I've had shenanigans called on me. Nice!
I'm glad you took that statement with the tongue-in-cheek nature it was intended. It can be good to try and break harder truths with a little humor up front, but sometimes that doesn't always come across in written communication. I'm glad it did this time. :)
I fully admit I don't know what folks here spend on phones (or phone plans) on average. I am not suggesting that I have bested anyone here. Just sharing my phone history.
Since folks have been chatting about plans as well -- since Feb 2015, my employer has paid for my cell phone plan (over-subsidized it actually, as they provide $40/month toward a plan and mine has averaged $26/month since that time). Prior to Feb 2015, I was always on a group plan with between 6 and 10 people total that also always had corporate discounts applied.
A few fun phone anecdotes during my journey: 1. My boss telling me I look absolutely ridiculous using a flip phone on the software development floor (this interaction led to him telling me to finally use the biennial device stipend the company provides); 2. while riding the train back from night school in 2016, the only other person on the train with a visible flip phone saw me talking on mine, held theirs up to show me, and gave me a smile and a thumbs up.
This kinda pokes at the heart of the matter that I was referencing and
@JimDogRock was also poking at. It's the approach and perspective issue, with a focus and emphasis on the wrong takeaways while ignoring the things of
true value from your own historical usage to be talked about and recognized and modeled.
It's not about money spent that matters. It's about the approach to consumption... and that defines a relationship between you and the tools around you, including your money. If all that matters is how much (or little) you spend, you're still a slave to that money instead of that money being a tool that you can use and be a good steward of. This is the matter at hand that I've tried talking about for years when I say stuff like,
"Pay for what you need, not what you want." This does not preclude being generous with your money, because it's not about the money. It's about priorities and getting the right tool for the job, and doing so in a way that is mindful of not only your own resources, but how those used resources not only impact yourself, but the others around you.
The pure metric of how much you spend does not define the value of the tool, in fact it's a pretty crappy metric to measure usefulness with. It also easily ignores the social graces, benefits and hidden costs that many others have paid to enable your capacity to save, making that savings all about yourself instead of the community support (or on the more negative end, the frequent community exploitation) that it took to allow you the ability to save that money in the first place.
Let's take your examples cited for defending and discussing the money not spent on your cell phone bill contextually, and highlight the privilege that permitted you that savings - such as a strong social and family network with high financial trust and literacy enabling you to spend less money while still being plugged into the consumer sucker treadmill of postpaid mobile carriers with funny math tricks done to exploit your greed and reward center ("look at how much I get with this!"), and the community exploitation that your carrier exercised and you took advantage of to make that happen. After all, it wasn't just you on that plan... and because of that, there's a ripple effect of entrapment through contract and inertia for an entire group of people who may have some having to pay more despite those "discounts" than they might otherwise need, even potentially to the point of hardship. The professional discounts are again a privilege that isn't available to everyone. Nor is a phone stipend from an employer, especially in an era where there are many lower paying jobs where worker exploitation is the norm, and your ability to draw a paycheck at all is dependent upon you having a mobile phone number, phone and internet service you have to pay for out of pocket. Not everyone has these mechanisms available to them to make them options to save money with, and in fact,
most do not.
(A lot of these concepts can overlap and be extended towards the topics of white privilege and systemic racism as well, if one can pull their head out of their ass long enough to recognize that it's not about you, it's about the damage that can be caused by the systemic biases that greed and tribalism within the system itself creates and trying to be more mindful of that with your own actions for the sake of the more vulnerable communities within that system... but that's another topic and I've digressed. We're talking cellphones, money, consumption and environmental damage.)
I don't highlight the privilege to bring shame or guilt upon you, I'm just highlighting that those discounts were a bonus and the money was a savings
despite the consumer habits that placed you there, not inherently a virtue of saving the money
itself. There is waste and overconsumption baked into the entire
approach that you yourself even took advantage of with the price discrepancy between what you were paid for phone service by your employer versus what you actually needed to pay for. Those savings weren't actual savings... they were the carrots dangled to blind you to the reality of your situation and make you spend more than you needed to in the first place through manufactured need, fear of expensive overage bills on plans that have no hard usage caps, and FOMO.
And in a way, you're
kinda getting some of it given your feature phone attachment... which is why I'm taking the time to lay this out and show the bigger picture. But the reduced environmental impacts of the used devices and the devices used aren't a deliberate outcome to your trying to save money, they're just a happy coincidence within the framework of the topic presented. The real value and the good lessons that should be engaged with and encouraged from your situation are ignored within the community, while everyone just goes into another degenerate circlejerk of, "look how much money I also saved," and, "all that savings is why I justify being a consumer whore about this optional thing now."
Imagine how much greater an impact on needless and mindless consumption you could have had over these past twenty years if you'd instead focused not on getting the service as cheaply as possible, but making financial decisions with these services that was informed by,
"for the greater good," first, and,
"if I must, may it be the least harmful outcome of that usage," last with the freedom to spend whatever was necessary to make that happen.
Does that mean that those two positions are mutually exclusive? No. There is the potential of still doing good and right even using something like that postpaid phone service so long as you're approaching it with a, "this fulfills my actual usage needs," as opposed to a consumptive want created through social pressure and marketing, and that is an approach that will leave you ignoring and bypassing many of the consumptive traps laid through contracts and phone upgrades, saving you further money
while still spending money in a way that can have a positive community impact through the ways you choose to spend and use those tools.
In theory, those actions taken by enough people with more money, privilege, and greater financial influence could have brought prices down faster on both devices and service by opting out of the postpaid multi-line and subsidized hornswaggle, and teaching others to do likewise by not rewarding those predatory industrial practices and trapping others in the system with you just to save some money yourself. With enough people, it could've even taken the teeth out of the explosion in price of modern smartphones and incentivized the cheaper more basic cellphone end to have remained more robust than it's become. It might have even slowed the progress towards planned obsolescence and disposable, unrepairable electronics... and the mental bandwidth to do all that wouldn't have been much greater than the effort taken to get those deals within the broken consumption framework in the first place, especially if someone else already did most of the mental gymnastics for you.
Of course, a lot of this is philosophical idealism and a history of what could have been instead of the reality of what has occurred... and like it or not, wealth creates biases towards preservation of that wealth for the sake of self preservation over community benefit for many people unless that community benefit is a thing exercised regularly. However, for the sake of a better future, it's good to talk about these concepts, because maybe it'll help break the flaws in the system enough that something better might take its place.
Ultimately, when you're only focusing on what you spent, you're missing the point and the undercurrent of trying to "do good" with financial freedom. This is the difference between being cheap and being frugal. It's the defining characteristic that helps define the capacity for happiness and the understanding and appreciation of what hedonic adaptation can do to a person, and allows you to appreciate and be thankful for what you have... and perhaps even inspires greater generosity and compassion towards those who have not.
In a world where we can't escape trading very real time and resources for the imaginary social constructs like numbers assigned to little pieces of paper as placeholders for those tangible goods and the inherent inequality that can create, it's good to talk about healthier approaches to that imaginary social construct that goes a couple levels deeper than,
"Fuck you, I got mine."And that's the heart. When all you think about and talk about is the money, it's all a reductio ad absurdum dick wagging contest steeped in virtue signalling in a community where the only winner on the cheapest cellphone argument is
@GuitarStv who's somehow escaped playing the cellphone game in the first place his entire life and still doesn't own one even with a technical job and a family. (And that's the thing, the only real way to win is to not play at all. But everyone has different needs and different budgets.) Meanwhile, the more impactful topics and lessons that can make all our lives better are nothing more than accidental benefits from cheapskates at best, and outright ignored and dismissed at worst.
It's good to talk about those personal victories, but we should also be sure to focus on the true
meaty good and focus on positive reinforcement for that sake, not just the superficial.
But, that's just the clueless observations and navel gazing of a poor inside outsider within this community of (mostly) privileged rich people who frequently turn a blind eye to the systemic exploitation that underwrites their financial independence in the first place. The only thing of value I own are my words, and the words I spill only implies an even vaster ocean of understanding that extends far beyond my capacity to reason, and how impoverished of wisdom and knowledge I truly am.
This has been my TED Talk. Have a good evening.
