Living within my means

I wrote a few years back about how my life has been so influenced by the severe recession in Ireland in my teenage years. Now that the word ‘crisis’ is generally used to refer to the economic malaise engulfing Europe I wonder if there is going to be a whole new generation of people with an inbred fear of letting money roll. I can imagine that there is a lot of satisfaction to be gained from buying a luxury car or a bigger house in a nicer area. For me though, I can’t really enjoy living beyond my means, I detest debt and the insecurity that it brings. I live in a terraced house but I have no intention of ever trading up. Living in a regular neighbourhood cheek by jowl with other residents gives me a sense of community and safety. When I see somebody driving an Audi or a Porsche I don’t feel envious because I think that an ostentatious car is a target for thieves and vandals. I didn’t grow up in a country where young people had cars so I was always bewildered watching movies where the guy with the nice car got the girl. More to the point the idea that a girl would have wanted to date me because I had money (even if I had have had any) would have been insulting. In a sense you could say that I am an anti-materialist.
However, a friend of mine at work recently put it to me that we are in a sense ‘immaterialists’. We don’t put a value on material possessions beyond the aesthetic, which has no intrinsic link to price. However, it’s not like we are naturalists either. My friend put it to me that we put a value on experiences in much the same way that other people value possessions. It’s easy to be snobby about people being so materialistic but immaterialists are just as guilty of priming their feathers in all of their vainglory. It’s particularly hard for a blogger to avoid swallowing a large urn of ‘mea culpa’. My friend spoke about the kudos you get for cooking well, for speaking other languages, for having travelled to exotic places, for playing a musical instrument, going to a cool concert or even for having seen a film or play. These are all things that count for something in the world of the immaterialist but ultimately they are just as transient as the thrill of buying a bottle of the best champagne or driving a flash car. We are all buying because we are all selling; the difference lies only in our target audience.
Still, there is one major advantage to immaterialism; it is an awful lot cheaper. I put far more value on somebody having written a great poem than somebody having a big house. I might be able to afford the latter but I don’t actually want a bigger house whereas I would love to write a poem that might survive beyond my time on this great vale of tears. That’s not to say that money is unimportant. I feel an urgent prerogative to give my children the best opportunities possible. We don’t spend a lot on most material things for them but we are willing to spend a lot on things that we value, like sport. For instance, I just dropped 70 Euro on a new acrobatic gymnastics leotard for Daisy and we are having a bling-bling one-off rhythmic gymnastics leotard made for Luna which will not be cheap. We are willing to spend when we want to, we just don’t spend on the things other people might take for granted.
In our sitting room we have a television that we bought in 2002 bought with a cheque that my uncle sent us a wedding present. It is a massive tube television that still works just fine and lives on long after nearly everybody we know has moved to flat-screen televisions. I take pride in the fact that the television will be used until it gets to the end of its lifetime. I see no reason to change despite the fact that our kids have mentioned more than once that it is really old. I like the fact that a potential burglar might pass by our house thinking that we have nothing worth stealing because, in a sense. he would be right. The worthy things we have are immaterial so they cannot be stolen, you can take my television but you cannot take my experiences away, ever.

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