Frugal in the Fruitlands

Bankrate.com presents Market History: Learning What to Do From Past Recessions. Everything old is new again, as Bankrate discusses the history of oil prices, real estate bubbles, gold, and foreign investments. I wish they had brought up what Money mentioned last month: that over the past 100 years, stocks have consistently outperformed gold. That’s advice that some people I know desperately need right now.

Delayed, but good: Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, writes about The Real Recession Problem: Consumers Are At the End of Their Ropes (h/t to Brian). We’re finally reaping the whirlwind of widening inequality and ever more concentrated wealth, he writes, acknowledging that there is more to this financial situation than just “HOMG yuppies bought bigger houses than they could afford!” This makes him rare among American finance writers I’ve encountered, who seem to ignore the social inequalities in how sub-prime mortgages were sold to minority and immigrant families by shady lenders. (The BBC’s The U.S. Subprime Crisis in Graphics in another good resource).

On a lighter note, I’ve discovered the new-ish Retirement: A Full-Time Job blog. I, too, aspire to be a “young retired bitch.”

Leo writes about The Magical Power of Focus and reminds me that- ooh, shiny!

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Last night, my favorite vendor of perfume oils, Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, released a bevy of limited edition autumn/Halloween-themed scents. I’m finding it very difficult to keep my mouse finger still and not snap up the entire collection, despite the dire state of my expenses and the fact that I already have more BPAL oils than I can possibly use before they go rancid.

I’m moderate in so many things - why do I go crazy for little bottles of smellies?

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This post is in response to a comment I saw on a ZenHabits article months ago and which has been digging at me every since:

“My only criticism of ZTD is your emphasis on recording progress, and what I would call over routinization. I completely agree that routines such as getting up early, going on a run, getting hard work done first, make a lot of sense. What I don’t agree with is making a routine out of the whole day almost, I don’t want to be a robot.”

It is worth mentioning that this commentator is in his teens. I suspect that at that age, I may have felt the same way. As the level of responsibility in my life has increased, I’ve gained the wisdom that you can’t always depend on passion and spontaneity to meet all those demands.

I’m a fan of FlyLady, and FlyLady herself is a devotee of routines. She coined the phrase “routines are not straitjackets,” and that is pretty much my sentiment on the matter. There are a couple of ways to interpret this phrase, all equally valid:

1. Routines aren’t things you have to do; they’re things you do to nourish your own well-being. You’re not meant to wake up and say, “Ho-hum, I have to make the bed again.” Ideally, you’re not even supposed to think about it. It’s supposed to be something you do automatically so that when you come back to it later, you think, “Wow, the bed’s made! Isn’t that awesome? Now I have a clean and comfortable place to rest.”

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Last week I reviewed the first chapter of Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, a Victorian-era personal productivity guide. Next in this continuing series (which has absolutely nothing to do with Jack Bauer) is chapter two, deliciously titled “The Desire to Exceed One’s Programme,” a chapter that he addresses to “that innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order.”

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I am often paralyzed with the awareness that I have a finite amount of time, and a list of goals and tasks that expands every day. Sometimes it helps to realize that this isn’t a modern phenomenon; that the PDA hasn’t made it better, but neither has it made it worse.

So relevant to the modern person is Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on 24 Hours a Day that it could have been published yesterday. Except for a few markers of its Victorian timeframe (mention of servants and “spirit-lamps,” for example), you might be tempted to think that it was written by a very British David Allen. I thought I’d take a stab at reviewing it for the readers who may not be familiar with this proto-personal development chapbook.

Chapter One: The Daily Miracle

“But though you have of the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has.”

“In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day.”

Not so much a lifehack as an essay on the qualities of time, this chapter is. Bennett’s observations are fairly straightforward but beautifully worded, and I’d encourage anyone to read this as a stand-alone essay.

There are two takeaway points in this:

• Time in even more valuable than money. There are always ways of making more money, but each of us has our allotment of time, and must make of it what we will.
• Your happiness depends on how well you manage that time. “Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul,” says Bennett. I suppose as an atheist I have an out on that last one.

… actually, that raises another point. This work is remarkably lucid about mortality for a Christian author. If you believe in eternity, what does it matter what you accomplish in your mortal life? Or perhaps, as Christopher Hitchens points out in God is Not Great, Bennett is only concerned with the “immortal soul” because he lived in a time when to do otherwise was dangerous.

One thing that Bennett doesn’t touch on is how paralyzing this fear of finitude can be by itself. This is a problem I often have–I end up doing nothing because there is so much to do.

I think that this way lies the path of addiction as well. In retrospect, I can say that I was truly addicted to World of Warcraft, and the reason I was is because it numbed the pain of finitude. Anyone who has not played an MMO may not realize their power to stop time for the individual playing them, but let me emphasize that when I was playing, everything else ceased to exist. Now that I’ve stopped playing, all that fear and pain has come back, and the challenge is to look at my daily time as a miracle, as a gift, and not as a burden.

Arnold Bennett is dust. What did he make of his life? All that’s left to us is to wonder how we will make an example of our own lives.

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