What you really need to get by

For nearly three years now, my wife and I have tried to be 'location independent people.' No apartments with long term leases. We move from place to place, seeing if we can make this mode work.

Repeatedly settling in and winding down over and over seems to be instructive. It has forced us to be efficient, to examine and rethink each of our possessions. (As an aside, here's my suggestion for anyone looking to de-clutter – Move houses)

So after nearly three years of doing this, here's my whittled down list of what I really need to get by: One big suitcase of sensible clothes, a sturdy set of multi-purpose pots and pans, a reliable car, and the very best electronic gadgets that I can afford to buy.



Everything else is only 'nice to have.'

Quotable sentence from Tim Jackson's Ted talk

I will post about a few of my favorite Ted talks soon. Meanwhile, here's a tidbit. I was viewing Tim Jackson's "Economic Reality Check" talk, and found this sentence so good that I had to stop and jot it down.

Prof. Tim Jackson talking about people's savings ratio and ballooning debt:

This is a strange, rather perverse story, just to put it in very simple terms. It's a story about us, people being persuaded to spend money we don't have, on things we don’t need, to create impressions that won't last, on people we don't care about.

Click the play button below, for the full talk:

Higher Taxes for the rich - Simplistic

It is possible to experience a certain Robin Hood-like righteousness in contemplating about taxing the rich and sparing the poor. But in this article, Harvard professor Greg Mankiw shows me why my thinking is overly simplistic.

His point is that if the taxes were raised further, the proportion that he (and his family) can put away from each incremental dollar earned becomes so small that he might choose not to earn that extra dollar at all.

The following paragraph touches on a slightly different point and it resonated with me. I did notice a certain similarity in our thinking. My possessions, such as they are, are quite modest. Prof Mankiw writes:

Indeed, I could go so far as to say I am almost completely sated. One reason is that I don’t aspire for much more than a typical upper-middle-class lifestyle. I don’t fly around on a private jet. I have little desire to own a yacht or a Ferrari. I own only one home, in which I have lived since 1987. Paying an extra few percent in taxes wouldn’t create a lot of hardship.

Read the full article here.

Pico Iyer: The Joy of Less

Thanks to Arvind N. for sending me the pointer to this Pico Iyer article.

Under the title of "The Joy of Less" Iyer writes about his almost monastic life in the suburbs of Kyoto. He writes:

But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did.

I also found it very insightful that Iyer refers to absorption as the closest he's come to understanding happiness. In other places, I have seen this referred to as 'being in the zone.' Be sure to read the article, though not all of us will agree with its points.

NYT has also published people's reactions to Pico Iyer's article, and I found that equally interesting.

Related Posts Keylessness

Freecycle

Things had gone awry and we didn’t even know it. My wife and I, reasonably proud that we hadn’t acquired too many things were, it seemed, quite deluded. We live in a 2-bedroom apartment, and only as we get ready to move are we realizing the sheer volume of things we have squirreled away. (This is what happens when you can’t throw away things in working condition.) But we are moving countries, and so pretty much everything needs to be disposed off one way or another.

One very efficient resource, it turns out, is freecycle.org. One example: A few years back, I bought a good amount of art materials (acrylic paints, watercolors, papers, sketch pads and brushes) but I hadn’t used them in years. They were very much usable, and rather than throwing them away, my wife decided to offer it on Freecycle.

One night the posting went out past 11.30pm, and within an hour there were 2 takers. All in all, we had close to a dozen people asking for it. Many genuinely needed it, but we could only give it to one. We ended up giving it to an arts program that a local hospital ran.

Freecyle truly leverages the power of the Web in getting demand and supply met, with the variation that there is no money exchanged. If you have things you want to give away, definitely consider posting it on this site in your area and watch the demand rush. Or maybe you can pick up something that is on offer. But be careful. You don’t want to end up with stuff that you didn’t really need. Check it out, though.