Puny Luxury

Felix Dennis wrote that "The transition from poverty to comfort is a massive leap in human happiness. The transition from comfort to wealth is an exercise in diminishing returns."

This reads quaintly in our era, where even the supposed "poor" live beyond previous notions of comfort and even wealth. But it's not quaint for me. I spent most of my adult life well short of comfort. In fact, I was the poorest person I knew—never earning more than a pittance while doing respected work in seven fields—before selling Chowhound.

Most people assumed I'd made a titanic windfall, but, no, it left me merely comfortable. And the discrepancy between reality and perception was less jarring for me because the jump from poverty to comfort really did feel titanic. To this day, I cackle with glee whenever I throw my car into a commercial parking garage. "Who's Mr. Zillionaire???"

Here's something I've never seen noted: money is only perceived while spending. It's like how you don't feel your clothes until they shift against your skin. If you're not spending, you will not and can not feel the least bit different even if you just won the Lotto. You can, however—and many people do—repeat a hypnotic suggestion to try to reestablish a sense of substantiality (remember "My name is Elmer J. Fudd, I own a mansion and a yacht! My name is Elmer J. Fudd, I own a mansion and a yacht!"?).

The creepy truth that money is only real while spending it explains the cliché of the nouveau riche spendthrift. And as you become locked into that cycle, you must keep raising the ante to maintain the same feeling. Spending alone is insufficient. You must feel acceleration. And feeding a sense of bashing through barriers gets expensive.

My mother blazed a different trail. She'd spent a few decades pinching pennies. Driving all over town to use her coupons and take advantages of sales. Once we had a bit more security, she let up on one single thing: gas. She chose a gas station close to home, and it was her gas station. I think it actually gave her satisfaction to notice other stations costing a couple pennies less per gallon. She got to indulge a preference.

I wasn't in a position to enter the spiral of compulsive spending. An interest in fancy watches, fountain pens, sports cars, or super hi-fi audio might lead me back to scraping. Camrys, not Porsches! And I never lost the dread. A glimpse of dwindling toilet paper supplies might trigger it until I patiently calmed myself down. Elmer Fudd no longer seems so shmucky. Dude was just trying to escape the dread. People raised comfortably don't get it.

If you're prone to cold sweats, but can't afford to fly First Class to endlessly re-stoke a sense of elevation, what do you do? You might simply act normal, changing nothing, but that leads back to coupons and compulsive price chasing. Those who avoid the spending loop often wind up rebounding in this way (so this reckoning explains them, too).

But I found a middle path. I call it "Puny Luxury."

I'm profligate with trifles. I've built up a library of second-hand DVDs and Blu-Rays, most costing under $20. Tons of them, most unavailable on streaming, because my tastes are not mainstream. The library feels like immense wealth. First, just all the quality I'm curating. But also the potential energy of it. Cracking open a snap case means hours of riveting fun...times hundreds. I could spend months watching great movies. Not just the banal chum of Netflix. Exactly the stuff I like, all of it hard to find.

And I allow myself infinite €15 lunches. And I'm free with a few other cheapo pursuits which bring me joy, and where my eye for quality insulates me from feeling ridiculous. The lunches are great. The movies are great. If it's not great, I don't grant the extravagance.

Are parking garages great? Yes, they are. In a far more genuine way than a $1500 fountain pen. If you once spent your life circling around seeking street parking, garages are the height of opulence. You can go anywhere and just leave your car right there. It still boggles my mind. I use them as often as seven or eight times per year.

I'm the billionaire of fifteen bucks. A wee wastrel. And, framed this way, there's an eagerness that never jades. No tolerance accumulates, and I avoid the accelerative loop. I still feel like lofty Mr. Zillionaire whenever I use a parking garage. I do not need an $800 coffee table. The cup sitting upon it (which cost €15) is awesome, as is the coffee itself.

I realize that my mother forged the Puny Luxury path, though she would not have articulated it quite this way...and she hardly branched out beyond gas.


$15 may not be your number. But establishing a realistic number is the key to the ingenious budgeting regime I devised at age seven.