Annie Raser-Rowland

Adam Grubb

It sounds too good to be true. You can save money and the world, inoculate yourself against many of the ills of modern life, andenjoy everything more on both the sensual and profound levels? Preposterous! Yet here is a toolkit to help you do just that. A tweak here, a twiddle there; every strategy inThe Art Of Frugal Hedonismhas been designed to help you target the most important habits of mind and action needed for living frugally but hedonistically. Apply a couple, and you ll definitely have a few extra dollars in your pocket and enjoy more sunsets. Apply the lot, and you ll wake up one day and realise that you re happier, wealthier, fitter, and more in lust with life than you d ever thought possible."

A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

The Art of Frugal Hedonism

Emma Hak-Kovacs

Which is what Frugal Hedonism is all about: perceiving a more multidimensional spectrum of pleasures, and living accordingly.

notice that you do not have to buy something to actively consume it.

What are some of the free or cheap things you're already relishing?

It is easy to use spending money as mental confirmation that something of value is being obtained. We can equally choose to relish and recognize value in experience, atmosphere, sensuality, or company. The more we make such choices, the less urge we have to treat ourselves by 'buying something nice' when life feels hard. That urge might become transformed into a yen to go lie in the park on a blanket and watch clouds for an hour. And before you protest that such experiential pleasures take time that most modern humans don't have, let us remind you that time is exactly what you can choose to have more of when you spend less money...

With such an abundance of cheap things to replace broken cheap things, many of us have lost the most basic knowledge of how to care for them, and instead have almost fetishized the pleasure of not bothering.

If flow were a drug, it would be cocaine. According to flow researcher Corinna Peifer, a flow experience resembles the more positive aspects of a cocaine high: "a rewarding feeling of high energy and alertness, accompanied by an improvement of concentration (and therefore performance), a carefree trust in one's own abilities ... while forgetting about basic human needs such as hunger or sleep." 

Look up. There is so infinitely much more matter than you out there, hurling forth flowing plumes, imploding into vortexes, converging into gaseous balls, then shattering into incandescent rain. It is endless and eternal and entropic and generative and holy in the most religion-irrelevant sense of the word.

Look down. There is the great grinding, shifting, melting foundry for all the yawning canyons and toothed peaks and rift valleys. There is the alchemical trinity of moisture, mineral, and organic debris that has the power to birth new life, and which informs the composition of your bones, the structure of your extracellular matrix, the very viscosity of your blood. 

Remembering where and what you are should not be to the end of feeling like an insignificant speck. You are woven of this stuff, this starlight and magma, let it extend you and make you feel endless amongst it, swathed in the vastness of time, rich in your very elemental connectedness. Then scan what feels important to you as a creature.

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