by Ben Hewitt
These presumptions may all be a bit unfair because of course Erik had plenty to lose. Furthermore, he’d recently leapfrogged to exponentially more commodious digs with the move to Heidi’s place. It did not seem inconceivable to me that the relative opulence of his new digs (Toilet! Telephone! Internet access! Stairs, even!) might soften him over time, and that any potential slide downward to a lower standard of living—should events necessitate such a slide—could affect him in ways that observers of myopic loss aversion would recognize all too well.
But what did all this mean for myself? Was my fear of scaling back merely a textbook case of myopic loss aversion? And of course, my family complicated things. I could not make cuts in isolation; unlike Erik, who had only his own expectations to set and satisfy, my expectations and living standards were entwined with those of my wife and children. In the case of the former this was not a problem, for as I’ve previously noted, Penny was not merely an ally in the quest for cutbacks, but an instigator. Her desire to pick every last scrap of flesh off the bone of our family budget and general consumptive habits was nothing short of insatiable. I half expect to come home one day to find her ripping out the plumbing—in part because the scrap copper market is hot, and in part because indoor plumbing represents to her an untenable degree of luxury. Of course I exaggerate, but not much.
Mind you, I’m not complaining about Penny’s mindset, in part because it relieves the pressure on me to direct my path in accordance with occupational or income-based factors. But the truth is, it places me in the somewhat discomfiting position of lacking a viable excuse for not acting on my desire to achieve at least a portion of Erik’s Zen-like contentment, which I assumed was in part due to his studied avoidance of the moneyed economy. I simply couldn’t pawn off my inaction on a spouse, because she was raring to join my friend in his quest.
Of course, there were the children to think about; at 7 and 10, the boys were coming of an age whereby they were likely to notice changes in our standard of living. Might they experience myopic loss aversion if things suddenly took a turn to the south? Might this not be a more traumatic experience for them than it would be for me, a grown man with the presumed advantage of emotional maturity? I did not even broach the subject with Penny, knowing full well how stridently she’d argue that the trauma of a declining standard of living, as defined by material goods and the comfort they provided, would be more than offset by our family’s increased awareness of the natural world and the interconnectedness that was certain to evolve from embracing a more holistic abundance.
I disagreed with none of this. Yet I found it daunting to consider deeper cuts in my family’s budget, which had already been pared to what I perceived to be a noble minimum. But was it, really? Because while Erik was subsisting on somewhere around $500 each month, most months we spent five or six times that.30 Sure, there were four times as many of us, but two of them were children, with child-sized appetites. Furthermore, owing to their relatively isolated rural upbringing and our reliance on thrift stores, they possess little awareness of the manufactured toys and electronic gadgetry generally assumed to come with the territory of childhood in contemporary America. In other words, our boys are particularly cheap keepers, whose expectations for material abundance have been set lower than most of their contemporaries. Despite this, and despite my wife’s (and to a lesser extent, my own) concerted efforts, we’d created a life that demanded significant flows of cash; that there were opportunities aplenty to eliminate spending, I had little doubt. But did I want to? Not much, I had to admit.
And there was another profound misunderstanding in my understanding of Erik’s relationship to frugality, one that had been slowly percolating its way toward the foremost of my consciousness: Erik didn’t think of himself as frugal. Granted, this has been fairly obvious from the outset, if for no other reason than that he had told me so. And, in my defense, I’d picked up on it early on: In one sense, he is the poorest person I know. It may already be obvious that in another sense, he is the wealthiest, I wrote in the first chapter of this book. It wasn’t a gratuitous observation; I believed it wholeheartedly, though I could not at that point provide an accounting of his wealth. But by now I’d spent the better part of a year examining Erik’s unique version of prosperity, and I was beginning to feel more comfortable putting words to it.
In short, what I’d observed in Erik’s life was an incredibly interconnected, interdependent community network that shared freely of its resources be they intellectual, physical, or material. The most obvious example was his cabin, built on a friend’s land, largely by the labor of friends, with tools borrowed from friends. Erik had in large part usurped the moneyed economy by creating an economy of reciprocation, and he’d done so by building relationships within his community, using the human tools of trust, graciousness, compassion, and responsibility. “I know I could go to the hardware store and buy or rent the tools I need,” he told me once, when I asked about the proliferation of borrowed implements at his half-finished cabin, which, I’m keen to point out, for a time included our compound miter saw, a $600 contraption that could cut through a two-by-six approximately 1,001 times faster than Erik’s handsaw. “But I don’t have to because there’s an innate trust that I will return my friends’ tools in good condition.” He paused a moment. “I might even throw in a pound of beef or something in appreciation.”31
Maybe it was simply because he was talking about hardware stores, but I remembered a passage I’d read recently in Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, which explores both gifts and monetary exchange. It is a fascinating book and should be considered essential reading for anyone interested in how money and the commodification of essential (and nonessential) goods and services have eroded our relationships to fellow humans and to nature. Here is the passage: “It is the cardinal difference between gift exchange and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection. I go into a hardware store, pay the man for a hacksaw blade and walk out. I may never see him again. The disconnectedness is, in fact, a virtue of the commodity mode. We don’t want to be bothered.32 If the clerk always wants to chat about the family, I’ll shop elsewhere. I just want a hacksaw blade.”
There are a couple of things I find fascinating about this passage. The first is that Hyde is comparing gift exchange to commodity exchange and then, in a later passage, actually defining that difference. A commodity, he explains, is that which is valued via a comparison to another item. This value allows the product to enter into the market, to be traded and ultimately consumed by whoever can scrape together enough dough to pay for it. Take oil, for instance, which is pretty much the ultimate commodity. Everybody needs it, and because one barrel of oil is essentially indistinguishable from another, they can be traded across great distances, without careful inspection.
In a sense, oil only has value once it has entered a market in which that value can be defined by a metric that is universally (or nearly universally) acknowledged, accepted, and understood. It is not that oil is not worth anything without a price tag attached to it; obviously, it still embodies the same incredible density of energy and expression of human labor whether or not it is actually priced. But it is the price that allows it to be assigned a standardized value, and it is the value that allows it to be brought under the umbrella of the commodity market.
A gift, says Hyde, is very different: It does not have value; it has worth. A gift is not homogenous, and its worth is based on innumerable factors, many of which are too personal to ever translate into value. Therefore, a gift cannot be assigned a price, or at least, it cannot be priced to a standard that is universally understood and accepted. It is true that one might assign a value to the use of a compound miter saw; one could simply call a tool rental business and inquire as to how much it would cost to rent such a saw for a specified period. There: value. In dollars and cents.
But th
e gifting of the saw’s use33 has worth, precisely because, in opting for this exchange between us, Erik and we choose to, in the words of Hyde, be bothered. We choose to assume all the responsibility and risk that money abolishes, and therefore we create the possibility of a “feeling-bond” that cannot be sold into the commodity market for a particular value. Now, it could rightly be said that this feeling-bond might not be of the warm and fuzzy sort. For instance, what if Erik had left our saw out in the rain or dropped it from a great height? What if we had neglected to tell him how the safety guard tends to get hung up, rendering it ineffective, and he had inadvertently removed a digit or two with its toothy blade?34 The term “feeling-bond” has a noble ring to it, but of course feelings can be hurt or hard; of course bonds can be broken as well as formed. We should not pretend that these things cannot happen, and we should not be too quick to dismiss the virtue of the commodity economy that Hyde mentions: disconnectedness. And with disconnectedness comes the abjuration of risk.
None of this happened, and so our feeling-bond with Erik, already strong, was strengthened a little more. We were reminded of his responsibility and general conscientiousness when he returned the saw in perfect working order on the agreed-upon date. He was reminded of our generosity and general desire to help when we offered the saw in the first place. If, postloan, he felt some small obligation to us, that sense of indebtedness only strengthened the bond further, and provided yet another opportunity to build upon it.
This arrangement was not unfamiliar to me; indeed, Penny and I had leaned heavily on trust and generosity during the building of our house, although never so heavily or completely as Erik. But for the first time, looking back, I began to reconsider these earlier exchanges, which had done nothing less than put a roof over our heads, in the context of currency. Was it possible that these exchanges and by extension the relationships that enabled them were themselves a form of money? How different were these exchanges, really, for not requiring physical currency to facilitate them? If, per my contention, money is not so much a thing as it is a web of arrangements and unspoken agreements, could Erik’s informal exchanges with friends and community be thought of as monetized? After all, he’d gotten what he needed, as he would have if he’d paid in dollars. What did he give up? This seemed harder to define, but there was little doubt in my mind that he gave up something, that some small piece of obligation was accrued and that this obligation was, in a sense, credit extended. It was a debt he owed to the owner of the tools, who believed and trusted that Erik was a good credit risk.
When I mentioned this theory to Erik, somewhat to my surprise, he agreed. “In a sense, money is just a representation of trust that if I give you something, you’ll give me something back. Sometimes, I think it’s trust we’re really after, and denominating it in dollars actually trivializes the exchange.” We were in his kitchen, noshing on a very nice goat cheese he’d liberated from the dumpster of an artisanal cheese–making outfit,35 eating it by the heaping spoonful straight from its wrapper.
Erik’s belief that trust is a viable form of currency isn’t as radical as one might first assume. Obviously, trust is at the core of our contemporary money system, as it must be with any currency, fiat or otherwise. If there is no confidence in the system, there is no confidence in the currency’s value, and the whole thing falls apart. Maintaining trust in currency is a crucial aspect of any successful government, if for no other reason than self-preservation, and any government that loses the public’s faith in its currency tends to have a decidedly hard time holding on to power. To suggest that the United States’ current monetary system is suffering through a crisis of faith isn’t exactly going out on a limb, although we have not yet experienced a wholesale abandonment of trust. Nonetheless, it has become increasingly clear that policies and interventions relating to our nation’s financial and monetary systems do not benefit us all equally, and it’s no surprise that, for those of us consigned to the sour end of the deal, our confidence is waning.
Perhaps the larger issue, however, is the commodity nature of money. A dollar is a dollar is a dollar; they are indistinguishable from one another only via careful examination of the green serial numbers printed on each bill. But seriously, have you ever looked at those numbers? Of course, credit only extends the characteristic of anonymity, and it’s not unreasonable to postulate that the very nature of modern money—its numbing sameness—also both trivializes and commodifies the relationships that form around its exchange. If the value of everything is reduced to monetary units, and if the monetary units used to purchase these items are merely reproduced symbols of a currency that is already fraught with mistrust, is it any wonder that every aspect of the exchanges conducted with these units are imbued with the same hollow sense of value and homogeneity?36
In more concrete terms, Erik could have purchased his tools from a hardware store and his building supplies from a lumberyard. He could have hired a contractor to build his cabin, and a plumber to . . . oh, wait: There wasn’t any plumbing. Still, each of these acts would have hinged on the exchange of money; payment would be made, the goods exchanged, and in the end the resulting relationships of these transactions, by and large, extinguished. Because what money ultimately does is provide a convenient mechanism through which to absolve debt in a very immediate and impersonal way. The dollar I pay to you is exactly the same as the dollar you pay to another; heck it might even be the same dollar. This arrangement works only because the value of these dollars is indifferent to—and unaffected by—our personal differences and sense of what something is worth.
We often think of the word “debt” as being strictly financial in nature, but like so many of the words whose definition has been co-opted by the financial realm, that money-based association provides an overly simplistic and incomplete view of things, because, of course, debt can and does arise from human relationships. It can and does exist outside the boundaries of money. When we speak of “owing” favors, we use a vernacular that acknowledges either a debt of service or simple gratitude. In other words, a debt can be as personal or impersonal as the currency we use to make good on it. The impersonality of the dollar (to say nothing of credit) and the efficient, no-strings-attached nature with which it absolves debt are decidedly convenient, and perhaps this is for the good. But when we utilize money, we by default outsource a degree of interpersonal trust and value, instead relying on the homogenized trust and value inherent in the dollar.
Indeed, at every step of Erik’s construction process, I saw how mutual trust, combined with no small amount of toil, had built his home. The owner of the property on which he’d built trusted that he would treat the land with respect; he trusted that she wouldn’t send him packing or sell the land out from underneath him. Those who loaned him tools trusted that he would return them in good working order on an agreed-upon date. What labor was not the product of his own sweat had been given freely and without a specific expectation of reciprocity. But even this indicated the presence of trust, for there was confidence that Erik would not exploit this generosity and that, if called upon, he in turn would extend it to others in need. These might or might not be the specific individuals who had helped him nail down his siding or plaster his walls; rather, it was as if Erik simply served as the vessel of this trust and giving. He would hold it like a currency, as if he were merely its temporary vessel, to be dispensed into the community as needs dictated.
To the extent possible, Erik gleaned the constituent materials of his cabin: clay from the stream bank; sheep’s wool from his friend Bradski; cow manure from my family’s small farm.37 Like the clay, the stones had been hauled from the most-generous stream. Lumber had been purchased from a small, family-run sawmill up the road, and the windows—all used—from a variety of sources.
From these arrangements, numerous benefits could blossom. Of course, one was the manner in which they allowed him—and those with whom he did “commerce”—to reduce their dependence on money and all the attendant iss
ues of how to earn and manage it. Less obvious was the depth of the connections he’d forged with the wide circle of friends and acquaintances that made up his “economy.” In the absence of money’s depersonalizing element, they were both forced and allowed to forge more meaningful connections based on trust and mutual generosity. They were not merely parties to a transaction, but members of an interconnected community that depended on one another in ways that are largely absent from 21st–century first world society.
“To give and receive, to owe and be owed, to depend on others and be depended upon—this is being fully alive. To neither give nor receive, but to pay for everything; to never depend on anyone, but to be financially independent; to not be bound to a community or place, but to be mobile . . . such is the illusory paradise of the discrete and separate self.” These are the words of Charles Eisenstein in his groundbreaking book Sacred Economics. The “discrete and separate self” Eisenstein speaks of is the contemporary illusion of autonomy from each other and from nature. Eisenstein argues that this disconnect is due in large part to the use of money as an exchange mechanism. When we settle our debts via monetary exchanges, we extinguish any lingering obligation. True, it may at times feel inconvenient or even uncomfortable to feel indebted to someone, to “owe them a favor.” But this discomfort arises only from the illusory wealth of money, which has largely absolved us of the need to rely on others and, likewise, to have them rely on us.
