Patterns of Deep Response

Category: Patterns

  • don’t keep a budget

    Action A ‘budget’ here is defined as a list of maximum spending limits for your categories of expenses. This pattern is simply to intentionally not have a list of spending limits that you consciously adhere to, the opposite of pattern keep a budget. Discussion Not keeping a budget doesn’t imply that you don’t also have…

  • keep a budget

    Action For every category of expense (food, transportation, shelter, clothing, entertainment, etc), decide the maximum amount of money you want to spend on that category per month. Then track your expenses, attempt to spend no more than the budgeted amount, and compare how you did every month. Discussion Some people find it easy to come…

  • spend less than $200/mo on food

    Food is one of the top three expenses for typical households, but food is also one of the easiest categories of expenses to cut back on while improving quality of life, health, social life, etc. The quick and easy wins for reducing food costs, in rough order of impact on cost, are: Further Reading

  • make your clothes

    It is trivially easy to acquire manufactured clothes for very little money. It is very much not an efficient use of time to make your own clothes from a time-and-money perspective. However, if you love making clothes, and find satisfaction from the creative expression and pure craft of the thing, then making your own clothes…

  • track all expenses

    Action Record every expense. Here’s a much more in depth treatment of how to do this. Discussion In terms of simplicity/impact ration, this is one of the heaviest hitting patterns. Note that this pattern is not keep a budget. This pattern by itself doesn’t tell you how much to spend. It just requires you to…

  • put your own oxygen mask on first

    If being useful to other beings in this confusing, complicated era is important to you, then first get your own systems up and running smoothly. Bias decisions towards increasing durable personal autonomy and cooperative self-reliance. Get as free as possible as quickly as possible. You can’t do much good if you’ve still got handcuffs on,…

  • a very low cost of living is magic

    The Issue Spending money requires earning money, which requires exchanging labor in a job of some sort. The Response Aim to spend very little money while maintaining or increasing your subjective quality of life. The less money you spend, the less time you need to spend earning money, the more time you have available to…

  • reframe crazy

    To be considered strange by the prisoners of the dominant culture is a compliment. Worry if they don’t think you’re strange. Is society healthy, that an individual should return to it? Has not society itself helped to make the individual unhealthy? Of course, the unhealthy must be made healthy, that goes without saying; but why…

  • do the math

    Do the Math is a general pattern. Lots of areas of our lives seem mysterious or difficult until you just do some simple math on it, and look at the numbers, and go “oh, this isn’t that mysterious or difficult after all, I just didn’t understand how it worked.” For example it might seem impossible…

  • stimulate the informal economy

    Action Seek ways to bring the activities of your life back into the informal economy, the ad hoc person to person web of reciprocal relationships whereby people simply do the things necessary for living in ways that don’t involve the exchange of money. Discussion The Machine would like all labor and activity to fall under…