Something has dawned on me during the pandemic, and that is that I miss the rush leading up to ER when we were accumulating and engineering our exit. On the one hand, I think, "Isn't this the point? To relax?". Does anyone else feel this?
I think I got an endorphin rush out of saving money. Or maybe some prehistoric center in my brain felt that I was fleeing a big bad predator (the predator being a toxic work culture.)
I miss a lot of the little things, and I realize I don't have to stop doing them. But I'm surprised that my pleasure in doing them is so visceral. Why is this? To this list I would add the following examples:. growing a garden, preserving, optimizing grocery purchases and shopping the deals, thrift store shopping, riding the bus, getting any book I want from the public library on interlibrary loan...
I think I actually get a huge kick out of quietly exercising my stealth wealth.
In these pandemic times there are things I simply cannot do and stay safe (we live in a hotspot.). Sometimes I don't go to Aldi because it's too crowded and I need to one stop shop elsewhere to stay safe. It bugs me to pay twice as much for my bread! We've bought a few books these last months because our library can't do interlibrary loan right now. I rarely go into thrift stores because it's not essential. In sum, I don't have the latitude to optimize purchases and sometimes but new when I could have thrifted.
On many levels our spending has decreased, but I miss the freedom to do the little things.