From 53ff84252d776671f24a3b621e2c860a370131ca Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: luxagraf Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 08:13:56 -0400 Subject: moving --- the-worst.txt | 61 +++++++++++++++++------------------------------------------ 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+), 44 deletions(-) (limited to 'the-worst.txt') diff --git a/the-worst.txt b/the-worst.txt index 4334322..20c0185 100644 --- a/the-worst.txt +++ b/the-worst.txt @@ -1,62 +1,35 @@ -We've started telling people about our plans to live full time in the blue bus. +We've postponed our departure three times now. Our original plan was to leave town in March. Then when March sailed right by and the bus wasn't done yet, and the house was in no condition to sell. So we moved things back to June. Then June came and went. Right now we're on September and this time I'm reasonably confident we'll do it. - +Some of the delays are a result of things beyond my control, notably clients that didn't pay on time (a perpetual problem for anyone who works for themselves), which meant I couldn't buy things I need to restore the bus. But there were plenty of things that were in my control. -After the eyebrows come down and the puzzled frowns flatten out, people start trying to bring up -- usually as politely as they can -- the question they really want to ask: *how can you possibly afford to travel around in an RV? Do you have a trust fund or something?* +I have a very particular vision of how the bus is going to look. I want it to be perfect. I want it to be The Best. But that old saying that perfect is the enemy of good enough turns out to be very true. I started out needing to have everything perfect, but that's cost us at least a month of time on the road. -Never mind that living in an RV is orders of magnitude cheaper than the average American mortgage (including ours). I always want to say, how can you possibly afford a $400k mortgage? Never mind that though, no one really cares how we can afford to travel, what they're really asking is* how come I can't afford to do this too?* +I'm about done with perfect. I just want to go. -The answer is the same though. No, there are no trust funds here. We're not even wealthy by American standards. It just so happens that if you get rid of your debts and life doesn't actually cost all that much. - -But if you really want to travel full time you need the part that no one wants to hear: you need to be okay with existing outside your comfort zone. - -We're able to do this because we've combined a few traits and made some sacrifices. The bus is 26ft long. We don't have a large home with room for tons of stuff. I guess we just have a certain sense of not needing much, not being afraid to get outside our comfortable zone, learning to improvise with what you have rather than buying something new and saving most of what you make. - -I am also a big believer in the concept of [The Worst](https://moxie.org/blog/the-worst/), which makes it much easier to not worry about stuff. I don't know that we qualify as minimalists, but once you stop needing stuff, particularly The Best stuff, a lot of self-imposed constraints disappear. To understand the rest of what I'm going to say you need to follow that link and read it. Here's a brief quote to illustrate the difference between The Best and The Worst: +I've been thinking about an old post on Moxie Marlinspike's blog about something he calls "[The Worst](https://moxie.org/blog/the-worst/)". To understand the rest of what I'm going to say you need to follow that link and read it, but here's a brief quote to illustrate the difference between The Best and The Worst: >The basic premise of the worst is that both ideas and material possessions should be tools that serve us, rather than things we live in service to. When that relationship with material possessions is inverted, such that we end up living in service to them, the result is consumerism. When that relationship with ideas is inverted, the result is ideology or religion. -When people ask how we can afford to travel my first thought is usually pretty simple: we can afford to travel because we don't spend all our money on stuff. Perhaps just as important, we don't wait until everything is perfect to go. Nothing will ever be perfect, go when it's good enough. - -As a kind of example of how the philosophy of The Worst works I thought I'd deconstruct a couple of product reviews I wrote for Wired a few years back. One was about knives and one about knife sharpeners. Coincidentally, Marlinspike's article is based on forks. Kitchens are apparently a common source of overspending. In my case this is partly written out of guilt. Despite the best efforts of my editors, both of the reviews have been bothering me for years now precisely because they're about The Best, rather than The Worst. What's been bothering me all these years is that I had the incredible privilege of testing all this cool stuff to tell you about and I didn't come out and just say all this stuff is pretty cool, but **you don't need it**. Or at least I don't think you do, you can decide for yourself. But since I wrote those reviews, here's a counter-review of sorts in the spirit of The Worst. - -The internet loves its tips and tricks, so here's the luxagraf guide to outfitting your kitchen for less than $50, which is $150 less than the budget assumed in the Wired pieces. Yes, the budget in the Wired pieces I wrote is $100 for a knife and another $100 for a sharpener. That's probably not even that much money to Wired's audience, but to me spending that much on two tools is madness. - -That's way more than enough to outfit an entire kitchen. How? Glad you asked. - -First go to your local thrift store and find a cheap 6 or 8 inch chef knife. Do not under any circumstances spend more than $10. - - - -Now that you have a knife go ahead and drop $10 on the cheapest sharpener you can find. Now follow the directions that came with your cheapo knife sharpener. Congrats, you're all set for knives for the rest of your life. Trust me on this, I have had my $20 Ikea 8 inch chef blade for over 20 years now and it is still razor sharp. I minced garlic with it tonight. And yeah, I overspent. I was young, didn't know better. The point is you do not need some artisanal handcrafted Japanese purple steel bullshit knife just to slice a tomato. Your piece of shit knife is now sharp and will get the job done. - -Now we're going to go high dollar. Take another $30 to your local thrift store and pick up a couple cast iron skillets. Brands don't matter, just avoid rust (Lodge brand are the most common where I live). Buy one 8 inch cast iron skillet and one 10 inch. Follow these directions to season your new skillets. Also grab some mixing bowls, stainless steel if you can find them. Ceramic and glass are also fine. I suggest you get as many 2-4 Qt mixing bowls as you can, but don't spend more than $30 for all this stuff. +I'm not cutting corners on the bus. I still plan to adhere to my original vision. To me The Worst doesn't mean half-ass, it means being okay with incomplete. I've started to incorporate that idea of having the bus be in service to us rather than me in service to it more. We're ready to go and the bus isn't done. And that's okay. We'll figure out the rest as we go. That's part of the adventure. -Okay peelers, you need them but they can't really be sharpened so used is a no go[^1]. Buy the cheapest you can find new. Don't spend more than $10 for a 3-5 pack (Asian markets are a good source for cheap peelers). +Currently there's no floor, no water tank, no propane, no solar power, and all the seats still need to be recovered. Of those though only two will likely get done before we leave. We'll recover the seats and we'll put in a floor. Everything else can be done as we go. -Okay so we've spent around $50 and we have a knife, a sharpener, 2 skillets, 3-8 mixing bowls and some peelers. We still have about $150 bucks left. You could go back to the thrift store and get a nice enameled cast iron braising pot with part of it (no more than $20). But I suggest you put the money in a savings account, head to the library and check out these books. Seriously, **do not buy them**, check them out from the library. After you've read them, practiced their recipes and find yourself wanting to refer back to them then consider buying them. Used of course. +Everything has costs. In this case it's money and time. If you have to have a water tank before you leave it's going to cost you money, which in turn is going to cost you time. Or you could grab a $5 water color from Home Depot and make do until you can get a tank. In some case not only does embracing "good enough for now" get you on the road faster, it can also save you money. -For the basics: +A lot of the expense of a water tank is the shipping. The tank we want is only about $400, but it costs another $250 to ship it to us. If you're willing to hit the road without a water tank you can drive to the water tank production facility and pick it up yourself. This is also true of awnings, windows and paint jobs, all of which we long ago decided we'd do as we go. -* La Technique by Jacques Pépin -* Mastering The Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck (Knopf, 1961) -* The Frugal Gourmet by Jeff Smith -* The Joy of Cooking (Scribner, various editions 1931-2006) +Because what I've been forced to confront is that if you have to have everything perfect you're never going to go. -Because they are awesome: +And deep down I suspect that my need for perfect is a kind of excuse to not go. A way of avoiding all the fear that comes with leaving. Fear that if it's not perfect it won't work. Fear that something will go wrong. Whatever. Something will go wrong anyway. And you what? A lot of times its the things that go wrong that turn out to be the most fun. Maybe not at the time, but later. -* Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan (Knopf, 1992) -* The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution by Alice Waters (Clarkson Potter, 2007) -* Invitation to Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey (Knopf, 1973) -* The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook -* The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden (Knopf; Revised edition, 2000) +It's impossible to overcome that fear of discomfort. It's natural. You can't "get past it", you have to learn to live with it. At this point in the evolution of our culture I think those of us in the privileged position of being able to do this in the first place could all use a bit of discomfort. Countless people all over the world are living in situations that make our worst moments seem like the petty, insignificant discomforts they are. It helps to put things in perspective: and no matter how you frame it, we're incredibly lucky to be in the position we're in. We didn't even earn most of the privilege we have. Our comfort and possibilities are an accident of birth. -Okay, now, cook. That was the point right? Apply The Worst broadly to your life and it will mean no one is going to walk into your kitchen and go, wow, you have such nice stuff, so if you need to impress them -- and if you're human, you do want to impress them on some level -- then you need to do it with really delicious food. Because the reason you have a knife isn't because it's immaculately handcrafted, but because it's a tool that helps you make delicious food. +Even in comparison to our ancestors we have it easy. My great grandmother raised eight children in a one bedroom 800 square foot house with no air condition in Tucson AZ. My wife's mother picked cotton from the time she was a little girl. We are soft. We don't even know what discomfort is, let alone the host of horrors visited upon innocent people all over the world every day. -Now take this philosophy and apply it to the rest of your life. Spend more time in thrift stores, less time in Ikea. Spend more time at the library, less time staring at Amazon.com. Spend more outdoors doing things that are free less time paying someone else to curate your experiences. Keep track of the money you're *not* spending and put it in a savings account. Consider that if you save 50% of your annual spending you can take a year off work every two years. +We are incredibly thankful to be able to embrace whatever discomfort we might encounter. To chose to be uncomfortable is a luxury, perhaps the greatest luxury. I'm pretty sure my great grandmother would have taken a 4000 ft home with central air if someone had given it to her, and I suspect my mother-in-law would just as soon have not spent her childhood picking cotton. They weren't choosing discomfort, it was just life. I'm less sure that either would have exchanged the experience though. -The beauty of buying cheap stuff is that it gets out of your way. You don't have to think about it, you don't have to obsess over it and read reviews. You buy it once for a minimal amount of money and you move on to the actual point -- in this case cooking. You simplify not by buying some quality item you think will last forever, but by eliminating the need to think about anything other than the cooking. +There's a line in that piece I linked to earlier, "the best moments of my life, I never want to live again." I have feeling my great grandmother would agree. It goes on say: -I'll leave you with Marlinspike's words, which I think are good enough to live by: "**We don't simplify by getting the very best of everything, we simplify by arranging our lives so that those things don't matter one way or the other."** +> The best means waiting, planning, researching, and saving until one can acquire the perfect equipment for a given task. Partisans of the best will probably never end up accidentally riding a freight train 1000 miles in the wrong direction, or making a new life-long friend while panhandling after losing everything in Transnistria, or surreptitiously living under a desk in an office long after their internship has run out — simply because optimizing for the best probably does not leave enough room for those mistakes. Even if the most stalwart advocates of the worst would never actually recommend choosing to put oneself in those situations intentionally, they probably wouldn't give them up either. -[^1]: It probably is possible to sharpen peelers, so if you want to one-up me, figure out how to do it and buy the cheapest on you can find. Please email and let me know how I can do the same. +If you have the luxury of being able to embrace discomfort then take it. Forget perfect and just go, even if "go" is metaphorical. You'll figure it out along the way. -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2