Annie Raser-Rowland

Interview by Madeleine Dore

Annie Raser-Rowland: Artist, horticultural and author

Full transcript

"The most common thing that I've heard people doing in response to reading the book is really questioning how much they rely on money to give them pleasure or relieve anguish. So the solution to feeling rubbish or having a bad day is to buy something because it's only having something indulgent that you bought that will make that better. And a lot of people no matter what their financial situation find the questioning that really changes how they approach their concept of indulgence. Does indulgence have to mean adding something more. Can it be subtracting something?”

– Annie Raser-Rowland

Madeleine: What if living frugally could be the very thing that helps us live more creatively? Questioning our spending habits requires problem solving, delayed gratification, and openness to experimenting.

Living frugally requests curiosity, connection with others, and defining your own measures of enough. 

Maybe consuming less is a conscientious choice out of respect for the planet. Maybe living frugally is a reality, not a choice. Or maybe limiting expenses comes with the perk of taking on less work in order to have more time.

In any case, each of us can inspect the connection between how we approach feeling good and our consumption habits—and embrace something called frugal hedonism.

For artist and horticulturist Annie Raser Rowland, spending less can enliven us to a magnificent spectrum of pleasures.

In The Art of Frugal Hedonism, Annie and her co-author Adam Grubb tell us just how. The book is a primer for a life less dependent on the comforts of consumption and more focussed on extracting maximum pleasure from the most essential parts of being human–our connections, our curiosity, our passions, our time with our self. 

Being a frugal hedonist isn’t as contradictory as it might sound. Just as there is more to living frugally than penny-pinching and saving old tea bags, hedonism isn’t about having everything you want in abundance, but rather exploring deeper pleasures and minimising suffering from painful circumstances. 

And the two overlap—many of the things we might do out of frugalness can save us from future pain. For example, borrowing things from friends instead of buying anything at the drop of a hat can keep us socially connected to fend off feelings of isolation.  

Here’s Annie: "Being frugal actually leads you to exist in kind of continuously higher hedonistic state than lots of people because you edit out a lot of the default suffering that comes with modern lifestyles if you're a little bit more frugal and self-reliant."

In this conversation, we speak about the routines of a frugal hedonist, limiting the burden of choice in our days, working on the things that might never be seen, recalibrating, relishing, the pleasure of experiences, how we can have the “Getting Feeling” from learning things, not just buying things, busyness as an obsession, and how comparison shapes our ideas of wealth and consumerism.

So, given our days and the pleasures we find within them ebb and flow, here’s Annie Raser Rowland, on how she is today.  

Annie Raser-Rowland: Yeah, I've been doing the usual sort of hodgepodge a few kind of administrative stuff. Then a good solid chunk of creative work through the day and it's all gone well, and that makes me feel happy, and I've also had some other nice kind of textural elements in the day and it feels it feels like it's a good gentle, well-rounded day. 

Madeleine: Oh, I love those combined elements. What would be a creative work and the textural elements specifically?

Annie: So the creative work is I'm working on a novel. It's my first fiction, although I do kind of think of my nonfiction as being a lot more linguistically flamboyant than a lot of nonfiction is but I'm finding it very exciting to write something entirely free form like that and also very terrifying. I don't tend to do a lot of sort of spreadsheeting and everything around it like some people do for writing a novel. So it really is usually a case of trying to fall into a slightly dream-like trance for three or four hours and think about what's going to happen in that universe next and how it's going to happen and I had a good go at that today so that was good.

Textural, it's been a lovely grey rain pattered day here followed by lots of sunshine and I'm someone with an excess of physical energy in general and if I don't do physical things in the morning, I can't actually function for the rest of the day, I get so dozy or so tense one of the two or usually tense then dozy that I have really learned I have to move in the morning. If I've ever tried to get up and sit down at a desk within an hour of waking up, even within two hours of waking u,  the day just becomes disastrous for me. I can't concentrate I feel awful. So I always figure out something that I'm going to do in the morning that's either useful or pleasurable that will burn off some of that physical steam and today I just wrote up the creek to go shopping at the cheap organic shop that's about a 20-minute ride away from me. But I got drenched doing it and I also rode through one the deepest puddles that I've ever experienced on that creek path and even though I rode through and I was like it's never so deep that it that it gets you past the pedals but this time it was and so it's soaked my sneakers and riding through like knee-deep water because once you've committed you can't really uncommit to running through a puddle like that because it could get worse if you get up and go back the other way and that was just fun. You know, it was like, oh, look, I'm now the soggy woman in the shop with sneakers shedding pools of water and because it wasn't a freezing cold day it wasn't unpleasant. It was just sort of a little yeah a little textural upset to my morning that I hadn't been expecting but I kind of enjoyed. 

Madeleine: Yeah, I'd love that. I am not quite sure. I'm guessing that it was Picasso that said that the end of childhood is when a puddle is no longer seen as an opportunity...

Annie: I get such a thrill out of when a water body breaks its banks. There's just something so thrilling about that shifting of a physical element out of its constrained space to start to claim some of your space and so suddenly have ducks swimming around on the path and so on because they go will the rivers on the path now as well of course, we're going to go swim there and it has a little surrealism to it that I really enjoy when water is surpassing its boundaries. 

Madeleine: Yeah, it's a beautiful metaphor for how we can surpass ours. I love those elements in your day and particularly to hear that you're working on fiction. And in the Art of Frugal Hedonism you speak beautifully about how much of the aim is about leisure time and having that freedom to explore the experiences that you want to have. So I'm curious what came first, having the leisure time that led you to the to the book, or has the book been the driver behind building more time into your life?

Annie: I think as I've aged as many people do you become a little more sucked into the various practical aspects of life and you find it harder and harder to justify things that are purposeless. And it's a trajectory that I'm very wary of because I don't think it leads to happiness and I don't think it leads to a better society necessarily because once we all become so focused on the idea that productivity is what our lives are meant to be shaped around and things with a clear practical purpose we lose a lot of that liminal space that makes us beautiful and interesting as brains and creatures. And having written two books that had and I should say co-authored not written solo that had a very clear useful function from the outset, I realized that I was reluctant to, or I couldn't quite justify it for myself spending the years that it takes to write a book, on writing something that had had no functional purpose as its endpoint. And of course once I realized that I felt that way I had some challenge that. Because some of the greatest pleasure in my life has been reading fiction and just because I can't put my finger on what the function of this piece of fiction will be when it is brought into existence for the people that read it, doesn't mean that it doesn't have a function however hard that function might be to put into words. 

I mean if I ask myself the question would I like a world where people just read a lot more stories and did a lot less work, the answer is yes, of course, so I kind of pushed myself to jump over both that reluctance and the fear to start writing a piece of fiction. It has lined up very well with the year covid in that I haven't been able to work because I've got some health issues that means that I can't wear a mask and let some of the restrictions around covid meant that I haven't been able to work in my usual horticultural job. And so I've automatically had this extra amount of time. Throughout the year or the last six months have also been working with my previous co-author Adam Grubb on kids edition of The Weed Foragers handbook lovely and that's turned out to be the perfect complement to writing one of those terrifying projects, which I'm sure as a freelance person you probably know what I'm talking about, where you spend all of your mental energy and time working on this thing that there is a total chance will never be seen by anyone else—except for maybe the few friends that you shove it under the nose of—and so to have something that has a publisher already in place to work on at the same time as working on something that might never actually exist is very comforting.

Madeleine: Yeah, I think you need the thing that can bouy you so that you can kind of stretch a bit further and sort of not lose balance and quite a fan of you know, mixing and matching freelancing day jobs, passion projects, depending on on what I need with that balance. 

I loved how with the Art of Frugal Hedonism it really is an art because so much of it ties into I guess approaches that really work well for the creative process to but it broadens that and really applies it to our lives and one example that I'm just sort of reminded of in is that idea of flow and how frugal hedonism really is about problem solving and and building that self-reliance, but also this idea you mentioned in the book about how the frugal hedonism doesn't expect perfection. And that's another one that is really important for embarking on these big projects. 

Annie: Yes, and I think a great one for that is that sense of being present because you can't really be creative if you are never letting yourself be present in where you are or what you're doing. And I think you know because of the buzz words of mindfulness and so on, everyone is pretty aware of this general thought concept at this point, but not many people are still applying it.

That stopping and imbibing the atmosphere of a moment and that doesn't mean only a pleasurable moment of any moment that taps into the thing about accepting imperfections is where the furnaces of your brain really fire up and start to get excited by the flavours of life, whether they be the crappy flavours or the fine flavours of pleasure or love or excitement.

But to be creative you need to care about flavour because that's where story comes from and that's where contrast comes from. And I didn't know I had an interesting moment the other day where I sort of checked myself because I had spent a bunch of the morning doing quite boring stuff. And then I had to catch several buses to go to an osteopath that I was going to and I was having that slightly resentful feeling of "oh, why do they need to be so many days like this, that I just on the way to having the good days? They're just the stuff you get through to have the good days, you know, or they have the good bits of life. And then as soon as I had the thought I realized how absurd it was. Because if you're treating any imperfect parts of the day as stuff that's just to be waited out until you get to the good stuff you're very prone to miss out on a whole lot of flavor. And so when I got to the osteopath as I was lying there with my face in the face hole with my cheek or you know stuck down to the vinyl of the work table the massage table and I could hear his receptionist who works on this of 200 year old computer in this tiny tiny foyer thing as you know, it's a one-room practice and you can hear his the receptionist typing away all the time and I was laying there listening to him, you know, tell me some slightly inane slightly lovely things about the possum that had moved into his house and what they were trying to do about it and crunching bits of my neck and listening to these keys making this incredibly musical clunking noise in the reception that's next to me and my face stuck to the vinyl and I found myself thinking this is life right here, right now I'm in the middle of it. And this is not something on the way to the good bits. This is life and it was such a powerful check on that tendency to treat all the bits that we weren't planning on and wouldn't have designed into our life if we got to choose as stuff just to be surfed through. And once I had that feeling in that moment, there was just this phenomenal almost ecstasy in feeling so present in that, this was me in the middle of living life right now. And it stuck with me as a sort of mental practice that took about a month after that to fade out and you know hasn't ever completely faded out. But it just it really stayed alive through every moment that I had after that where I'd check if if I was sitting with a relative or something who I hadn't particularly wanted to have to visit for example, and listening to them tell me about their broken toaster or whatever it was and feeling on my feet are freezing cold and there's a funny smell in this house isn't there and all all of these elements that were inviting me to be looking forward to this moment being over, but then finding that once I sank into it, there's always a beauty there and I don't know if all creative people function this way, but I suspect there's a very strong bent in this direction, in that I care more about narrative and about story than I do about goodness and happiness and contentment because it's very hard for us to have lives full of goodness and happiness and contentment, but there's something that makes us feel okay about being alive with all of its messiness and ups and downs if if we feel like there are stories there. And so tapping back into that both enhances your creativity and protects you psychologically in quite a powerful way. 

Madeleine: Ah, Annie. Yes, I couldn't agree with you more if it's astonishingly beautiful what you just said, I'm currently deep in my book that I'm writing at the moment as well and it's about how we have the power to create our days and just what you've said there it's so it's exactly in it's the name that we can kind of shape and sink into so that was beautiful. But it also reminded me of a concept I really loved was that of relishing and I love the tip of you know, if you are going through something inane or something frustrating to pretend that you're paying for the experience. 

Annie: It really does work. It was I mean, that was one of those–they're all actually very genuine tips in the book–but that was one of those ones that felt extra fresh to me at the time because it was a little game that I played with myself during the writing of the book so it felt you know, if they'll almost like a new discovery from me as I was writing about it. Yeah, the the tip is based around the idea that if you're in a situation that either you think you could be appreciating more or that maybe isn't even by any common descriptor something to be appreciated. So either you're just undervaluing something that's quite good or that, you know to the external eye you might say there's nothing there to be valued and if you tell yourself imagine that I've paid $10 to come have this experience. How would I be reacting to it then and it is incredible how your attention switches into really treating that experience as something whose nuances who's textures and flavours and implications, philosophical implications, neurological implications, sensory input on every level how they all suddenly become more complex seeming and more interesting and more enjoyable because of that. I guess the point I'm making is that even in a really technically fairly unpleasant situation, that some interest and some presents can turn it into something that becomes quite worthwhile ingredient in the course of a day rather than something that needs to be taken care of and moved on from so you can get back to your proper life. Because the illusion of a proper life is a dangerous thing. 

Madeleine: Yeah. We're just going to continue to chase the lack if we go for that. But this ties in so nicely to another concept which is recalibrating and how you can really do some interesting experiments to get that sensitive pleasure palette back and one example was imagine going on a plane and almost been childlike or on the plane for the first time and just marvelling at the fact that you're in the air flying and you're moving through the clouds. I just love that because I think we just hop on a plane and you know moan and complain but it is marvellous. So what's this idea of recalibrating, or what some ideas for how people can do that? 

Annie: So recalibrating is that thing of shifting the parameters of what sort of demarcates pleasure for you or pain for you or something been interesting for you and the most wonderful things about human beings and the most dangerous is that we're so adaptable. We're very flexible in our brains in our physiological responses to the world and it's partly why we've been able to live in so many parts of the world and why we can adapt amazingly to psychological trauma and still keep functioning is we just we've got these anomaly plastic brains and bodies. But that also ties into the fact that when you live in a society that really supplies your needs to a hyper abundant level, food for example is is a really clear and obvious example that food that is so rich in fatty and sweet and salty flavours is easily available to even people on really low incomes. We suffer because we get calibrated to such a high point keeping the food example alive of food that is really stimulating in terms of its calorific presence in the flavours that are there that we then can't enjoy simpler things as much.

And it takes some discipline but the payoff is pretty incredible once you exercise that disciplined enough time. If you just don't give yourself everything that's available to you all the time whenever you want it or whenever you can lay your hands on it it retrains your brain and your senses to go back to that super enjoyment of much more simple things and so you can get away with feeling like you just had a mango and that was the most luxurious food you can imagine eating, rather than we've moved into a situation and modern times where eating a mango probably feels like the healthy kind of martyr-ish option to lots of people and lots of cases because the mangoes what you eat when you're not eating chocolate ice cream. And I like to use the example of how Christmas has changed because it's such a good little nugget of historical change in that in the times when people used to do really hard physical work all the time most people and where animal protein and things like dried fruit and nuts were a luxury that it took a lot of effort to grow and store and they had lots of calories in them that to have a large amount of animal protein and cakes made out of dried fruits and nuts on this festival event those foods tasted just so opulent and that was such a treat and it would have been so excited about it. And especially when you've got a body that's doing lots of physical work and you're really craving those calories on the bodily level and now, you know the fruits and nuts of the healthy option when you're not having the the Mars Bar because we've recalibrated calibrated so intensely to a different kind of eating experience and you can recalibrate back the other direction with quite a bit of ease and I find that one that the best ways to do it is not to say I'm just going to exercise the discipline of changing how I eat, but have a full extreme event because it's more fun to say right for this whole week I'm just going to eat the plainest kind of simple cooked from scratch peasant food, no desserts and then when you do then get the go back and introduce something like a mango the next week it'll just be like wow, this is the bomb. This is as good as it gets. And you can do the same sort of thing with technology. I'm in the strange boat of being both blessed and cursed that because of the health issues that I've got, I can't use computers that any sustained amount of time at all because it gives me a headache, and so I can't use social media so I've never fallen prey to this to the temptation of excessive media use, but I know that lots of people it's a massive problem. We really underestimate the amount of digestion that we don't do as part of modern life.

Madeleine: Yeah, I guess what I really love about the art of frugal hedonism overall is that it's so much more about these experiments that we can do with our days rather than typical, you know advice on money always sort of speaks to budgeting and setting up a spreadsheet or earning more, whereas for the Frugal Hedonist it can also be about the experimenting and I'm wondering if after sort of publishing the book and all the reprints and people engaging with you, whether you think it is something that is accessible to most people.

Annie: I think that in terms of increasing people's daily pleasure, it's very accessible to most people. That cutting spending massively isn't available to most people and that is a big part of the book in that if you spend less you don't have to work as much and you get more time to daydream and conduct strange experiments on yourself. If you're someone who's really entrenched in a like a deep and profound mortgage and has several children to support and jobs that you can't do without driving a long way then a lot of the cutting back of spending we talked about in the book isn't going to be possible for you. 

I have been surprised, that said, how much more possible it seems to be than I had anticipated from reader feedback. The number of people who said that they've read the book and then have sat down with their partner — I think there's actually been to emails over time that the said we stayed up all night and talked about how we can change our lives – which blew me away. For some people it is it feels worth it to them to restructure aspects of their lives and go, could we move to a smaller house? Could we move somewhere that's close to where we worked or we could just have one car. Holy cow, having one car would save us $30K a year, think of how we could use that time that working time in a different way and some people have actually had that response to reading the book, which is beautiful. 

I think the most common sort of in-between thing that I've heard people doing in response to reading the book is really questioning how much they rely on money to give them pleasure or relieve anguish. So that very common modern line that gets bandied about by advertisers in particular of "treat yourself, you deserve it or you've earned it" which I think is one of the most dangerous lines in advertising that says the solution to feeling rubbish or having a bad day is to buy something, because it's only having something indulgent that you've bought that will make that better. And a lot of people no matter what their financial situation find that questioning that really changes how they approach their concept of indulgence, does indulgence have meaning adding something more can it be subtracting something, and subtracting something very often doesn't cost any money can it be just saying, you know, it could seem important to go to this class that's going to improve me or to renovate the kitchen and disrupt all of our lives, but maybe it's not very important. Maybe I could just have that extra time and that extra money and spend a bit more time being daydreaming or spend more time just getting a really good night's sleep because I never get to sleep in and I always feel like I'm short of sleep, or spend a bit more time hanging out with my kids because I'm always feeling guilty that I don't do that and I think that reframing of pleasure and relief being something that you get by spending money is something that almost everyone who's read the book and talked to me about it has found really useful. 

The challenging of spending on stuff that I mentioned too, it is a lot more in common with your average sort of how to save money book, but we do approach a lot more from the deep psychological level of, do you really want this stuff. Like how much happier is it going to make you? And there is as we as we go through in the book, there's just amazing research that shows people making even really quite extravagant purchases be they practical purchases or pleasure purchases and their happiness levels in every kind of survey coming back to the same point within next to no time and that it's only having experiences that increases your long-term happiness. And that's another thing that people in any situation seemed to really take away from the book. 

Madeleine: Yes. That was one of my favourite parts as well as this how you put it as the "getting feeling" and how that can come from learning or experiences or new experiences not just consumption. In fact, it's as you just pointed out its longer-lasting when it's an experience. 

Annie: Yeah. Yeah. And it really works. I think one of the huge problems with so many financial books is they don't acknowledge some really fundamental things about human nature and us loving that that acquisition feeling know that dopamine release that comes from the sick Instinct of your finding the thing you want and you're discovering something and you're looking forward to the getting of that building. We love that getting feeling but it doesn't have to come from getting something new. We've been sold the message so well that there's a freshness to to buying something new that is going to make life feel nicer and make us feel fresher and like a new version of ourselves and make us feel stimulated and all of that comes across in the different layers of was incorporated into the ads and is implied in a way that leaves us with a really strong feeling that buying something new will scratch that itch in that lovely way. But none of those ads acknowledge that you can equally well get that getting feeling from a bunch of other things and learning new stuff is one of the easiest ways of doing that at that doesn't have to be learning technical information. It could be just learning how to play an instrument or learning how to say one phrase in another language that then you say to your partner every time that situation arises and that you've just gotten something, you've gotten a new ingredient in your life where every time your partner makes that dumb remark about the refrigerator and the noise that it makes you say this phrase to them in French that makes you both laugh because of what it says about what you think of them having made that observation yet again, and that is a that is an acquisition. It's a place that pushes your brain into a slightly different shape and it's a new element in your life. 

It could be getting something in terms of learning to poach an egg when you could never poach an egg before you buy never been able to fry eggs and that becomes a knowledge and the shape of that egg and the possible future poached eggs that you will eat made by your own hands, they are all something you have just gotten that you hold within your bosom that will provide that same getting feeling. 

So it can be really simple like that. Or it can be as I mentioned before I think we really do love stories where very narrative loving kind of creature in general, and it could just be getting a good piece of gossip from someone. It's really underrated. 

Madeleine: It is underrated and there's so much to show that it really connects people. But I think just overall, I love that getting feeling you've just described. It's interesting, a lot of this does take a major shift and a major rethinking of the message that we've been sold and that can come with, I know in my own experience, especially when I started out as a freelancer and I was in charge of how much I earned in a way that you aren't, you know, in a determined salary and how that number could shift depending on how much or little I worked was kind of daunting. I felt like I was cheating if I wasn't working all the time, even though that was enough for me for me to survive on you know, a frugal lifestyle. So I'm wondering, you mentioned in the book about how it can be daunting when you first start to kind of adopt this Frugal Hedonism and how it's a practice and almost requires recovery time when you're first making the shift. 

Annie: Well, I guess the recovery time acknowledgement in the book was more referring to if someone's making a really dramatic life change and I think that it is very important in that kind of circumstance to – oh I hate the word detox appear to be about to use it – to detox yourself from that obsession that we are taught is good that being busy all the time is is almost a moral good there's a piety to that. And yet it really is a pretty modern obsession and it's worth questioning on so many levels not only because of the growth economy that it has generated but also because it often seems to make people quite stressed and unhappy and we probably wouldn't have a lot of history's great creative works but keep us all sane, if people hadn't let themselves just get a bit bored sometimes and be a bit more speculative and daydreaming sometimes. But yeah, I know that I mean I struggle with it too when because you know forge new neural pathways with whatever you're doing and if you've been having to multitask and do heaps of things back-to-back throughout a day, it feels really uncomfortable when your neural pathways are then trying to run just on one track or not be zigzagging back and forth all the time anymore and you've got to give your actual brain sometime to reshape to putting a bit more space around things.

The Protestant work ethic is really intense and the best way that I know to help myself question it, is to look at history because there's nothing more efficient at telling us that something isn't how it has to be then seeing it's not how it's been for most of humans throughout most of history. Yeah, it's the best way to break down that assumption that whatever is happening is that the only way it can happen and it really wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that people saw work as an inherent good, before then people saw work as something you did to meet your requirements and that is such a difficult concept for modern humans to wrap our heads around. But I think it's one that's really worth pushing through to think about and say well, why do I want to be more productive? Is it just to get more money? And if the answer is yes, I want to get more money than you might want to ask. Why you want more money? Do you have enough money? Could you need to have less money? Do you want to be more productive because you think that society needs everyone to be productive then there's a lot of stuff you can question about that in this era in particular more than any other I would say in that we'd basically all be better off at this stage if most of us were producing very little and consuming very little and being a lot lazier. 

Madeleine: I think it's the best frame for being lazy I've heard so that. But I think what gets in our way and you touch on it in the book as well as is it's actually our comparison to other people. So it's for me I've come to really embrace boredom and laziness and find those qualities actually my favourite parts of myself now, but for a while it was comparing myself to other people and what I was assuming or projecting onto them in terms of their output or what they were doing and how they can't possibly be lazy. So yeah in terms of consumerism or even just our ideas of wealth, how much do you think that's shaped by comparison. 

Annie: Massively. I mean, we entirely frame our sense of how well we're doing and whether what we're doing is enough or good enough in comparison to the society in which we are living and particularly the peer group in which we're moving. And that's both really burdensome, but also kind of hilarious in that there's so many human lifestyles throughout time to choose from and that if we throw our brains out broadly to encompass all of the possibilities of what it means to be human throughout history through different societies, that as long as we feel like what we are doing in our own life has some beauty within that scope, then there's a lot of wiggle room in who you compare yourself to, you just have to keep reminding yourself that it doesn't just have to be your best friends. You could compare yourself to an ancient Egyptian slave. You can compare yourself to the guy in LA in 1972 who spent his whole life sitting on a street corner and just talking to passes by in a deck chair and drinking four liters of home brands lemonade a day, you know, both those people probably had some amazing experiences and amazing thoughts and amazing stories because of lives that they were leading and what they've produced actually doesn't seem that important in retrospect. They were lives there were human lives that had beauty and they had a story to them and that's what we should try to be making our lives into not something that competes effectively with the people that surround us. 

It's hard. I mean, it's one of those things that I don't know if you've ever read Alain de Botton so religion for atheists, but he really hammers home the fact that religion does people a kindness and I'm not religious at all, but I really appreciated this point ,that religion does people kindness by offering all these mechanisms to remind us of bigger truths and better forms of ourselves that would like to be and it repeats them again and again via art and via repeated readings of the religion's dominant text. Yet in the secular society, we're supposed to keep bringing ourselves back to this sense of our higher self just by discipline, by saying no, you can be more like this or you shouldn't have these cheap thoughts about comparing yourself to other people we supposed to do it all for ourselves, which is really quite a big ass.

But the neat thing is the more we ask ourselves those questions in the more regularly, it becomes a practice and it becomes something that we just use to actually define ourselves and how we go about life. 

Madeleine: Yeah, exactly. I suppose that's what being a Frugal Hedonist does as well, it provides a frame and it's a flexible frame. I love that there's this periodic abandonment that you speak about, it's an inbuilt way to acknowledge our human tendencies

Annie: Well, I mean, I'm someone that I think I get quite morose if I don't have some degree of excess pretty regularly, but I have learnt very much to make that the excess of going to hell with it tomorrow, I'm going to get up at 5:00 a.m while it's still dark and catch the train to the beach and jump in the freezing cold ocean and jump around and scream and then I'm going to be back home by 10:00 a.m. And go back to doing the work I want to do in that day. But like there has to be things that perforate the structures of sensibility that we place over our lives to keep them chugging along well, or I think we we start to get a bit a bit blue in general.

Madeleine: Mmm, yeah. We need that outlet. I supposed to bring that back to a day or a routine, there's this sort of wonderful element of limiting the burden of choice through Frugal Hedonism and I was wondering what kind of choices you make day-to-day or what that looks like for you specifically in terms of your choices around work or spending or I guess paint a picture of a routine of a Frugal Hedonist, and how that can change because obviously there's the periodic abandonment. 

Annie: I feel like operate on maybe a sort of 90% type rule, maybe even more, maybe 95, where my basic mode of living where that would involve not eating food that I hadn't cooked myself, so you're not buying takeaway food or coffee or of any kind. Not having a day where I didn't do some kind of aerobic exercise because it makes me feel much much better if I do, and some kind of yoga type exercise to stretch things out a bit, even down to stuff like spending, yeah, probably the ratio is about similar, like if I need to buy clothes then 95% of timeI would expect to go sauce that from an op shop and 5% of the time I might let myself go not that's really going to be better if I get it somewhere new I'm going to do that then something like a rain jacket for example where you want it to last for a long time.

I find that does work really well in the I don't give myself choice about any of those kind of things until I feel really desperate and clear that I want to do something differently like no, I just feel so lazy and worn out today that I don't want to go for a run. I'm going to just be someone that does desk work or reads books or even has an afternoon nap and I feel okay about doing that because I can tell that I really, really want that today. But the other 95% of the time I don't let myself ask that question until it's really clear and just getting rid of that choice is it is a real relief. It means that sort of grazing for other possibilities just doesn't exist for me, which is very nice and non-taxing because you're not always having to discipline yourself to not spend money on certain things. Furniture, I would never really consider buying new furniture either that either comes from the side of the road or from an op shop and that means there's never that temptation to go shopping to spruce something up or you know homewares. One of my least favorite shops is a homewares because they seem to be full of almost entirely things that no one actually need I would not even bother going into a homewares shop. These are things I actually find it quite hard to comment on because they're so automatic to me at this point, but I see other people getting in that fug of destruction of sort of would I like that and I realized that it doesn't look fun and that I'm happy that I don't do that. 

Because I don't use social media at all, I've eradicated that decision making of do I look at this now? Is this a discipline? I have to exercise with this be useful or do I need to weigh up if this is a good career move to keep up-to-date with this particular strand of conversation that's happening in my area. I just don't do it. 

Madeleine: To me, it's just so exciting but say someone's skirting around the edges and sees how they can apply it to their life, but is worried about what say friends will think if they no longer wish to spend money on eating out. Do you have any suggestions for how to win over friends or skeptical family members.

Annie: If your entire social circle if that's really the way they socialize and so on I would never suggest that anyone entirely trying to stop eating out or anything like that, but you can do stuff like invite people around to all cook lasagna together or something like that and that is something that most people quite enjoy and once you've done it once they are more likely to suggested themselves because their that was so fun when we did that. And if they don't then the fact that that time that you invite them to do that still becomes a difference within their lives and your lives that has a bit of a bleed effect in general I find hmm.

You can always sow those seeds of lets you know, let's just get some bread rolls and go to the park it's such a nice afternoon instead of let's go to that Thai place where we know we're all going to end up spending 60 bucks for dinner each. Inviting people in on stuff is one of the strongest things you have on your side, but also being really clear about why you are making some of the changes that you're making and explaining that to people is really powerful because what you say is very likely to tap into stuff that so many people you know a feeling when you say, I just don't want to be stuck working this much forever just so I can keep having this lifestyle that involves x x and x. Most people will relate to that and so if you say yeah, you know, I'm just I'm trying to walk and ride a bit more and leave the car at home except for when I really need it. Maybe we should go for a bike ride up the Yarra this weekend or whatever it is then for lots of people both the explanation and the invitation will tap into something that they've felt like they would like to change in their lives anyway. 

When lots of my friends started in us a late 20s getting higher incomes and spending a lot more money, I did find it was quite hard for a spell where people would just expect to go out incessantly and spend all the money they were learning and as most of them have gotten older and started to see the problems that comes from that, it's been just easier and easier and easier to have people be almost relieved seeming to say let's not go to that bar, come come have a cup of tea with me instead and we'll go for a big sit up on the hill and watch the sunset. Like so many people into the cheaper option if you sell it to them right. It's more appealing to most people, you know, probably than you think. 

Madeleine: Yeah. Thank you Annie, but sowing the seeds and making these suggestions and also I feel like you've helped pull us out of a collective rut of consumerism, which is no small task. 

Annie: If I could if I could help to close the advocate elect a variety of consumerism, I'd lay down my hat and so my work here is done that would be marvellous...

Madeleine: Annie reminds us not only to live lightly when it comes to what we consume, but also to live light-heartedly in all areas of our lives.

As Annie writes in The Art of Frugal Hedonism, “Frugal hedonism is partly about noticing when less is more, and that applies to activity just as much as in the realm of consumption. If you’re too busy, don’t add a new commitment unless you can ditch a current one. If you're already loving life, check whether saying yes to another appealing project could steal important time from some less visible aspects of your world.”

Being a frugal hedonist is a practice, and one you can make your own. Experiment with a frugal choice in one area of your life and put your own hedonistic spin on it that suits your circumstances or preferences. Maybe it’s favouring experiences and learning over buying things for the “getting feeling.” Or maybe a pot luck dinners instead of dining out with friends or not buying anything new for a month to practice delayed gratification. See if it makes you more creative, more curious, more content. 

In the words of Epicurious, “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.”

I’m Madeleine Dore, and that’s what I hope to share with podcast – that we can also experiment and notice our own measure of enough.