This first section explains the most important things you can do immediately to build momentum on the course to a post-consumer lifestyle. It covers both actions and attitude, or mindset. You need both. If you don’t read the rest of the book and only do the minimum viable crowbar, you will have enormously changed your life.
The desired outcomes of your crowbar era is to
- significantly and rapidly decrease your cost of living (assuming your spending is in fact in excess of Enough, which it probably but not necessarily is) while
- maintaining or improving your quality of life via improved skills, optimization, and strategy,
- internalize good stewardship of your finances,
- save up a buffer of liquid cash to increase optionality and resilience
- deprogram active and latent consumerist habits and attitudes
- simplify the logistics of your life by finding and removing sources of friction and waste
- enlist support and understanding from the most important people in your life, and/or find other people doing similar things with whom you can engage in mutual support
- increase actual or potential time freedom (the option to work less than the arbitrary 40hrs/wk)
- set yourself up with a solid foundation to transition to the next major phase of your journey, which I’ll cover in volume II.
In one sentence, the purpose of the crowbar phase is to decrease (or maintain a low) cost of living while maintaining or increasing quality of life in order to deprogram consumer ideology, and to do so as quickly as possible. This is more radical than it sounds.
If you live below your maximum earning potential, then you don’t have to expend your maximum potential into earning, and you can deploy your surplus potential towards other things that interest you. (This could look like reducing your weekly hours spent earning, or a seasonal tempo, mini-retirements/sabbaticals, or full blown early retirement.)
Mainstream consumer society indoctrinates everyone into thinking that they need, or ought to get, or deserve, or are losers if they don’t attain a level of consumption that is just a bit more than their current take.
If you figure out the trick of maintaining or increasing quality of life despite a lower cost of living, then you have subverted the implicit directive of consumer culture which is to maximize earning and spending in an endless and futile race for More. Not just intellectually or rhetorically, you have subverted it with your actions. Your life becomes living proof that we are essentially indoctrinated into wasting something like 7/8’s of our lives on things that don’t matter to us.
In this process, you will change your brain. You will change how you think, if you go deep enough. Doing the practical day to day work of spending less and living more is extremely rich information about your life and your world that you will incorporate into your thinking patterns. This is a feedback loop. The more you do it, the more you believe it, the more it feels natural to do it.
You only need to believe enough to begin, and to get a few small wins in. These small wins feed back into your belief system and will provide extra motivation and desire to keep going.
If you space your wins out too much, it is easy to get bored or discouraged and lose motivation. This is one reason why I recommend going as fast as you can. Start getting small wins, stack and bunch them, and don’t rest on your laurels. Win and keep going, win and keep doing.
If you tackle something too big and thorny too early, and suffer a loss, you can kill all forward momentum. It is important to not suffer too many or too large of losses, especially in the beginning. You will definitely have some failures (aka learning experiences) and discouraging episodes. This is unavoidable and nothing to be ashamed of. It is the cost of learning. But from a technical perspective, especially in the beginning, seek those early wins to build motivational momentum that can carry you through the thornier ones.
Which actions will be easier to pull a win off with has a lot to do with your unique personality. Something that is breezy and kind of fun for me (e.g. building and tweaking a financial resource tracking spreadsheet) might sound like pure psychological torture for you. Building a spreadsheet is the first thing I did, and it helped me build stoke and guide actions. Maybe it should be the last thing you do after you’ve built up a good head of steam already.
The patterns in this first chapter are what I consider the minimum viable crowbar. They are the mindsets to adopt and the actions to execute that represent the most important first few cranks of your crowbar. These will move the needle significantly, and most if not all of them are ultimately unskippable components of a post-consumer lifestyle.
This does not mean that they are all necessarily permanent components of a post-consumer lifestyle. Some of these actions or patterns might be things you do for a while, learn what you need to learn, change what you need to change, and then later abandon. This is another important attitude you should approach the crowbar phase with: everything here is experimental. You aren’t committing to doing any one thing forever. You’re committing to trying everything and seeing what works for you and what doesn’t.
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