Money Quotes: Joy vs. Stuff
Photo by Jonathan Kirn/Getty Images
Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, authors of Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence on frugality vs. hedonism:
While both have to do with enjoying what you have, frugality and hedonism are opposite responses to the material world. Hedonism revels in the pleasures of the senses and implies excessive consumption of the material world and a continual search for more. Frugal people, however, get value from everything—a dandelion or a bouquet of roses, a single strawberry or a gourmet meal. A hedonist might consume the juice of five oranges as a prelude to a pancake breakfast. A frugal person, on the other hand, might relish eating a single orange, enjoying the color and texture of the whole fruit, the smell and the light spray that comes as you peel it, the translucence of each section, the flood of flavor that pours out as a section bursts over the tongue … and the thrift of saving the peels for baking.
To be frugal means to have a high joy-to-stuff ratio. If you get one unit of joy from each material possession, that’s frugal. But if you need ten possessions to even begin registering on the joy meter, you’re missing the point of being alive.
(Emphasis is mine.)
Writer and commentator Stuart Chase (1888-1985) summarized the gist of Thorstein Veblen’s1 The Theory of the Leisure Class in its foreword:
People above the line of base subsistence, in this age and all earlier ages, do not use the surplus, which society has given them, primarily for useful purposes. They do not seek to expand their own lives, to live more wisely, intelligently, understandingly, but to impress other people with the fact that they have a surplus … spending money, time, and effort quite uselessly in the pleasurable business of inflating the ego.
1He who also coined the term “conspicuous consumption.”
Related articles:
1. What is “Voluntary Simplicity”?
2. The Golden Rule
3. Simplicity and Consumption
4. Voluntary Simplicity/Frugality Online Resources
5. 174-Year-Old Wisdom
Chelee said,
February 22, 2007 at 11:07 am
I haven’t read that book in a few years. I forgot how much wisdom it has in it. I’ll have to pull it from the shelf and give it another read.
Frances said,
February 22, 2007 at 5:47 pm
What a great moment of synchronicity.
I’ve just started reading 1) your blog, 2) Your Money or Your Life, and 3) Duane Elgin’s Voluntary Simplicity.
Thanks for the illuminating quotes and links.
The Worsted Witch » Three Simple Joys said,
April 11, 2007 at 4:03 pm
[...] I’ve quoted Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s philosophy that to be frugal means to “have a high joy-to-stuff ratio.” [...]
The Worsted Witch » What a Dream said,
May 21, 2007 at 7:42 pm
[...] I so rarely make personal purchases these days—a combo of ecological living and cheapskatednessa high joy-to-stuff ratio—but I just had to treat myself to one of Tamar Schechner’s beyond-gorgeous fairy-tale dreamcatchers, which she tells me makes use of fabric scraps and vintage buttons. [...]
The Worsted Witch » Money Quotes: Frugal, Not Miserly said,
August 7, 2007 at 3:22 pm
[...] Related article: 1. Money Quote: Joy vs. Stuff [...]