Hi folks,
I'm a 32-year old married guy with two kids under 5yrs old. I live in an gut-wrenchingly overpriced and wasteful suburb of Philly called the Main Line (yech). My wife and I both work and make ~$120k/year and are debt-free.
In a former life (in Cambridge, MA), I biked year-round, we both walked or biked to work, and were much more frugal. By choice. Because we liked it that way. Two years ago, we moved to the Main Line, both of us embarking on much more intense careers, and have regretfully assimilated with the local, hightly anti-mustacian, lifestyle (driving kids to school 1.5 miles away, eating out, buying frivolities on amazon, long commute to work for one of us, you name it). We tend to justify our expenditures as "necessary" (daycare) or "time-saving" (eating out). Prior to making a purchase, we rarely ask ourselves "do we really *need* this?" We just buy it.
That said, we are both harbor an inner-mustache, and are in agreement about the need to change our lifestyle. This summer a job relocation will take us to another ridiculously affluent suburb (this time a western suburb of Boston), and we want to use this opportunity to enact a major lifestyle change -- to become more mustacian.
My main concern is finding a community of mustachians (or at least of like-minded folks). I know that if your lifestyle differs from others it can be isolating. As an example, my wife and I were (very) late adopters of cell phones. I still have a "dumb" flip-phone. She recently upgraded to an android device (I loved the article on the $10 cell phone plan by the way). The main reason that we ended up getting phones in the first place was not because we needed them to communicate "out" to the world or to each other, but because without cell phones, people were not communicating "in" to us. In the age of cell phones, gone are the days of making plans. Everything was done "on the fly" and we didn't have the tool (cell phone) to partcipate.
So I'd like advice on building a mustacian-tolerant community in a highly non-mustacian environment. I'd love to hear from recent converts and experienced mustacians about difficulties you faced on the social front when transitioning to the mustacian lifestyle. Did you have conflicts with friends? ("want to grab a beer?" "let's meet up for dinner" etc.) How about parents/siblings ("can you come down for the weekend")?
I'd especially like to hear from folks who are living a mustacian lifestyle (of any degree) in a particularly non-mustacian location.
While I look forward to spending time with mustacians, I want to be able to maintain friendships with consumer-mucus laden folks as well!