On Frugality: A Lost Virtue and Its Rediscovery Through Adventure and Travel

Simplifying our lives in an overabundant society isn’t easy, but one of the core lessons of travel and adventure often reacquaints us with the value of frugality.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash

“Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.”

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”

“Our life is frittered away by detail... simplify, simplify.”

-Henry David Thoreau

One winter when I was young, the power in our house went out for several days during a severe blizzard. While my parents frantically scrambled to figure out what to do without electricity, I became energized. Silence fell as candles and kerosene lanterns were lit and a blazing fire appeared in the brick fireplace, which we’d barely used but now replaced the television as the main theater of entertainment in the living room. The back half of the house was closed off with draping blankets to confine us and the lingering warmth to the main room. A tent was pitched in the center of the room so we could stay warm at night. Our living room was transformed from an otherwise banal space into an unforeseen atmosphere of natural darkness and firelight. Watching those flames dance and our shadows silhouetted on the walls during those nights, some part of me became convinced that THIS was how we were meant to inhabit our homes and live our lives…in peaceful quietness.

Why do I look back so fondly on this childhood memory? Why was I enthralled to be instantaneously transported back into a Dark Age-like existence? No electricity? No video games or television shows? So many modern appliances and other conveniences suddenly became useless. Most of us shutter thinking of living a more primitive existence yet somehow this didn’t bother me at all (probably because I was a child thinking this was just a fun game). Nevertheless, this experience left me dazzled and pondering about what it would be like to live more simply. Humans used to get by without so much stuff cluttering our lives. Do we sincerely need all of it to survive and thrive? What might we have traded away in the time we’ve transitioned to this overabundant society? Has frugality become a lost virtue for us?

We’ve all heard the phrase “less is more” and perhaps many of us have waxed poetic about living a more minimalist life. I know I have. One of my philosophical idols growing up was Henry David Thoreau and reading his book Walden about his years spent living in a single-room cabin in the woods communing with nature enchanted me and inspired a sense of nostalgia for simpler times. I even spent a large part of my early youth dreaming and planning to escape society to live a vagabond existence built on the principles of minimalism. Back then, I moaned a lot about materialism and consumerism being forces corroding our liberty. I lived by the famous line from Chuck Palahniuk’s book Fight Club that,

“The things you own, end up owning you.”

Clutter and excess. I’ve always been unsettled and anxious around clutter and excess. As a teenager, I worked at our local Lowes and would occasionally help deliver new appliances to peoples’ homes which gave me a lot of insight into how lots of us live. And I am not stretching the truth by much when I say that nearly every home we delivered to had their cars parked in the driveway because the garage was overflowing with endless boxes and long-forgotten items that mice were now using to build mini-mansions out of. It struck my young, overzealous mind as somehow morally wrong to hoard so many things no longer in use. Were we about to be survivalists rummaging through all this stuff in a post-apocalyptic hellscape and I just didn’t get the memo?

I was irked by so much mindless consumerism, especially when some of these same folks bemoaned climate change and environmental destruction yet continued to frivolously buy more and more without batting an eye. I thought that if people had taken one look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or perhaps driven by one of our many mountainous landfills growing every year and not felt some pang of regret and urge to change their consumptive habits, then nothing would convince us that we might one day have a serious environmental problem on our hands. It has become incredibly easy to accumulate so much stuff in our society that we are perhaps unaware that we even have a problem. We seem oddly nonchalant about it at least. Most of us are swimming in a sea of overwhelming materialism like the fish in the short story by David Foster Wallace who puzzlingly asks “What the hell is water?”

In recent years, I’ve pulled the reins back on my cynicism and idealism just a bit and see that, over time, my house too has somehow naturally expanded and grown with more stuff (but mostly with books, so I don’t feel too guilty about that). And with children, birthdays, and holidays also comes an expected avalanche of toys, gadgets, and products from loved ones whether you ask for them or not. It seems impolite or downright rude to deny or tell someone not to give you gifts in our society. The anthropologist in me knows all too well that gift-giving is a vitally important cultural universal and is a hallmark of human relationships so I know my wish for a more frugal world is likely to fall on deaf ears.

Yet, I still believe frugality is an important virtue I can’t help but cling to. I am always waging my quiet war against stuff—attempting to trim down our inventory of superfluous objects and shed any items we no longer need or want. (Sorry to tell you this, Mom, but whatever thing you gave us last week is now at the local Goodwill.) Lately, I’ve wondered how many others still share in the idea of frugality and whether this principle has gone the way of the dodo as our society, economy, and technology have enabled us to drown in abundance and take a lot of it for granted.

Whereas most of human history has been a prolonged period of scarcity for most humans, the last handful of generations—arguably since the onset of the Gilded Age—have witnessed immense growth and prosperity for large swaths of the population on the planet, especially those of us living in the United States. There are perfectly sound moral arguments for extending this wealth and prosperity across the globe, but it remains questionable what the earth’s carrying capacity for unchecked economic growth and development is. We are the world’s beacon of the “super-size” everything and overindulgence has become a kind of virtue that so many want to emulate. When we observe all the Hollywood stars, billionaire entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, and the latest and greatest musicians and athletes, virtually every one of them touts living a luxurious and excessive existence. Many simply equate reaching this level of success with the American Dream.

Most youths start with relatively little to no wealth, so it isn’t a wonder that many teenagers attempt to mimic the lifestyles of the rich and famous and fall for the latest schemes to become YouTube influencers or ambitious entrepreneurs in the hopes of getting rich quickly and catapulting them to the top. Like a drug, we crave the many things that we perceive to give us status, wealth, security, and convenience. But is this attachment to our things a product of modern culture and economy, or is this perhaps something more deeply ingrained in human psychology and evolution?

We love our material culture and for good reasons. For better or worse, it contributes to our status and sense of security. We imbue a lot of the objects we collect with talismanic symbolism and sentimentality. We all have our memory boxes full of childhood trinkets and gifts given by grandparents, our collection of baseball cards, Hot Wheels, and endless other items we can’t seem to part ways with. As we move into adolescence, our first cars become a strong symbol of freedom and individuality—we might have even anthropomorphized our vehicles by christening them with a name. And we remain married to much of our stuff until death do us part.

As any archaeologist knows, humans love their artifacts, and this is something that long predates our modern times. The famous British archaeologist Ian Hodder coined the phrase “human-thing entanglement” to describe the phenomenon of how humans form relationships and dependencies with their material culture. Being attached to the products of our creation, it turns out, is a deep feature of our humanity so we didn’t just acquire this love and fascination with our things due to rapid industrialization and wealth accumulation; it just became much much easier to do so. However, another insight from studying archaeology is that the outcome of every artifact ever created is that it will eventually be discarded no matter the bonds we make with our objects.

For most of human history, population levels were low and the things we became attached to could more-or-less fit snugly in a backpack or single-family dwelling, and the products themselves, exempting a few items like stone tools, degraded within a generation or two, returning naturally to the soil. Now, however, with our burgeoning population coinciding with an economy and technology that churns out metric tons of synthetic plastics and endless products with thousands of pollutants and contaminants by the hour, we are dramatically transforming the material world at an unprecedented pace. Many of our items are now immortal and they are piling up. How close will we get to the predictions of Idiocracy?

Thus my anxiety and concern over excess and clutter unfortunately remain.

When I backpacked the Appalachian Trail in 2014, I was able to put the theory of frugality into practice. Living out of a backpack for four months was incredibly liberating and, in a lot of ways, exactly as I’d imagined it. I was forced to be thrifty and mindful of every object on my person. There was something enthralling about carrying everything I needed, but it didn’t necessarily make me want to live this kind of Spartan existence forever. I realize we cannot step back in time to start over and, for better or worse, most of our stuff is probably here to stay until we figure out how to incinerate all our waste by launching into the sun.

However, what I believe is a core lesson we learn from travel and adventure is experiencing how much we can do without. Adventures have the power to reacquaint us with the value of frugality. One of the critical things one comes to learn in wandering is how much we can do without while still living a high-quality life. Indeed, self-inflicted deprivation is one of the key features of backpacking a long-distance trail. As Bill Bryson humorously put it in A Walk in the Woods:

“[T]he central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things—processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation –fill you with wonder and gratitude. It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca-Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the brink of orgasm by white bread. Makes all the discomfort worthwhile if you ask me.”

When we’re forced to carry only what’s on our backs, we think very carefully about what we truly need and want. Given the expanding population, unsteady markets, increasing pressure on the environment and its finite resources, climate change, and a dominant culture still encouraging conspicuous consumption, it could be a wise societal move for more people to fine-tune their needs and wants.

When we return home after months of travel with just the things on our back, look at our apartment or three-story house or gluttonous garages with no room for our cars overflowing with things in disarray we might well ask ourselves, “Why the hell do we need so much stuff?” Our things can genuinely make our lives more convenient, but they can also be baggage. For those of us who’ve moved a time or two in our lives, we know how daunting and burdensome moving all our stuff is. How much do our things truly control our lives?

George Carlin’s comedy skit on “Stuff” is one of my favorites and captures these sentiments of how our stuff can rule our lives:

These experiences in travel and adventure just might inspire us to refine and simplify our lives. If more of us experienced living more frugally, we could perhaps have a larger impact on alleviating some of the pressure placed on the earth’s resources and, most of all realize, that living a more minimalistic lifestyle might turn out to be more liberating than limiting. Who knows, with less money spent on gathering more stuff, we might have more time and money for the travels and adventures we’ve been dreaming about. Experiences are the stuff of our greatest memories in life, not the stuff itself. Life is too short. Do not let the things you own end up owning you.

Spring is in the air and that normally evokes an urge for spring cleaning. Once we’ve downsized our garages and closets this time around perhaps instead of filling them back up, we choose to keep things simple and opt to take that adventure we’ve been dreaming of.

Thanks for being a fellow traveler with me through this read. Please consider subscribing, sharing, and supporting this project—much more to follow.

Cheers!

-JSB