are now. We are alienated by the trends we currently see in the mall, and we're alarmed at having to let go of the familiar in favor of the disconcerting. (I'm from a generation that believes Tights Are Not Pants). We find ourselves with closets, drawers, and piles of unwearable clothing, things that Present Self can't use and doesn't need. Present Self often misses Past Self, even though Past Self is the same lazy, selfish brat who spent all our money and kept leaving us all those stacks of messy papers and dirty dishes. It can really help to look forward and imagine what Future Self is going to want. Not sure about you, but whenever my Future Self calls me, she always asks for more money. She always gives me an earful about any annoying chores I've put off and saved for her to do. She often picks on me about my fashion choices, hairstyle, dietary habits, etc. I recognize the same things I complain about to Past Self. One of the few thing I can do for Future Self today is to do a bit of culling and let go of clothes neither of us will ever wear. One thing is guaranteed to lead to money problems, and that is a feeling of deprivation. Budgets are a psychological issue for most people in the exact same way that diets are. Yes, they absolutely do work, in both cases, with the stipulation that the time is spent examining one's default state and looking for the holes. The trouble is that we're only human. Analyzing our behavior and looking for our personal flaws is not something we want to do with our free time. We'd much rather talk about other people's behavior and THEIR flaws. Think about other people and their money problems. Discuss weird celebrities and their dysfunctional eating/drinking/drugging patterns. Where is Future Self in all this? The goal is to live intentionally in such a way that we are meeting our own standards. Where we spend money is where we spend our life energy, and if anything should match our values, that should. The ultimate goal is contentment in daily life. When I think about my perfect day, I'm very close to it. I spend time with my favorite people (and critters) doing work I enjoy in an area where I like to live. I'm in the fabled state of feeling comfortable in my own skin. I worked for the body I want to have, one that is free of chronic illness. My surroundings are structured for comfort. If I were going to change anything about my most boringly ordinary day, it would be to add maybe a little more art. There are two tricks here. One is to extract the utmost enjoyment from activities that don't cost anything. The other is to know how much it costs every month to live this way. When your perfect day costs less than your income, you can rest easy and know you won't have financial worries. Oh, great. Easy for you to say, sitting where you're sitting. That's what I would have thought of this advice ten years ago. Definitely twenty years ago. It would have been so aggravating to listen to someone who was financially comfortable talking about how great it is not to worry about money. The truth is that you don't have to worry about money at any level of income or debt. You just have to work at it until you have it where you want it. Worry is not required. It's just a default emotional reaction. If you trust that your true physical needs will be taken care of, if you believe that you're working toward the asymptote of financial freedom, then you can relax. Keep plugging away at the routine and the time will pass before you know it. The time will pass before you know it anyway. Getting out of debt is exactly like losing weight. First there's the extreme reluctance to look at the numbers. Numbers are freedom. Data, nothing more. Hug the data. Love the data. Data can get you where you want to be. Getting an accurate number for your monthly dinger shouldn't be any more emotional than stepping on a scale, and maybe less so. Figuring out exactly what you owe in every area shouldn't have to be any harder than looking at lab results of your blood work. Here am I today, facing reality. Is that the reality I would have chosen, or not? What is free will for, other than that? I have the power to change my attitude and I have the power to influence my circumstances. The sooner I start, the easier it will be. Debt snowballs and adds to itself at a very rapid rate. Every month that I tremble under the blankets, afraid of that monster in the closet, is another month that it's eating Miracle Grow and lifting weights, sharpening its claws, waiting to jump out at me. Better to get a big flashlight and a crowbar and go in after it while it's still smaller than me. I lost 15 of the 35 pounds I've taken off by going on a very strict calorie-restriction diet for three months. I cried. "I just want a chimichanga!" I wailed. But I succeeded in losing the weight, and nearly three years later, it's still gone. In retrospect, not only was it totally worth it, but I wish I'd been much stricter. I could have lost another of the 5 pounds that took another month to get off. Getting out of consumer debt in my early 30s was much the same, except that it was psychologically easier for me. In fact, I lost a little weight during that time as a natural result of saving money, and I never thought twice about it. Deprivation again. During my debt-reduction period, I built my life around wiping out the debt. Aside from my two student loans, I had two maxed-out credit cards, an auto loan, and personal debt to, I think, four people. I spent all my free time either at the gym or the public library, doing a side hustle, reading, or watching library DVDs. Any time I got extra money it went toward the credit card balance. I paid off the personal loans as quickly as I could, starting with the smallest. I wound up selling my car and paying off the loan. After that, I paid off one of my student loans six years early. I paid for my share of our wedding in cash. All I've had in the last seven years has been the remainder of my student loan at 3.22%. That time of my life wasn't so much about budgeting as about restructuring my time for a brief period. It took not quite two years to pay off all my personal and consumer debt. If I'd knuckled down and continued to live that way, I could have finished paying off the student loan in another couple of years, too. Lots of people would love to feel financially secure, but not at the price that it actually costs. Move to a smaller place. Sell one or more of your vehicles. Get rid of your storage unit. Cancel cable. Quit drinking your signature beverage(s) until you're debt-free. Do your own beauty treatments. Stay away from stores that trigger you to buy things you didn't know existed. Read every book you own. Finish every project for which you've bought materials. If any of this sounds harsh, maybe you don't want it badly enough. Financial security creates an emotional state in which splurging on these things seems silly and self-sabotaging. Financial insecurity creates an emotional state of scarcity in which splurging on these things feels like the only way to get through life. The end results are completely different. Again, it's not budgeting that's involved. It's making personal decisions about your daily behavior, and weighing whether each recurring choice matters as much to you as the knowledge that your future financial needs are being met.
This is more than a business productivity book. A key message is that we need to connect with others around us, giving our full attention to the people who are in the room with us. "We don't have the time to not listen." This can, of course, improve our business relationships, but more importantly, it can improve all everything. Culturally, it's become commonplace for people to look at their phones instead of making eye contact or holding a deep conversation. Time to look at this as a dumb, passing fad and return to true companionship. The author is not immune from the tempting digital distractions of our age. She relates trying to edit her manuscript during yoga class, not just once, but for a few days! If I did this, my papers would quickly be ruined by all the sweat pouring off my forehead. Then I'm sure I would have toppled sideways. I am agog at the dedication this must have taken. What an astounding idea. It is surely a sign of our milieu that I am a bit impressed and almost want to try it myself. FIFTY MINUTES of singletasking? What are you, some swami? Zack claims that singletasking makes us happier, more relaxed and focused, and more productive. I agree. I've worked at home for years now, setting my own schedule, and I alternate between deep dives and petty chores. When I spend time with people who still work traditional day jobs, it can be alarming. We don't notice the way that phone notifications constantly ruin our concentration. We don't realize that we're leaving people hanging when we break eye contact or are clearly dividing our attention. We don't notice how jangled we are on caffeine, either. Try the exercises in Singletasking, and take it from me: your daily life will feel more like you're on vacation, even as you get more done. This book deserves to be an instant classic. It's snappy, funny, and short enough that even the most harried person can take it in. Read it in short bursts if you have to, but read it. If you can attend to even two pages without getting distracted, it will help gather your divided attention and start pulling your focus back together. Willpower fits in your pinky finger. Hold up your hand and look at that finger. Now try to pick up your backpack with it. It's not much of a much, is it? Whenever I hear people saying that they wish they had willpower, I know they have no idea what willpower is. Willpower barely exists. Willpower is so scanty it's like a paper towel. It can be used for tiny jobs, but not for anything serious. I don't expect to mop the floor with one, and I definitely don't expect to use one during a plumbing crisis or natural disaster. I recognize that it's designed for a specific purpose, and that is not a life-changing, earth-shattering kind of a task. Willpower comes in wisp-thin little perforated sections. There's exactly enough of it to handle brief spills. What can willpower do? Allow you to clap your mouth shut milliseconds before blurting out a hurtful remark Restrain you from slapping your child Push you past the entrance to the cookie aisle, but only if you don't look back Tie your workout shoes Stand your sorry self up out of your chair Dial a phone number that you don't feel like calling, but you have to Pour that drink down the sink, but only one time Force out a gracious apology Never expect willpower to get you any farther than fifteen seconds. If you're a driven, ambitious person, you can work up to about two minutes. What do I know about willpower? I've done things that people think require willpower, but I know they don't, because I have none. I once ate half a pan of brownies at a social occasion, and there weren't enough for everyone, and another guest called me out publicly for it. I have no excuses because there are none. There were brownies. I saw them. I ate them. Then I ate more. If there was a second pan, I might have eaten those as well. I would have eaten them in front of a crying child. I know, because I once ate a donut with sprinkles and pink frosting in front of my crying niece, and there weren't any more donuts. I didn't share. Not even a bite. I don't act like an out-of-control, selfish jerk around sweets anymore. It has nothing to do with willpower, because, again, I have none. I changed my mind. I lost thirty-five pounds because I changed my mind about deprivation. I thought it out and I decided that I now had enough money to access whatever food I wanted, 24 hours a day. Therefore, I could pass up enticing treats without FoMO. If I really need a brownie or a pink-frosted donut with sprinkles, I can get one, I can store them in my freezer in case of Donut Emergency, or I can make my own. My heart will not break if there are still desserts sitting there and I am not putting them in my face. I became a marathon runner because I changed my mind about my history of chronic pain and fatigue. I thought it out and decided that doctors don't know everything. I knew that fibromyalgia isn't fatal. I already knew that I could handle intense pain on a daily basis. How much worse could it get? It turned out that distance running drastically increased my pain threshold, helped me resolve my sleep issues, lowered my anxiety, and brought me happiness I never knew was possible. Willpower had nothing to do with it because willpower could only get me into my socks and shoes. I got my drivers license at age 29, after failing the test twice, because I changed my mind about driving. I thought it out and decided that I needed to be able to operate a vehicle if I was on a backpacking trip with friends, someone got injured, and I was the only one able to go for help. I changed my mind about being a passenger and sitting passively while someone else handled the burdens of driving, which are many. Driving is one of the worst, most annoying and stressful things to do, but I can do it now. Willpower never would have gotten me there because I loathe driving. I convinced myself that I needed to be responsible and accountable and learn it. I force myself to do things, not because I have an iron will, but because I changed my mind about chronic procrastination. The moment I feel the feeling of I DON'T WANT TO or I DON'T FEEL LIKE IT, that is my trigger to jump on it and do it. I decided that the feeling of resistance is a clear sign of something valuable and important for me to do. If I feel that I don't want to do it or I don't feel like it, this means that I feel I must. Otherwise, it wouldn't even cross my mind. I don't have to whine that I don't feel like riding a donkey or I don't want to play the tuba, because those activities are irrelevant to my interests. I don't feel like looking for a new dentist and I don't want to mop behind the toilet, but I like it even less when I don't do these things. Having a necessary task using up my mental bandwidth is a way of annoying myself. Might as well get it over with and go back to thinking about condors. Once I've decided that something is important to me, I'll make it happen. I've never failed at getting desserts into my face or staying up too late so I could finish a book. I have all the persistence, focus, attention, cognitive skills, and emotional wherewithal to make those things happen, even when they're logistically complicated. I have the resources to get things done, WHEN I WANT TO. The only way to want to do something is to talk yourself into it. You have to sell yourself on it. The way to do that is to start by humbly admitting that not everything in your life is perfect, that small changes in certain areas might be nice to try for a while. Changing your mind for the sake of changing your mind is good discipline. There's no commitment. You can test out a new idea without letting it change your personality. You can sample it. You can pull it over your head, and then whip it off again if it doesn't fit or it isn't your color. Practice, though, has a tendency to demonstrate very clearly why changing your mind is easy, obvious, and gratifying. Why didn't I figure this out sooner? If only I'd known then what I know now. Change is easy for me now, because I know how to learn new things. It starts with resistance. Then comes reluctance. After that is awkwardness. Then there's a very long period of not even being mediocre. A year later, there's competence. By the time I've decided to move on to something new, what formerly seemed to require willpower is now ordinary routine. I did it when I went back to school and got my degree. I did it when I learned to drive. I did it when I learned how to lose weight. I did it when I trained for a marathon. Now I'm doing it with public speaking. I'm already considering what dreadful, obnoxious, willpower-requiring thing to take on for next year. The secret is that willpower has nothing to do with anything. It takes changing my mind, and that takes curiosity, imagination, and an adventurous spirit. Ugh, the gym. The smelly, loud gym. I love being in a gym now, but when I first started going, I felt the same way most people do. Why on earth would I want to combine public humiliation, obnoxious music, sweating, physical exertion, and not being on my couch? All at the same time? It's the same with anything. If we're familiar with it, we're okay with it. If we're unfamiliar with it, we feel resistance toward it. We feel self-conscious. We know everyone is staring at us and giving us side eye. We're much, much too smart to ever do anything that makes us look awkward. No way are we going to put ourselves out there and look like the beginners that we are. People are watching. We know that everyone is just as interested in what we're doing as we are. We're watching them, and we know they're watching us. There's a saying that when you're 20, you care what everyone thinks about you. When you're 40, you no longer care what anyone thinks about you. When you're 60, you realize nobody was ever thinking about you in the first place. The gym has a way of accelerating that realization. The better the gym, the buffer the patrons, the more this is true. That guy over there dead-lifting twice his body weight is sincerely not looking at anyone right now. He's just trying to hold his form so he doesn't give himself a hernia. That old-timer hogging the bicep curl machine is just using it as a bench to check his phone. That juicy young blonde still wearing her makeup is rushing to make it to her class so she doesn't have to take the spot behind the pillar. They're not looking at us or thinking about us anymore than anyone at the airport or the Starbucks is thinking about us. As far as they're concerned, we're nothing more than trees or clouds, a generic part of the wallpaper of the world. My gym is a "super sport," meaning it's enormous and it has tons of members. Literally, physically tons. There are a couple hundred people there at any given time. They range from half-grown kids to distinguished elders who must be 80-plus. They come in every size, from very petite to over 500 pounds, from frail and mobility-challenged to sculpted and massive. Probably the majority are between 40 to 60. College kids, athletes, business people, retirees, people recovering from injury or working on physical therapy. It's a cross-section of humanity. Yeah, people probably check each other out from time to time, but it doesn't work like you'd think. The fittest people are always looking up to the next-fittest person above them. They want to know, what workout does SHE do? How much is HE lifting? Where can I get an awesome shirt like that? If they're looking at anyone at all, they're just glossing over anyone who isn't at their level yet. We can safely walk past them. Being the least-fit person in the gym is a privilege. It means you're alive and you're well enough to work out. Some very broken-down people have worked their way back to health at the gym. My mother-in-law came out of cancer treatment, wore a surgical mask, and did one minute on the treadmill each day until she'd built back up to her preferred routine. If you're struggling, if you're having a really hard time, people are rooting for you. If anyone has noticed you, it's with a heartfelt desire to help you or support you in any way. I was taught to do ab curls by a kindergarten teacher who had lost the flap on her esophagus to acid reflux. We have to hesitate before we make any assumptions about the fitter people around us at the gym. We don't know their journey unless they tell us. There will be people at most gyms who have been athletes their entire lives. They have the right to go to the gym, too. Almost everyone is there, though, because they need to be. We go because when we don't, something goes wrong. For me it's thyroid function. I have to work out at least at a minimum quota each day or my hormone levels gradually decrease until I feel wretched around the clock. I probably look super-fit to some people, and that idea is amusing to me, because I know my medical history. I'm lifting weights, and I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia at 23. I'm thin now, but I lost 35 pounds. I'm in maybe the top third of flexibility and balance in yoga, but don't be sad, because I started learning postures when I was a teenager. When you've been doing it as long as I have, you'll probably be better at it than I am right now. I'm a marathon runner, and on my first day of running, I couldn't make it around the block. I ran my first mile at age 35. Never assume you can tell anything at all by looking at someone. Some women wear makeup at the gym. I've done it. I've done it because my schedule was rushed and I didn't have time to fuss with removing it if I wanted to get the workout in. I wear makeup a couple of times a year. Others spend hours perfecting their look. Maybe they do put on a fresh coat before working out. Good for them. Why would you care? Maybe they just really, really like makeup. Maybe some women see it as war paint, and it helps them feel confident enough to face the world. Maybe some women are really self-conscious about how they look, and they can't do anything until they feel like they look perfect enough. Sound familiar? Until I can honestly say that I don't feel self-conscious doing something, I have to withhold judgment from anyone else who also feels self-conscious. I also have to not care about people who are more attractive than I am, because for one thing, I live within walking distance of the Hollywood sign. Also, it ain't a beauty contest. I'm at the gym to confront my inner self. What other people think of me is none of my business, just as what other people look like is none of my business. I like being at the gym because in a way, it's the opposite of a beauty contest. It's a safe space. It's okay to have messy hair, to drip sweat, to wear smelly shoes and sloppy mismatched clothes with holes in them. Sometimes you can see people's surgical scars and stretch marks. There's a lot of tattoo art of variable quality. There are also a lot of comically strained facial expressions, unsexy contortions that are never going to make it into a profile pic. The only way to look bad at the gym is to inconsiderately monopolize equipment or idly stand around. I saw another woman the other day. In street clothes, she might have looked like someone whose book club I would want to join. Cool glasses. My impression was of an intelligent, unpretentious person a little older than me. In gym clothes, well! She had a modestly midriff-baring top and tights. She was cut. Broad shoulders, tiny waist, big arms, about ninety million rippling muscles in her back. I kept sneaking peeks at her. Each time, I would re-evaluate my estimate of her age. At first I thought she was a few years older than me. Then ten. Then I realized she was my mom's age. It was so hard to tell because of her magnificent posture. Who knows how she looked when she was 40? Or 20? I want to look exactly like her at 60. If people are checking me out then, let them. Maybe she's had that wise revelation that "nobody was ever thinking about you in the first place." Maybe it's wrong. She's entitled to her gravitas; she's earned it. Nobody was born that way. The same night, as my husband and I were finishing up, I saw a beautiful young woman. She was maybe 20. She had a lovely, slender build. She had a yard-long glossy blonde ponytail. She also had a wide sweat trail up the back of her dove-gray tights. I thought, good for her. She's doing what she wants to do and not letting self-conscious anxiety hold her back. She has just as much right to be sweaty as anyone else here. Maybe I wear only black shorts and tights for that same reason, but that's my hang-up. I'm glad she doesn't feel as awkward and weird as I do. Hopefully she, too, will still be at the gym when she's my age, when she's at the cut lady's age. If I needed an alibi witness on a night I was at the gym, I'd have to count on the guest log, because nobody would be able to vouch that they'd seen me. I know it. The fifty people on the cardio equipment faced forward and never even saw me come in. The two dozen men and four women lifting free weights had their eyes on the mirror, watching their form and avoiding injury. Maybe one or two people using the weight machines noticed me for two seconds, but I'm just an average-looking middle-aged woman with a dark ponytail. I can come and go freely at one of the most anonymous places in the neighborhood. Nobody is watching, not really. In my professional work with hoarding and squalor, I have seen a lot. I can't say I've seen everything, though, because I know there's one thing I've never seen. I've never been in a home with an empty closet. The paradoxical thing about closets is that they're meant to hide things, yet they are usually so full that most of the stuff that they're meant to hide has to be left out in the open. We use our closets to store things we never use. Then the space isn't available for our "real" stuff when we want to put it away. There's no away to put it. The clothes we really wear are either in the laundry basket, on top of the dresser, draped on a chair, or in the dryer. Meanwhile, the closet and dresser are full of clothes that don't fit or that we forgot we even owned. The coat closet is so full of random junk that there's no room for coats or backpacks. The kitchen cabinets are so full of mismatched plastic containers and travel cups with no lids that there's no room to put all the dishes away. We rent storage units we can't truly afford because we think we don't have enough space. We use them to store stuff we can't bear to get rid of, that we think we really love, and we demonstrate that by keeping it away from our house and never using it. I live in a 728-square-foot house that was built in 1939. All the houses in our neighborhood are about the same size - or smaller - because that was the norm back then. The bedroom closet rod is four feet long, and that's supposed to be for two people. There is no coat closet. Even though this house is half the size of the house we moved into when we first got married, there's plenty of room. It turns out that even the tiniest studio apartment has room for the true necessities: toiletries, linens, a functional kitchen, enough changes of clothes for two weeks, some books, and a file of important papers. There isn't as much room for things that didn't exist in 1939, like a large-screen TV, a desktop computer, a set of every small kitchen appliance ever made, or my hula hoop collection. When our house was built, people had an average of nine outfits. They didn't have massive inventories of craft supplies or holiday decorations like we do today. Kids only had a couple of toys each. Stuff cost more and most people didn't have access to credit. People believed in these mysterious things called "nest eggs" and "life savings." They got their sense of security from their family, friends, jobs, pantries, and savings accounts, not a thick insulation of material goods. Most of us live in homes that were built more recently than the 1930s. Living space has expanded over the years, adding roughly three hundred square feet per decade. As of 2013, the average was 2600 square feet, which is more than triple the size of the house I rent today. What the heck are people doing with all that space? How do they clean it all? How can they afford the heating and air conditioning? I'm starting to think the answer is that we can't keep up with the cleaning, and it's stressing us out. We can't afford the heating and cooling, either, or the mortgage, and that's stressing us out even more. We think we need all the space, though, because it's the cultural norm and because WHERE ELSE WOULD WE PUT ALL OUR STUFF? We live in historically unprecedented ginormous houses and yet we still think we need storage units. What if we started prioritizing the home itself over the stuff it contains? What if we paid more attention to the experience of living where we do? How much of our time do we spend looking for lost items, arguing over housework, fretting over money, or grumbling about the laundry? Home should be a sanctuary. It should be a place of comfort and relaxation. Our living space should reflect our personal tastes and show that YES, this is how I choose to live! This is intentional! I have one place in all the world that I can shape to reflect my preferences. In this little corner of the world, everything is exactly the way I want it. That can't be the case when our closets are bulging and our dresser drawers are cracking. I should know; my closet rod snapped under the weight of all my clothes one day. There can be no tranquility or serenity in a cluttered, grubby house full of power struggles and money worries. The structure of the home itself teaches us that there are natural physical limits. Just as we have physical limits for sleep deprivation, thirst, and excess food consumption, our homes have limits for how many objects they can logically contain. We start by looking at the available space and using it for the obvious: our practical needs. Anything that doesn't fit and isn't a practical necessity is under suspicion for getting in the way and lowering our quality of life. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
Categories
All
|