Buying and making

Those who write and speak about minimalism often encourage us to choose experiences rather than things. It sounds like a lofty choice — more elevated and less materialistic — but it's important at the same time to acknowledge that experiences can be very expensive. Those who recommend that choice often suggest spending money on travel or eating out with friends, maybe concerts or theatre; whatever it is they mean by experiences. But look, meals out usually amount to more than double the cost of eating at home, and concert tickets are ever so expensive and you have to pay to get there as well as for admittance. And with travelling — as well as the fuel or train ticket (depending how you go) you have to pay for the Air B&B or hotel, and for the food while you're away. 

In every case there are budget options, of course. For instance, we (people in our family) often go down to the bandstand at the park when Alice is playing her French horn in a summer concert, or Rosie is playing her trombone, and those concerts are free — though you do have to factor in that the musical instruments cost thousands of pounds each in the first place, and the musician had to save for them for years.

Experiences lead to friendships of course — you meet people when you go out — and that can in turn lead to budget option experiences; friends round for a cup of tea, or going for a walk with someone. But even the cheapest kind of experiences I know of — going to church and joining a choir — aren't actually free; there's always a subscription and a collection and other fundraisers of some kind.

So from the point of view of minimalism, experiences accrue no clutter unlike purchasing items, but sometimes people buy things because it's cheaper than the experiences and it's miserable never being able to do or have anything because you're a minimalist but you're too poor to join in with things or travel.

I find the YouTube videos made by young Japanese people illuminating. They typically live alone, and their dwellings are very small — especially the ones who live in Tokyo — and they have to either choose minimalism and make necessity into an art form, a way of life, or live in a mountain of clutter because there's nowhere to put anything. Those who have the smallest apartments, like this young man —

— have to eat out because there's no room to accumulate cookware.

It's something of a balancing act, and some of it is about life choices but some is a matter of necessity.

And then, as well as the choice between objects and experiences, there's a choice between buying and making. 

Again, this depends on other factors — what skills you have and how much money. You can grow a garden instead of buying cut flowers for your home, but you need enough money to get a dwelling with a garden in the first place (and maybe you save up towards that by making it a priority and not buying things like cut flowers). You can make cakes and quiches and bread instead of buying ready-made — but you need time and skill and energy to do that, which you might not have if you needed to get up at six to walk to the train station to get to work and you won't be home until seven that evening, and your weekends are spent gigging at a theatre to make some extra money for house repairs. There are often practical reasons for the choices people make.

Having said all that, though, espousing minimalism and choosing experiences over things and making instead of buying are all very life-enriching.

In our family, we do some and some.

For instance, on a Friday, because Tony and I have a car, I pick up Alice and Hebe (who don't have a car) and take them to two different edge-of-town shops to buy their groceries. The shops are too far to walk and carry groceries home, and are on opposite edges of our sprawling seaside town, and the benighted re-jigging of the buses means to get to even one of those shops would take them over an hour on the bus, and they'd have to change buses which would mean buying two tickets each way — so £12 and two hours for each person. It takes ten minutes max to drive to that shop from their place in our car. 

So that makes a happy experience out of the necessity of buying groceries, and means only one of the two households needs to run a car.

And if someone has a birthday we often get together in one of the family households for afternoon tea; and at least some of the goodies we eat might have been home-made. 

The birthday person is always given lovely presents, and again some of those will have been bought, and some home made. Because none of us has much money, birthdays are a good time to give something the person actually needs. Recently when one of us had a birthday, I gave her some Weleda deodorant spray and Gutology hydroxyaptite toothpaste and a dark grey t-shirt for work, because she asked for those things. The toothpaste costs a lot more than the fluoride sort from the chemist, and the deodorant is more than the cheap ones with aluminium in, so a birthday is a good chance to have these superior products. It's not exactly a fun present, is it, but helpful.

But Alice and Hebe (in addition to something purchased) gave their sister something they had made, and been working on for a while.

They made her a tote bag with a unicorn embroidered on — they drew the unicorn as well as embroidering it and making the bag.

Here's the unicorn stretched on the embroidery frame in process.

Now, the thing is (going back to considering minimalist principles), if a person is going to make rather than buy, and play at a concert we can all go to, and have homemade cake for a party, that does imply buying and housing embroidery threads and fabric and a frame, musical instruments and scores and a music bag and stand, and the instruments themselves, and the cookware and serving plates etc. Minimalism would to some extent throw you back onto purchasing rather than making, even if you have experiences rather than things.

So there's always a choice to be made and a balance to achieve, and then you have to consider what skills you have or want to develop as well as what you can afford in terms of money, time and energy.

But certainly making things and sharing in experiences generates and increases joy. It's also empowering. I was home-educating my children at the time my first novel was published. Back in those days, the publisher would send the author a sample cover to look at before the book came out. I remember saying nothing about it but taking that book cover and wrapping it round a book we already had and putting it on the book shelf — I wanted my children to get the idea that the books on our shelves could be written by us, just as the music at the concert we went to would be played by us, and at church the services would be led and and the organ played and the sermons preached by us, and in due course when they went to school, the teachers would be their parents and grandparents. The food they ate would be grown and cooked by their family, and at least some of the clothes they wore and furniture they used and the pictures on the walls would all have been made by people they knew and loved. This meant that without any lectures or coercion they would naturally grow into people who shape and create their own lives. The Montessori principle, "I can do it myself."

This is very helpful insulation against adversity. You don't have to wait for someone else to give you a job or a certificate or tell you you're good enough. You aren't subject to someone else's opinion. You just get started, you have the confidence. If you know what weeds to eat and what are the most resilient plants to grow and how to propagate them, you're less vulnerable to food shortages — even more if you can hunt and fish which sadly isn't part of our skill repertoire; though I can certainly milk a cow and a goat (two different techniques).

I remember when my children were small, concealing from them that I couldn't sight-read music as their father could. I mean, I could read music up to a point, but not like he could. But I didn't want them to know — I wanted them to grow up assuming everyone could read music, because I knew that if they thought that then they'd easily read music themselves. The best way for children to learn anything is to grow up in a family where everyone else does it, because confidence, assuming that everyone does this, is half the battle.

When our Grace went to school, she came back from her first day rather surprised. It turned out that she'd assumed that she (at the grand old age of four years old) would be going there to teach — because that's what all the family did. It hadn't occurred to her that she'd be one of the pupils. She thought this was how it began.