So Much More Life

Sometimes, buying things is genuinely necessary. That’s hard for a frugal minimalist simpleton like me to accept, but it’s true. In a consumerist world, when is it okay to join the herd and buy some things?

When something important breaks or wears out, buying a new one may be a necessity. And it may not be. It may be good idea to replace things that aren’t yet faulty too. But how can you decide if you’re being rational or just rationalizing?

Food Storage Containers And Crock-Pots And Things

I’d like some new food storage containers and a new slow cooker. While I’m not raking in the big bucks or even always bringing in enough writing income to make ends me, I sometimes have a few extra dollars in the bank. And I’ve delayed replacing some things that need to be replaced.

As I told you in last week’s post about “letting things go” meaning two things, I’ve been a bit of slacker recently, at least in relation to household cleaning, maintenance and decluttering.

Careless, reckless spending saps the soul from a life, and I need all the sap I can maintain. So am I justified in replacing a few things around the house that need replacing but still function fairly well?

Our old plastic food storage containers are scratched and stained, and since we no longer use a dishwasher, glass ones would be easier to wash. I’m also concerned how sanitary the old plastic ones are. When leftover food molds in a plastic container, can you ever really get it clean? The glass containers are a bit expensive and also not completely necessary since the ones I have still work, but would they be a good idea?

My Crock-Pot, as another example, only hold three quarts and the plastic lid is starting to crack, so isn’t it justified to buy a more modern one with a glass lid and a size that makes it easier to actually make a meal in it? Still, the one I have works fine.

Being Rational vs. Rationalizing

Making a purchase has very little to do with whether you have enough money to do it or not. If you don’t have money, you shouldn’t spend, but spending money when you don’t have to or need to is reckless. We all do at least a little careless spending, however, and we all lose a bit ourselves when we do.

Deciding when spending is necessary means reaching a mental compromise between rationalizing and being rational.

Being rational is doing something in accordance with reason or logic. Rationalizing is attempting to explain or justify something with plausible reasons, whether the reasons are true or not.

Deciding you need a new washing machine because the one you have doesn’t work is being rational. Deciding you need a new washing machine and then listing out all the small flaws with the one you have as justification for the expense is rationalization. But what if your washing machine makes a small noise and the spinning sometimes doesn’t turn off. Would buying a new one then be rational or rationalized?

I don’t think spending money for the sake of spending it is an intelligent idea, no matter how much of it you have. Do you?

Here’s a bigger question though: Is most of your spending rational, rationalized or simply reckless?

I think it’s okay to replace things even if they have a little life left in them, but as each new item comes in, its predecessor needs to go out. Keeping something in case you need it when it has been replaced by a newer model is hoarding and cluttering, and those are very bad ideas.

My original career intention was to get a job writing for money, but I got sidetracked through a few years of stable-but-boring office work and a few years of fun-and-profitable online bookselling.

Now, however, my eyes are focuses squarely on writing for money once again — and things are going pretty well.

Is writing part of your life? If not, what’s your thing?

If you want to live a simple, deliberate life without complete dependence on any one employer and without having to deal with business hours and office politics, working from home is the perfect solution. And nothing is more satisfying to me than being a professional writer once again.

Does writing play a role in your escape from working to make others rich?

Writing For Profit

When I launched this blog a couple of years ago, I wanted to use it to reconnect with the writer inside me, refine my rusty writing skills and eventually return to writing as full-time job. That’s what I’ve done.

But until recently, these two years have been a financial mess. With the online bookselling business that supported me for five years failing, I was too slow to return to the writing for profit.

Although I was a freelance journalist when I depended on writing income earlier in my life, I’ve never had a desire to return to journalism. Since I’m much more spiritual than political, most journalism seems destructive or at least useless to me now. While journalism has a real purpose that would be a great topic for another day and another post, I’m happy to allow others to provide that service to the world now.

Thanks to the help of a few private clients, some high-paying content mill sites and the work I’m doing to establish my own stable of online content, I make money each week writing fun and easy Internet content for myself and others.

While my financial situation is far from where I’d like it to be, things have stabilized over the past few months. That’s great progress. And that’s all thanks to my return to writing for money.

An (Almost) Perfect Complement

A career as a professional writer is an almost perfect complement to a simple, deliberate life.

Because I set my own hours and only take the work that I need and the work that interest me, I’m not overburdened or overstressed. My life is my own, something very few people can say.

Of course, this career path comes with a little built-in stress. Some weeks, there’s not enough high-paying work coming my way. Other weeks, I’m too busy dealing with other aspects of life to do as much writing as I my income goals require.

Once I got back in the groove of planning and arranging my life so that I can fit in an adequate amount of work, however, the stress of these uncertain situations has started to fade away. I’ve settled into a pace that I usually enjoy very much.

Not Quite Perfect

The biggest issues with fitting a career writing for money into a minimalist lifestyle are ethical ones.

Many of the clients for whom I write don’t share my lifestyle and are chasing after doomed dreams. Some may even be involved in unethical business practices, but I don’t know that for sure. I’ve caught clients lying to me and avoiding me because they didn’t have good news about our projects, both major ethical breaches.

I’ve managed to work through these ethical issues, however, using a spiritual principle, not a business principle. Of course, I don’t do anything unethical myself, and when I feel I’m being treated unfairly or being asked to do something unethical, I try to simply move on, allowing other people’s nonsense to stay in their court.

To use more spiritual terms, I release my issues to the universe and release my attachment to any particular outcome. Often, things eventually work out in a way that’s favorable for me.

Life would be easier if I didn’t concern myself with ethical breaches, but I do. Don’t you?

What Works For You?

I always knew I was supposed to be a writer, but the genre of writing in which I now participate didn’t even exist when I first started on the writing path. Perhaps for that reason, I got sidetracked for a while.

Now, I’m a professional writer again, and simple living make it possible. I’m having fun, I’m not under the thumb of any particular company and I’m not as worried about how to make ends meet as I once was.

Writing for money fits nicely into my minimalist lifestyle.

What about you? Have you found the perfect way to make money while still having the kind of lifestyle you desire? I hope you have, and I hope you’ll tell us all about it in the comments section below.

Can dollar stores fit into a simple, deliberate life? They can’t be very socially responsible or life-expanding, can they?

They’re frugal enough, and they’re fairly simple. But since most of the products are imported and the quality is often very low, just how deliberate are they?

This post is not about places like Dollar General and Family Dollar that sell things at a variety of prices but round them to the nearest dollar. This post is about stores where every product is one dollar — or the appropriate equivalent single-price in other countries. (What are these places called in the UK and Australia, for example? I know some of you can tell me.)

Around here, the most prolific brand name of those one-dollar stores is Dollar Tree. When I was a kid and these first started appearing, many were called Everything’s A Dollar. Dollar stores once carried overstocked merchandise and lots of ceramic figurines, but now, companies make low-quality alternatives to just about everything especially for these stores.

The Backstory

We rarely buy a new broom or mop, but it’s time for us to clean up our act a bit, and even our cleaning supplies are dirty. After seeing $4 brooms and $8 mops at Walmart, I decided that such disposable cleaning supplies shouldn’t have to cost so much. Where could I get a low-quality, barely adequate broom and mop? We have hardly any hard floor to worry about, so our requirements are, perhaps surprisingly, minimal.

Enter Dollar Tree.

I don’t like their stores because they’re filthy and usually smell like broken bottles of cleaning chemicals, but they surely have brooms and mops, don’t they?

We found a perfectly adequate broom for $1 with a metal handle and nice bristles. The rag mops we found looked okay, too, but the sponge mops had plastic handles that were already collapsing and the sponge part seemed to be made of the kind of foam rubber you stuff a couch cushion with. We didn’t buy one of those.

I’ve also been wanting something to help me wipe the inside of my car windshield. With my large hands and its steep angle, wiping it nearly impossible for me. Walmart has the perfect device for $15, but I’m no idiot. I wouldn’t buy that. When we visited Dollar Tree, they had a similar device — not exactly the same — for, as you might of guessed, $1. I willingly bought that. I even sprang for a bottle of glass cleaner there.

I bought a few sponges, too, for doing the dishes.

I wanted some low-end necessities, and for $6.50 including tax, I got what I needed.

So What’s The Real Value?

I always wonder, however, if I’m doing the right thing when I go to dollar stores. Here are some considerations that have occurred to me:

• I saved perhaps $20 or more on just these few supplies. I work hard for my money and don’t yet have an unlimited supply, so I need to save on things that aren’t very important to me.
• The items at Walmart are probably better quality, but how good does a broom need to be? I could have perhaps found even better items at Target or somewhere else.
• The items from Dollar Tree are probably made in Asian sweatshops or similarly horrid places, but the ones at Walmart probably are too. Am I willing to pay a fair price for these things? And would these supposedly oppressed and perhaps fictional Asians have a job at all if they weren’t making low-quality products for Americans?
• It isn’t very clear what the cleaning chemicals they sell at dollar stores contain. I suspect many of them are just fragrant water without the benefit of a brand-name manufacturer’s research department making sure they actually work. Or could they be more caustic or dangerous than they need to be? I can’t imagine there’s much quality control, but I suppose the government has some kind of oversight on these products, don’t they?
• Why is food cheaper there? I don’t trust the frozen products and jars of processed foods. And what about the canned goods? Are there really beans in there? Aldi seems like a better, more trustworthy place to buy food.
• Like shopping at other places that are packed with junk and overflowing with uselessness, you can’t exactly feel good about yourself in a dollar store. But then where can you spend your money for cleaning supplies and feel good?

You can use the comments section to sound off about my observations and add your own.

What do you think about dollar stores and similar places?

I’m never sure what to think, but I like their prices on some of the simple things in life that don’t really have to be very good.

Sometimes, I think, quality isn’t a selling point. Isn’t it foolish to pay more than necessary when you aren’t sure you’re being any more responsible or any more sensible when you pay the bigger price?

State fairs, carnivals, home and garden shows and similar vendor-oriented events don’t seem very fair to me. They don’t seem very simple, deliberate or intelligent either.

In fact, they’re really just massive collections of people trying to take advantage of each other, aren’t they?

There’s some fun involved, of course, but there is also lots of commercialism, plenty of shady business practices and an unhealthy dose of overindulgence, overspending and overtaxing our out-of-shape bodies.

That said, I went to the State Fair of Texas last Wednesday.

It Was Fun, But…

Since it was discount day, we paid nearly nothing to get in. We didn’t buy anything other than a 24-pack of AA alkaline batteries (a $3.49 loss-leader at a tool tent), a $5 mound of fried potatoes and two $2 bottles of tea.

We didn’t fall victim to the commercialism, and the three of us enjoyed the day. We saw two shows from one of my favorite bands, a celtic rock group called the Killdares, and an hour from Shoot Low Sheriff, an old-fashioned Western Swing band. The shows were great, and they were the reason we went.

The other events of the day were a bit sad, as they always are when you visit a place with lots of vendors.

Sensodyne toothpaste took us into a booth and asked us if we had sensitive teeth. (No, as it turns out, we don’t.) We stuck pretzels in lots of little bowls of cream cheese dip and determined that none of them had much taste. We heard passing sales pitches for many different fancy pans, and we saw some guy pushing the same dirt back and forth along a floor tile with an ineffective rubber broom.

We didn’t fall for anyone’s sales pitch, and we didn’t see many other people falling victim either. Maybe those of us with lives uncomplicated enough to visit a fair on a weekday are the ones smart enough to avoid life’s sales pitches.

It’s All A Bit Sad

Still, isn’t the whole purpose of the fair for people to take advantage of each other?

Every vendor wants your money, and most of them know their products either don’t work, work poorly or only work in the hands of an experienced professional demonstrator.

And then there’s the midway, a place we missed completely this trip. For a few dollars per toss, throw or shot, you can try to knock down or nudge over something that months of research has proven rarely falls. For your efforts, you get something that’s worth much less than the price of a single turn and sometimes too large to carry through a fairground.

A fairground is one of the few places where it isn’t considered rude for people to actually call out to you, begging you to play, buy or try something.

Fairgoers, on the other hand, hope to beat carnies at their own games.

They also hope they can find great products that no one knows about to make their difficult chores and overstressed lives easier. But if there were such miraculous devices, wouldn’t Walmart have swiped them up for their stores?

It’s all very crass, commercial, complicated and… pathetic, actually, isn’t it?

A Better Way Of Life

By way of full disclosure, I come from a long line of sellers of useless items. My parents owned a gift shop and so did some other relatives, so I know a thing or two about uselessness. No one was forcing anyone to buy anything at my family’s business, however.

I even think the life of a traveling vendor might be fun. The idea of setting up a little booth with my wares and selling them directly to the end consumer — eliminating the nonsense of middle men and distribution chains — sound a bit romantic to me. I could live that life. Never mind that most fair vendors are just distributors for big corporations.

I have integrity, however, so I could never really live the traveling-vendor life.

For many people, fairs, concerts and plays are escapes from an everyday life that’s boring, stressful or at least predictable.

As my life improves in quality and meaningfulness, I find fewer reasons to let others entertain me. I could be writing instead of watching this, I think. I could be doing something instead of just watching something.

I still love British television comedies and dramas, and I have a passion for live, local music. But I don’t have to watch every episode or see every set anymore.

I don’t always need someone else to entertain me — or to try to take advantage of me.

For me, a better way of life is to limit interactions with systems and situations that conflict with my values and increase the time I spend creating things.

Do you enjoy a good fair? If so, there are a few more days of the State Fair of Texas left, and it’s supposed to be one of the biggest and best fairs in the world.

Or would you rather actually do something?

Today, I encourage you to take a few steps back from the life of logos, mottos, slogans and brands that surely surrounds you as completely as it does me.

While some bloggers focus on creating a brand for themselves, I’m focused on escaping branding and living in a generic, advertising-free world.

Of course, that isn’t really possible.

I Understand It Less Each Day

Sometime when I was in, perhaps, junior high school I noticed that lots of my classmates were wearing t-shirts, and most of these t-shirts offered advertising for a hip and cool product.

I didn’t understand that then — and I understand it less now.

Why would I pay to purchase a shirt with a Nike logo a foot tall it if they aren’t paying me for advertising? Aren’t things with advertising on them free — like those paper fans that funeral homes used to pass out? Don’t you at least get a discount when you agree to show a brand logo?

In many cases, you actually pay more for products just because they have a popular logo. That doesn’t make any sense to me.

As I write this post at my home computer, I’m surrounded by logos. Without turning my head, I can see HP logos on both my monitor and CPU. Since I have a postage printer on my desk for my bookselling business, I see a cute little zebra on my — you guessed it — Zebra brand printer. I can even see a Stamps.com logo because my postal scales are old ones that Stamps.com gave me for trying their (cumbersome and long-ago-rejected) service.

When I look around a bit, I see my old Dymo postage printer that I need to sell on eBay, my Pelouze high-capacity analog scales and a WorkForce brand tape measure that needs to be put away.

How many logos do you see from your current vantage point on the world?

I’ve already bought these things, of course, so there’s no need to advertise these products to me. Shouldn’t these companies be paying me to look at their logos? And now that I’ve mentioned all of them on a respected and growing blog, what will that get me?

Rejecting A Branded Life

Logos are very literally everywhere, so you can’t escape them. Every store displays some of their own and some for their products and suppliers too.

Even the lid of large unsweetened iced tea from McDonald’s has logo for DART, a company that apparently makes lids.

You can’t escape logos and brands, but you can make sure you don’t contribute to the commercial culture. Here are three things you can do today to reduce your contribution to the silliness of logos:

• Don’t go to “logo villages” — also called shopping malls and strip centers. Their only purpose is to sell you something.
• Don’t brand your blog, if you have one. So Much More Life has its name in text and a simple phrase that describes my purpose in offering this experience to you. That’s all. It’s never had a logo and never will.
• Don’t intentionally offer free advertising by wearing huge logos. I really like the look of some North Face jackets, but I don’t need a logo on my shoulder and neither do you.

Don’t you carry enough on your shoulders?

It’s Ultimately About Buying Less

The logo experience can’t be avoided by those of us who can see. I have some readers who can’t, so this discussion must seem as useless as my mentions of MetroPCS are to my British readers or my take on Aldi is to those elsewhere in the United States who don’t yet have this discount grocery chain.

Escaping the logo world is ultimately about buying less — and participating less in the consumer culture, something all of us can do. It’s also something that I and a number of other bloggers have been suggesting for years.

Between where you are and where you’re going today, there are logos everywhere. Still, there’s no need to perpetuate the logo problem yourself or get sucked into the persuasive power of a powerful logo.

I may sometimes have an alligator over my left nipple since I buy all my clothes used from thrift stores, but I’ll never have a corporate-branded monkey on my back.

Or a North Face logo either.