Frugality

I have never been able to spend money with the reckless abandon of some of my peers.

There always seems to be some reason to save money rather than spend it. Over the many jobs that I have had, I have compulsively saved. In my current job (lucky that I am to have one) I am saving approximately 90% of what I am earning. This has gotten to the point that it feels like I am working for no actual reward. A bank balance becomes a meaningless number that rises and has no real consequence.

Why do I constantly avoid spending money? While the cliché of saving for a rainy day may ring true for me, I think it is a more complex process. Abstract rainy days are easily ignorable. What is not so easy to shrug off is predictable events in ones life that will require money. There is always something on the horizon that may need funds. This is even beyond recessionary scaremongering. We always find a reason to save.

Sometimes this frugality seems like an excellent idea. It is a practical application of forward planning and thinking. Yet at the same time, working and using up precious time for no real reward, or an imaginary one in the future is more than problematic. Money controls us in this way and we cannot escape its grasp while we allow it to dictate our lives. Money is simply a medium. When we earn it we should spend it and make those imaginary numbers mean something.

I am not saying that we should all drive ourselves into poverty with excess, simply that we should enjoy ourselves more while retaining our forward thinking.

-The English Student

Forging Out a Pre-Forged Path

Once again a bus journey has lead me to some introverted thinking.

Rain was streaming down the window in front of me. Pellets of moisture ran from the top right corner to the bottom left as the bus careered through the seasonal storm. As a new droplet hit the window it invariably coursed through a path made by a previous droplet. As I was making my way to work while considering the options of my future, this scene took on a very different meaning for me.

The window pane became a metaphor for life choices. As the rain courses down the window and is funnelled into certain paths, so to are the courses of our own lives. There are specific routes that we will all take that are pre-determined before we even begin life. While at times we can arc off and take a slightly different path, we will end up back at a travelled road before long. It was long in the making that I would take this bus journey and see this pattern on the window.

This post is not intended to rant against the lack of control many of us feel in our life's and rather to point out how ill-equipped we are to deal with it. Many of my friends have really began to struggle with these patterns. When we start in school we are on the first path of life. We go through the motions and follow on to secondary school. We do not make any real life decisions until we consider what to do next. Even then the main life decisions can be deferred if desired. We always desire to defer this decision. So when we face the real world we are lost and do not even have the equipment or practice to make decisions. I do not rant against a lack of control, I rant against a lack of ability to make the most of the limited control we are offered.

So we course down the window, not knowing where we are going and yet knowing that it has already been determined.

-The English Student