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I read a really interesting article about the pain of spending because Josh and I are trying to put a new budgeting/tracking system into place.  The general idea behind pain of spending is that “the less it hurts, the more people spend.”  In other words, the more inconvenient the purchase, the less likely you are to make it.

For instance, paying in cash is harder than paying with a credit card.  You need to get the cash and carry the cash and count it and hand it over.  That is more work than taking out a piece of plastic and swiping it.  The credit card company mails you the card; you have to go to the bank or an ATM to get the cash.  See, easy vs. hard.

Okay, cash isn’t really that difficult, but businesses are making it easier and easier to spend money.  It doesn’t even feel like real money when you’re talking about gift cards or swiping the phone.  So the article was about making it more difficult for yourself.  Putting a system in place that is enough of a pain-in-the-ass that you decide NOT to purchase something because it will mean doing X, Y, and Z.

I’m not a big spender — my dislike of change extends to not even getting new clothes and switching up my wardrobe — but I was sort of smitten with this idea of introducing pain-in-the-ass tasks in order to curb spending.

But there was a thought that I was still chewing on after reading the article.  George Loewenstein critiques the author’s recording system and points out that it isn’t effective:

It is ineffective, he says, because it focuses on the wrong type of transaction … There are usually more savings to be had from revisiting one’s auto- or home-insurance policy, or one’s phone bill, than from skipping the marginal cup of coffee. Loewenstein said it’s more effective to make changes with larger “one-time decisions,” instead of regularly having to make “all these micro-decisions.”

It’s not the random cups of coffee or the books or the totally adorable wooden duck I bought for myself in Scotland because IT WAS SO ADORABLE.  It’s the fact that we’re probably spending money on services that we’re not really using.  Or paying hidden fees that we don’t notice because we don’t look carefully at the 15 page bill.

Josh and I have started doing an audit of all existing bills, looking at things we can cut.  It will be interesting to see how much we save yearly when we’re done reading all the fine print.  So far, we’ve managed to cut $60.  Maybe not that impressive, but companies make it reeeeeeeally difficult to trim down bills.

How often do you audit your bills and see places to cut spending?  We’re thinking once every six months.

I’ve been meditating daily for almost a year, dutifully checking it off the to-do list once I’ve sat quietly, breathing in and out.  I usually do this early in the morning, though there are times when I forget or don’t have time, and then I phone it in right before bed, fidgeting around while the meditation app plays just so I can cross it off my list.  Look, I did it.

But in ticking off the box, I’ve missed the point.  I started out really meditating for the sake of quieting my mind, but I’m now meditating for the sake of completing the task.  I know this.  I feel it all the time, how I come out of meditation feeling the same way as when I went in.

Clearly, I need to return to meditating for real, but I also really love this idea of scheduling in quiet time.  Maybe not the suggested half hour because I just don’t have that kind of time in my life right now if I also want to catch up with Josh, but more than the four minutes the teacher uses in that TED post.

Does it need to be screen-free?  The article specifically mentions over and over again that it’s the screen that’s creating this monkey-mind, but… I think about the time that I spend reading blogs.  I’m not jumping around, feeling frantic.  That’s me time.  That’s quiet time and thinking time.  I’ll admit that reading on the phone means that I’m more likely to stop reading and start playing Farm Heroes, but sometimes the judgment of screens feels like old quotes you hear about other technological advances, such as bound books or telephones.  It’s not going to ruin us any more than telegraphs ruined us.  Telegraphs didn’t ruin us… right?  Or maybe it did, but this will ruin us in the same way.

Anyway, I put a 15 minute alarm on my phone so I’ll remember to take 15 minutes to read or write or think.  Maybe sometimes read blogs, other times read books.  Whatever makes me feel quiet.

Do you schedule in quiet time or just grab it where you can find it?

I am smitten with Rafaël Rozendaal’s Look at Something site.  You can click over and play with that.  Make sure you move your mouse all over the screen.

Everything Always Everywhere is also quite good.

Once upon a time I loved Do Nothing for Two Minutes, but it’s not like their old app where the picture moved.  I’m searching for an ocean scene, a website beach equivalent of the televised burning log for Christmas.

What are your favourite sites to stare at?

I read a fascinating article about the coining of the term “stress,” and the regrets the scientist, Hans Selye, had in the misunderstanding of his work.  Through a combination of poor explanation of concepts and mistakes in translation, we now have this belief that we can avoid stress or combat stress or reduce stress.

The article states:

Meanwhile, in popular culture, stress quickly took on a negative connotation. The public’s understanding was that stress existed outside of ourselves and was to be avoided, which contradicted Selye’s position. He posited that stress was unavoidable, because it was literally a function of every adaptation to change. Even in our sleep, our heart still has to beat, we still need to breathe, our adrenal system is still responding to dreams, we’re still under stress, he told an interviewer for the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. “The opposite of stress is death,” he said.

In other words, the only way to avoid stress is to be dead.  We want stress because stress means that we’re living.  When you look at it that way, that stress is something within ourselves that we continually navigate (and that doing so is “living”), it becomes a relationship, albeit one built on “the gap between demand and capacity.”

I’ve been meaning to read Kelly McGonigal’s The Upside of Stress, and this article (which references her) nudged me to move it to the active to-read pile.  I love this idea: “Rather than bemoaning stress or avoiding it, or worse, feeling proud of having an abundance of it, perhaps the best advice now is that we ought be practicing methods for transforming it.”

I like that idea of transforming stress and using it as fuel rather than something that needs to be swept out the door like tracked in dirt.

What will you do with your stress?

“A tree falling in the forest” is a thought experiment that (almost?) everyone knows, but I had to look up the origins.  It was proposed by George Berkeley in 1710, and then repeated in various forms up to an exchange between Einstein and Bohr.  The general idea is the same: If you don’t observe something, did it happen?  If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?  You can arguing multiple sides because it’s impossible to check without observation, which makes it such a juicy idea for the brain to consider.

Maybe that’s why my brain started chewing on it when Carolyn Hax brought it up as part of her answer.

The situation: an adult child doesn’t really want to talk anymore to his/her thoughtless parents.  The person asks: “Do I just ghost my own parents? Seems no matter what I do, they’ll think I’m awful and wrong.”

Hax replies: