Getting Back to Basics

I saw an article in the New York Times today that highlighted for me the degree to which people have lost basic skills, including the skill of spending their money wisely, and of thinking their way through problems to a sensible solution. I’ll be writing about that article in more depth another day, but its lessons are relevant today. It was about a couple that decided to try to live on $1.00 a day for food. The article didn’t say whether the dollar was for both of them, or whether they each had a dollar to spend, but in a way, that doesn’t matter. If you live in America, even if you get food stamps, you have more than one dollar a day for food, so the experiment was unnecessarily extreme to start with, and highly unrealistic.

More important, the couple didn’t have the skills to manage a very basic diet, and the month they spent on it was so miserable that they were overjoyed to leave it behind. Did they learn anything from their experiment? I doubt that they learned anything that would be of value to them in the future. Making tortillas from scratch every day after work only teaches you that making tortillas is hard work.

If you’re going to change your lifestyle, there are two simple rules to follow: 1. Do it gradually. You don’t learn how to eat more cheaply (and sensibly) by plunging into a near-starvation diet. 2. Learn the necessary skills first, if you can. If you have to learn them as you go along, that’s the best possible argument for going slow. Learn one skill and put it into practice before going on to the next. Learning and using new skills is supposed to improve your life, not make it worse. If it’s making you more miserable, hungry, and confused, you’re doing it wrong.

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