Things that make me feel rich

Read this if you're not going on summer vacation in Europe

Most of my camera roll is pictures of vegetables I grew.

We bought a new car recently. It was a major downgrade from our old one, which we gave back at the end of our agreement term. The “new” one is a 2012 Ford Focus station wagon in a color we thought was red, but turned out to be a lot closer to orange when we saw it in person.

It has great AC and you can connect your phone via bluetooth, but that’s about it as modern tech goes. The parking break is one of those levers that makes a mechanical clicking sound when you engage it — very nineties chic.

The car switch was part of a broader effort to de-leverage our lifestyle. As I wrote earlier this year, after two redundancies in twelve months, a truly inspired career pivot to carpentry by my husband, and AI’s ongoing hoovering up of the economy (and writing work), we are now an exclusively self-employed household.

Right now, we have lots of projects and ideas, our marriage feels way more equitable than it did when I was the only one with a flexible schedule, and we try not to work too hard (or at all) on Fridays. But what we do not have is a guaranteed paycheck that arrives on the same day every month. So we’re looking for ways to lower our fixed monthly costs, and getting rid of a monthly car payment seemed like a great idea.

Of course, I’ve been through belt-tightening, budget-conscious times before, as everyone has. But this one feels a little different — it doesn’t feel like a temporary measure. It feels like a new way of orienting to the world, a shift in my attitude towards the very ideas of success and wealth accumulation. It feels like giving up on the expectation that surely everything is just going to get better — from the state of the world to the state of our finances — and finding a way to build a rich, interesting life anyway.

It’s delicate to write about money in this way, because many people are struggling to cover the basics each month. This is a failure of policy, yes, but also a symptom of an extractive economic system that is reaching an upper limit. (The Daily’s account of why grocery prices are so astoundingly high was sobering in that respect.) We are fortunate that, thanks in part to this de-leveraging, we’re not struggling to pay our bills each month. But beyond that, I find myself searching for a different kind of personal finance advice. One that doesn’t assume I want to earn (and spend) ever more money until I stop working. One that asks: What if I accepted that keeping all this, right here, is enough? What then?

That’s what I meant earlier this year when I wrote about decoupling your lifestyle from your income, so you don’t set yourself up to endlessly strive. (I think you can do that in salaried work too, by the way). Currently, we have many different people who give us money: individual clients, corporate clients, not to mention the readers of this newsletter! But none of them give us enough money to tell us what to do with our lives day-to-day. It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally realized this is a luxury that I’m unwilling to give up.

What all of this requires is a new posture, a new way of moving through the world. It’s one I’ve been developing for years, but I’ll admit it’s only recently that I’ve stopped secretly hoping that one day, magically, I will get rich. Every day I still have to reckon with a consumer culture obsessed with growth, improvement, and progress. I still constantly wonder how everyone is affording so many nice things all the time. I still have to make plans with friends who don’t really get it when you say “we’d love to see you, but we’d rather not go somewhere that has a £50 family entry fee before you even buy coffee or ice cream.”

However — and this is the elegant part — this posture is way more in line with the future that our planet is begging us to have: less carbon, less cars, less trips, less mindless crap to distract us from what actually makes life feel good. Which is probably why driving an orange 2012 Ford Focus in 2026 doesn’t really feel sad or depressing to me. It actually feels pretty damn good.

In my wonderful conversation with Sarah Wilson earlier this month (please watch it!) she described asking the question: How can I be useless to capitalism today? That’s precisely the kind of wealth I’m interested in accumulating. Creating a life with more moments that sit outside the framework of extractive capitalism, even if I can’t escape it completely.

Living beautifully in collapse with Sarah Wilson

Money is essential for meeting our basic needs of security, health, and nourishment, but it actually does a pretty bad job of delivering us the connection and belonging we crave beyond that. In fact, it can very often work against it. So here’s a recent list of things that make me feel rich without costing much money at all. I’d love to hear some of yours in the comments section below.

Eating the food I grew

I wrote about my allotment project last summer, and in my second season on the plot, things are ticking along. I’ve had less time to be nervous about messing it all up this year, and my main goal has been to preserve more of the food I’m growing.

We bought a £20 chest freezer off of Facebook Marketplace (true suburban luxury!) where I’m stashing bags of pre-cut/washed kale and rainbow chard, pasta sauce, and whatever else I can figure out how freeze for the autumn and winter. Calorically speaking, this isn’t much. But if you zoom out, a lot is happening.

Growing (even some) of your own food is a systems-level change. It’s not just about the calories you add into your family’s diet. It’s about the produce you give to friends and the trades you make with your neighbors. It’s about the pollinators, microbes, and worms you work in collaboration with. It’s the time you spend not shopping, scrolling, comparing — and the “waste” you divert into rich, nourishing compost. It’s the frustration, the friction, the discomfort you learn to tolerate. The awareness you build of the seasons, the land, and your place in it. The food is just the end-product.

In a hyper-individualized world, I think learning to see yourself as part of a system is a radical and deeply reassuring act. Which is why going home with a basket of vegetables I grew makes me feel richer than pretty much anything else.

Rainbow chard is gorgeous, isn’t it?

Getting strong

At the beginning of the year, I was thinking about hiring a personal trainer. I had lingering hip pain since pregnancy, and the consensus was that the entire left side of my body was weak and out of whack. I thought perhaps paying money to someone would make me more consistent about the haphazard strength training I was already doing.

But then my frugal brain said ‘no, we do not have the money for that.’ Instead, I started going to the strength classes at my local no-frills gym. The classes are filled with a rag tag-bunch: retired guys who have a lot of opinions, tired moms with not a minute to spare, and post-menopausal women who I’m sure are stronger than all of us combined.

What I love so much about it is that every single time, despite the odd discordance of the group, everyone helps everyone else set up and tidy up the weights and equipment. The retired guys often start setting up my spot before I can even put my phone and keys down. An unlikely act of care!

And the payoff to my quality of life has been huge: being able to carry my four year old up a hill without paying for it in back pain later is a triumph. Lugging five loads of wood chips or manure in a wheelbarrow to my allotment plot makes me feel like a badass. Sleeping on my left side again without hip pain feels like freedom. Getting stronger has made me feel capable, powerful, and grateful for my day-to-day existence in a way that money can’t buy. The price was moderate consistency (and a £34 a month gym membership.)

Not going anywhere

A few months ago, someone asked me if I was going to book a foreign holiday after I met my book deadline. I told them no, we have a mortgage and childcare and, pointedly, did I mention my husband lost his job for the second time in a year? She countered: What about a cheap holiday? I’m not sure what financial reality she lives in, but where I live, there is no longer such a thing as a cheap foreign holiday anymore.

In my socioeconomic milieu, going on a summer holiday in the UK is kind of a thing. And to give you an indication of my privilege: this is the first summer in about 15 years of living here that I won’t be getting on a plane. Instead, we went camping in the Lake District, and we’re going again in August (this time with another family because that is a far superior way to go camping).

Look, do I want to go on holiday somewhere nice? Yes, I very much do. I had a moment of weakness in June and started looking at where we could possibly go in August, but then I thought better of it. I am ultimately way too cheap to spend minimum £3,000 on a holiday with a four year old that will almost certainly result in less sleep and rest than I could get at home.

Instead, the paddling pool is basically always out, the ice cream policy is liberal, and we eat a lot of dinners on the grass outside our house. Sometimes I wonder: we didn’t spend £3,000 to be here, and we’re not at constant risk of being too overstimulated to have a nice time. Maybe, for now, this is kind of enough?

Reading in the sun

If there is a single metric by which I want to measure the success of my life, it is this: How much time per week to I get to spend reading a book in the sun. This, honestly, is all I want out of life. It’s when I feel most calm and at ease. You could take me on the most high-end holiday in the world, and I’d simply ask: So when do I get to read in the sun with a glass of rosé? (I’ll admit that I am a snob about the kind of rosé I drink, both at home and abroad.) Granted, it’s only available to me some months of the year, but I’ve noticed how I’ve created a life where I there is not a lot stopping me from doing this most days of the week — I can even consider it “work” in some loosely-defined way. I don’t really think I can ask for much more than that.

The rich husband question

I was at an outdoor sauna on an urban farm with my friend Marina when she visited recently, and she asked me: If you could do anything in the world without worrying about money — basically if you had a rich husband funding your whole life — what would you do? I thought for a moment and, somewhat surprisingly, told her: Pretty much exactly what I’m doing.

Of course, day-to-day, my life is filled with things I don’t want to do. But if I removed all that, the work I do primarily to earn money, the strife and inconvenience and drudgery, what on earth would I have to write about? When I really think about it, a rich husband would probably be pretty terrible for the state of my copy.

What I keep coming back to is this: The goal, for me, is not the book deal or the follower count or the bestselling newsletter or earning loads of money from the things I make. It’s certainly not to have a bigger and bigger house with nicer and nicer cars — all of which really just creates ever more bullshit to deal with, doesn’t it?

The goal is to live a fully embodied creative life. One where I get to spend enough time away from a laptop to feel like I am in relationship with the world around me. That I am engaged in a feedback loop of curiosity and creation. A life where I keep a record of my days, my failures, my epiphanies with the things I create, the ripples (both small and big) they form, and the conversations they spur. That’s the goal. It’s a feeling, a way of being, not an outcome. None of it requires a great deal of money. Which is why, by that metric, I feel wealthy beyond measure.

My plot neighbor picked these for my son, which is about as sweet as it gets.

An August discount

I keep everything I write in this newsletter free to read — it just feels better for me that way. But I also happily receive the support of paying subscribers who give me the luxury of time to write it. In fact, being paid any amount of money to write this thing is one of the great pleasures of my life.

Every August, I run a discount: 50% off an annual subscription. Annual subscriptions are the cheapest way to support my work, and for the next four or five weeks, it’s just $15 (or the equivalent in your currency). I don’t make promises about how often I publish, and you rarely get anything extra in return — except for my deep gratitude in this funny little energetic exchange. Thank you for reading. 🍓