The bookshelf has gotten stuffy lately, I have some clothes to get rid of, and some of my unused kitchen crap is slated for sacrifice to the thrift stores. I’m eager to find things to get rid of.
These cycles. Why do they happen? The only reason the quantity of my possessions is fairly stable and low is that I go through these frequent cycles of purging the extra. But in the midst of this, the sad truth is that I seem to be spending quite a lot.
With books, the libraries almost never have what I want to read, and if they do, there is almost always a huge waiting list, so I usually just buy it instead. “I have the money!” and other dumb excuses. Oftentimes it’s $30 a pop here and there just for a book that’s legitimately interesting, but even then most of these books are one-and-done. They are almost always kind of sort of still interesting, but only the best really get a second read through. Either that or I guilt-trip myself into a second-reading.
I took a look back through my spending over the past year and a half. I was pretty shocked. I typically allocate $200 each month to “personal” purchases, and there was one, ONE, glorious month, July of this year, in which I had about $120 leftover, and only because I won a $50 gift card at work, but even without that the month would have been a victory. Almost every other month went negative.
Much of this was due to the presence of a personal savings account that has often acted as a funnel for big purchases. I used to put in a little bit here, a little bit there, and it all added up. But knowing it was there I guess gave me the excuse to indulge rather often. The problem was that I grew accustomed to seeing negative on this budget item and would dismiss it all because I knew I had money in that account. But as I dig into the numbers, the gruesome truth keeps revealing itself.
O, bruised ego. O, damaged pride. Look not mine eyes upon the figures!
I know I’m still saving a lot, but the waste of money is stupid. I’ve grown soft. Sure, most programming books cost about $35, but a few of those here and a few of those there, a bottle of creme liqueur, some kleenex boxes, and before you know it, that money is GONE and the little negative sign starts showing up all over the place.
I’ve pretty effectively recovered from my November spending bender, but I’m becoming aware of a pattern in which, maybe a week or two after receiving something I bought on Amazon, I start getting this itch and start browsing the site again. There was a time when I went many months without buying anything on Amazon, but that was in 2018, if I remember correctly. Bad habits really crept back in. I’ve started making the very dangerous decision to browse books, and just tonight I was sitting down to talk myself out of half of them. “Is this book really going to do for you what you think it is? Is this really going to teach you anything meaningful in your life right now?”
No. To all of them. But one is still deeply interesting, so I may buy that early in February. Since, you know, my January budget is shot.
Maybe my targets are considered aggressive by some people. Maybe not. I have no idea. Nobody talks about this stuff. That’s largely why I do. But the revolving door kind of makes me sick. I’m starting to wonder if bucking up and doing a few inter-library loans might actually be worth it. If I really love the book, I can buy it then, otherwise it’s just a donation waiting to happen, and $20-35 out the door. Sure, enjoy your life, but you shouldn’t lose sight of this stuff. As I mentioned in my previous post, the things you buy should enhance your life, but it’s so hard to not simply get excited over that prospect, without doing the really hard work of analyzing yourself, your patterns of weakness, and the observation of how much you actually use or a value a thing, which can clue you into what the problem is. I think for me, I just get really excited about knowledge, without questioning whether there aren’t more valuable uses of my time. After all, I have goals besides just learning, but sitting back and plotting what to learn is way easier than taking action in my life.
One of my hopes for this year to simply buy less in general. What else really do I need? I really wanted to spend more time enjoying what I have, living in that appreciation and thankfulness. I’ve also wanted to make people a higher priority this year, but that’s hard to do if you’re buying yourself into deeper introversion (books). It’s also interesting that all of my big purchases are done already, so to speak. What other “big things” do I really have to buy? And I’m not buying a drone. I know it would just spend 99% of it’s time in my closet.
Sigh. This could be an interesting year.