The premise of Broke is Beautiful is that the cash strapped life is the creative life. Further support for this concept comes from the blog 99% which has an article Is Consumerism Killing Our Creativity. The article argues that we're using up our creative impulses in the pursuit of bargains and stuff.
The consumerist search capitalizes on the same “seeking” part of the brain that fuels the creative rush. Of course, while consumerism can serve as an addictive substitute for the stimulation of creative activity, it offers nowhere near the same reward in the long term. ...No external thing can prompt creativity, and there’s no substitute for just getting down to doing the work. In fact, it’s been proven that hardship – being deprived of things – stimulates creativity more than being well-off. A recent Newsweek article on America's declining creativity reported:
“Highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.”
Studies show that people who feel financially strapped are much less socially engaged than those who feel more secure. Adjusting for income and education, the most financially stressed attend two-thirds fewer meetings of clubs and organizations than the least economically anxious. The broke not only go to movies and stuff that costs money less frequently but they also spend less time on things that don’t cost a cent like having friends over, going to visit friends, attending church, volunteering and participating in politics. The only thing financial stress seems to make us do more of is watch TV. Such social isolation can easily lead to clinical depression, which further isolates, and makes it harder to engage in the kind of productive, creative thought that can lead to novel solutions to your problems.
Have you had this situation? A friend says "Can I take you to lunch?" "Take you" implies he's paying, but you're not sure, and you have $3.23 in your bank account. Rather than risk an embarrassing conversation or an even more embarrassing moment when the separate check is placed in front of you, you find an excuse not to go.
Your neighbor has invited you over for dinner two times. You'd like to invite the neighbor to your place, but you only have ramen and boxed macaroni and cheese. The next time the friend invites you, sensing the growing disparity in the feeding-to-fed ratio you make up an excuse not to go.
Or this one-- you've been asked to be part of a committee at your church. The idea of "giving back" appeals to you tremendously, but on the day the first meeting is scheduled your gas tank is on fumes and you don't think you can make it to the church and to work the next day, so you don't go and don't join the committee.
I'm interested to hear your strategies for avoiding social isolation when broke. Post in the comments.
I love We Feel Fine. If you are not familiar with it, it is a site that scans the internet-- mostly personal blogs-- and pulls out "I feel" and "I am feeling" statements. The feelings float around as colored balls, click on one, and experience a random emotion from a person somewhere in the world. (Try it and you'll understand what I am talking about.)
Some of the thoughts are combined with images, and here is one I discovered this evening:
I have just learned of the organization Modest Needs. Their mission:
Modest Needs makes Self-Sufficiency Grants by remitting payment to a creditor for an expense on behalf of an otherwise self-sufficient individual or family for a relatively small, emergency expense which the individual or family could not have anticipated or prepared for.
In making a Self-Sufficiency Grant, our goal is to prevent an otherwise self-sufficient individual or family from entering the cycle of poverty as a result of the financial burden posed by a relatively small emergency expense.
For example, we might make a Self-Sufficiency Grant to cover the cost of an emergency auto repair that must be made if an individual is to continue working.
If an unexpected expense might derail your budget for months or years, Modest Needs might be just the resource you need.
Tip number two was "Skip the Starbucks and eat more mangoes. A healthy diet that includes lots of fruits, vegetables and Omega 3s will boost your energy and increase alertness."
This suggestion made me wonder: Why do all of the people who write articles on saving money assume "broke" people are sitting around sipping Starbucks?
Seriously! If I had a dime for every article on saving money, supposedly addressed to "broke" people, that mentioned skipping Starbucks I could afford to go to Starbucks!
Do they really think America is cash strapped because we're all sitting around with our Venti lattes saying, "I wonder where my money is going?"
Clearly the people who write articles on being "frugal" have a different "level of broke" than I have.
Anyway, if you're in the Los Angeles area and you want to feel sexy when you're broke, check out 365CheapDates.com for suggestions on fun, romantic things to do with a partner that cost little or nothing. If you know of any other great "cheap date" resources, please send your suggestions, but don't say to "lay off the Starbucks" or I may have to deck you!
Robert Fulghum, in his book, Everything I Need to know I learned in Kindergarten, famously pointed out the first thing we learned as children:
"Hold hands and stick together."
Have you heard of "common security clubs?" Here's how Yes! Magazine describes them:
Common security clubs are typically founded by people concerned about their economic security. These small groups of 10-25 adults are consciously breaking down the isolation and fear triggered by the 2008 economic meltdown. Clubs have strengthened communities and enabled participants to learn together, engage in mutual aid, and take social action.
For most of human history artistic production consisted of telling stories or dancing or singing songs within a community, around the fire, at church gatherings. Anyone who wished to participate could, and stories evolved in the telling, music gained verses as it moved from community to community. Tales took on a collective richness and who they "belonged to" and exactly who had "created" them was fluid and a bit vague.
As I wrote in Broke is Beautiful:
These days we’ve become accustomed to the idea that entertainment is something you consume, not something you make. We buy records, we rent DVDs and generally leave imagination to the professionals. Much of modern life, in fact, seems to be a rebellion against daydreaming. We listen radio on the way to and from work; we switch on the TV the minute we get home. There are now even screens to entertain us in restaurants and at the gas pump, as if we would become so bored in the five minutes it takes to pump gas that we would just give up and go home. They should know that’s never going to happen. That’s what iPods are for.
How are we ever to find a moment for quality daydreaming with the CNN airport network and the CNN grocery store check-out line network and CNN monitors at the post office? Recent surveys show that children everywhere now spend up to 80 percent of their free time outside of school watching television. Not surprisingly kids who are heavy TV viewers are less imaginative than children who watch only one hour a day. We no longer value our own fantasies; we pay other people to show us theirs.
I came across another example of this in a fascinating article in The New Republic, Ellen Handler Spitz reviews a new collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales called "The Grimm Reader." She points out that the movement from stories as oral tradition to written form made them static.
Fairy tales were originally recited aloud, and that format gave the listeners considerable power. They were able to exercise a direct and partially controlling effect on each recounting. If attention waned, stories were modified. They could be spiced, embellished, or curtailed. But contemporary American adults rarely tell fairy tales to children anymore. We read, slavishly adhering to a text. Such reliance denotes a diminished narrative inventiveness among us, even a dereliction in regards to the sacred task of passing on our cultural heritage.
We have internalized the idea that art is a product created by talented professionals, and forgotten about the community tradition in art so thoroughly that we think of Internet media that allow broad amateur participation and two way and collective communication as new and novel.
Brand loyalty fills the same role and religious symbolism according to an article in Fast Company:
Or so goes the thinking in a new study from Duke University, which concludes: "The brand name logo on a laptop or a shirt pocket may do the same thing for some people that a pendant of a crucifix or Star of David does for others." In fact, the more religious a person is, the less brand expression appears to matter...
Similar to Duke's report, brand expert Martin Lindstrom conducted a 3 year, 7 million dollar study comparing brain scans of the religious to those with high brand loyalty. Lindstrom discovered that the scans of people loyal to Apple matched the scans of devoted Christians.
Dan Ariely of Duke University and Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School, showed that across ideological, economic and gender groups, Americans thought the richest 20% of American society controlled about 59% of the country's wealth, while the real number is actually 84%. At the same time, the survey respondents believed that the top 20% should own only 32% of the wealth. In contrast, in Sweden, a country with significantly greater economic equality, 20% of the richest people there control only 36% of the wealth of the country. In the American survey, 92% of the respondents said they'd rather live in a country with Sweden's wealth distribution...
The United States is the most economically stratified society in the western world. As The Wall Street Journal reported, a recent study found that the top .01% or 14,000 American families hold 22.2% of wealth, and the bottom 90%, or over 133 million families, just 4% of the nation's wealth. The U.S. Census Bureau and the World Wealth Report 2010 both report increases for the top 5% of households even during the current recession. Based on Internal Revenue Service figures, the richest 1% have tripled their cut of America's income pie in one generation.
The gap between the wealthiest Americans and middle- and working-class Americans has more than tripled in the past three decades, according to a June 25, 2010 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. New data shows that the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest parts of the population in 2007 was the highest it's been in 80 years, while the share of income going to the middle one-fifth of Americans shrank to its lowest level ever.
So will we experience a "class war" over these inequalities? Read the original article for the author's conclusion.
Newsweek has published an article by Michael Hirsch "Our Best Economic Minds are Failing Us," which challenges our continuing focus on the health of Wall Street as a measure of our overall economic health. Here is an excerpt:
Wall Street execs have been whining for two years that to reduce pay incentives and bonuses would cost the firms their best talent. The government’s response should be YES! That’s precisely the idea. Finance was once a means to an end: the growth of the real economy. Banking once served industry and services. Now finance has become the end, and the real economy is subservient to financial services (it’s no surprise that after the crisis, over-the-counter derivatives trading quickly climbed back up to more than $600 trillion). “At some point in our recent past, finance lost contact with its raison d’être,” European Central Bank chief Jean Claude Trichet said earlier this year. “Finance developed a life of its own…Finance became self-referential.” As long as this pathological state of affairs persists, questions of global growth and social welfare will continue to depend on Wall Street and the enduring fallacies of free-market finance.
In the preface to her book Lanterns: A Memoir of Mentors, children's advocate Marian Wright Edelman wrote about the values her teachers passed along to her.
I cannot recall a single one of the mentors I share with you in this book ever talking to me just about how to make a living or get a job-- worthy and necessary goals. They all stressed how to make a life and to find a purpose worth living for and to leave the world better than I found it...I can't remember the clothes a single one of them wore or the kind of car they drove or whether they drove a car at all. What I do remember is their integrity, courage in the face of adversity, perseverance and shared passion for justice and a better life for children-- their own and other people's--as for education as a means to the end of helping others.
This clip of an interview with Charles Eisenstein, author of Ascent of Humanity, is from a forthcoming documentary, Money & Life, described by its director as:
Inspired by the possibility of generating real transformative social change from the opportunity of the current economic and financial crisis, I have been on a two year odyssey studying the money system and interviewing cutting edge thinkers and leaders on the issue of the day.
The film proposes that money, like other social technologies, is a reflection of our consciousness as individuals and as a society. If we are indeed in the midst of a planetary evolutionary shift, then money is one of the most important aspects of the postmodern world to grapple with, given its pervasiveness in our lives and throughout the world. The film's basic inquiry is: can our understanding of money and how we relate to it be transformed to serve our highest capacities and values?
The Telegraph has a great article today on how Netflix has scrapped its vacation policy and now allows its employees to take as much time off as they need as long as their work is covered and their managers know where they are. Some excerpts:
As the company explains in its "Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture", a 128-slide PowerPoint presentation that has spread like samizdat literature on the internet: "We should focus on what people get done, not how many hours or days worked..."
...ever more companies are realising that autonomy isn't the opposite of accountability – it's the pathway to it. "Rules and policies and regulations and stipulations are innovation killers. People do their best work when they're unencumbered," says Steve Swasey, Netflix's vice-president for corporate communication. "If you're spending a lot of time accounting for the time you're spending, that's time you're not innovating."
...In his new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, New York University scholar, Clay Shirky, argues that when we design systems that assume bad faith from the participants, and whose main purpose is to defend against that nasty behaviour, we often foster the very behaviour we're trying to deter. People will push and push the limits of the formal rules, search for every available loophole, and look for ways to game the system when the defenders aren't watching. By contrast, a structure of rules that assumes good faith can actually encourage that behaviour.
So if you think people in your organisation are predisposed to rip you off, maybe the solution isn't to build a tighter, more punitive set of rules. Maybe the answer is to hire new people.
The Ecologist recently printed an article (posted, I guess, not a lot of actual "printing" going on these days) on cash-free living.
I am embarking on my own "cash free" adventure as I head off to North Carolina for my first assignment as a house sitter. In exchange for free room and board, I will be watching a home and pets while the owners are on vacation. Being on the road with my ballet project half the year, the idea of being a house sitter during the off months has always appealed to me. I thought it would be hard to get into, and I didn't know where to start. It turns out to have been surprisingly easy to get into, at least in my case. I simply subscribed to The Caretaker Gazette, a newsletter which lists house sitting and property care-taking opportunities. I replied to an ad, and was off. I'll let you know how it goes.
In the mean time: buy the book, won't you? There's a link to the right. Thanks.
Broke is Beautiful was featured on Radio Woman's Day. The interview is a bit hard to find: look at the featured program in the dark box, then scroll down using the vertical navigation line on the right until you get to the headline "Broke is Beautiful."
"Money doesn't buy happiness, so you can get it on the cheap. "Broke is Beautiful: Living and Loving the Cash-Strapped Life" is a guide to living a cool life where money isn't the king, but how you live your life in spite of your poverty is. Laura Lee gives readers a good array of thoughts and wisdom and makes for a very entertaining and fun read. "Broke is Beautiful" is a choice and highly recommended read which shouldn't be missed for those who want to live well when they got nothing in the wallet."-Midwest Book Review
Nice article in the Charleston Gazette today on the book and our travels.
Lee wants people who read her book to re-envision the economic culture, look past the mentality of buying and selling and find ways to enjoy life even if you don't win the lottery tomorrow.
"You know," she said, "in the off-chance you don't win."
Now, she's touring the country, signing copies, meeting with people and spreading the gospel that broke is beautiful.
Actually, no, that's not it at all. Part of Lee's message is making the most of what you have. Among other things, Lee manages Valery Lantratov, a touring Russian ballet instructor.
"He teaches." She laughed. "I just push play on the CD player."
She makes arrangements for his tour, provides transportation and travels with him. Lantratov will be teaching a program from Monday through Friday for the River City Youth Ballet Ensemble.
And since Lee is in the neighborhood, she arranged for a book signing on an off-day.
"There's a lot of resourcefulness in being broke," she said.
And how! The article comes ironically or appropriately, depending on your perspective, as we have been stranded in Buckhannon, West Virginia by a break down of my 12 year old Ford Escort (168,000 miles). The repair shop can't fix it until Thursday, and in spite of having debit cards and cash on hand, a real credit card is the key to car renting. So after a day of resourcefully scrounging, I am pleased to say that friends in West Virginia are offering us a ride to our next tour city (A good 2 hours) while the car is being fixed. Living the life!
This is an older clip from The Colbert Report featuring Philippe Petit. I found his adventure to walk on a tight rope between the twin towers, as recounted in Man on Wire, inspirational, and he is used as an example of making creativity a priority in Broke is Beautiful. This interview was a fairly absurdist. It is here because at one point Petit espouses a "broke is beautiful" philosophy by explaining that he is from another planet and doesn't understand money. Enjoy.
Here is another entry from the "save money by not bargain hunting" file. Have you ever decided to feed your bargainista desire by getting together with a bunch of friends and piling in the car for the long drive to the outlet mall? It turns out they put those discount centers in the middle of nowhere for a sound psychological reason. The harder something is to attain, the more we value it. You could grab something out of the bargain bin at the store on the corner, but that is too easy, which makes it easy to avoid. When you go to all the trouble of driving to find bargains, you're much more likely to come back with something.
I learned about this through the blog Sociological Images, which has an article on the psychology of outlet malls:
...as Ellen Ruppel Shell explains in Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture. It turns out that being difficult to get to is, in fact, part of the appeal of outlet malls. The fact that they often require a drive of an hour or more signals to consumers that they must have really good deals. That’s the payoff for inconvenience — it’s harder and more time-consuming than going to your local mall, but in return you’re getting a great bargain...
According to Shell, though, that’s pretty typical of outlet malls: they often don’t really provide great bargains. But they provide the illusion of bargains, and a motivation for thinking you’re finding them...
It turns out that the more trouble people go through to get to an outlet, the more they overestimate the amount of savings compared to prices at regular stores. The very fact that it was hard to get to convinces people that it must provide something fantastic; if you aren’t saving a lot of money by going there, why on earth would it be so far out of the way? And the more remote it is, the cheaper the products must be!...
If you’ve driven an hour or more one-way to get great deals at the outlet mall, you are primed to believe you’re getting bargains because otherwise you just wasted a lot of time, effort, and gas for nothing. Once you get there, you’re psychologically motivated to believe your effort was worth it, and you do that by buying stuff and thinking the price is a steal...
We overestimate what the original value of the item must have been and focus on the difference between that hypothetical price and the outlet price, rather than on the objective price itself. And consumers tend to discount the cost of getting to the outlet, not including the cost of gas and their time into the price of the items they buy.
Two days ago I posted a video interview with Stephen Fry who made the bold declaration that people should not have goals. (I would love to hear him give a commencement speech on this topic.)
Today Idea Connection posted an article that takes a scientific approach to the same theme. If you haven't done so, watch the video above first. I'll wait...
Daniel Simons, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, created this as a follow up to what is apparently a "classic video." I had not seen the original, but was tipped off to the "invisible gorilla" in advance by the article that pointed me to it. (Its title: "Invisible Gorilla Blindness.") So I did not miss the gorilla. I did, however, miss the new tricks Simons had in store.
Peter Lloyd writing at Idea Connection was fooled twice, "I'm twice convinced that we just don't see what we don't expect. It's not just difficult to see what we don't expect, we consistently see what we expect to see. In fact, it's unavoidably easy to see what we expect to see."
In a similar experiment I read about several years ago, subjects were asked to rate how lucky they were. Then they were given a task. They had to read a newspaper and count the number of times a particular word appeared. In big block lettering in the paper was a line saying "Congratulations! You have won $100, come up to the experimenter to collect your prize!"
Most of the subjects were so focused on their counting task that they did not even notice the message. There was a correlation, however, between calling yourself "lucky" and seeing the message. The self-described lucky spotted it and won. The self-described unlucky did not. The moral as I understood it was that being open to the unexpected makes you lucky.
Gordon MacKenzie wrote a wonderful little book called Orbiting the Giant Hairball. The titular “hairball” is the corporate group-think that grows in an organization over time. Corporations don’t begin as giant hairballs. They begin life as simple, effective concepts, one or two strands of the ideas that will produce success. As success builds on success, more and more strands of “things that have worked in the past” get woven together. Next thing you know, you’ve got a giant hairball.
“It is a common history of enterprises to begin in a state of naïve groping, stumble onto success, milk the success with a vengeance and, in the process, generate systems that arrogantly turn away from the source of their original success: groping,” MacKenzie wrote.
Picture Michael Douglas delivering this line: “The point is, ladies and gentleman, that groping -- for lack of a better word -- is good. Groping is right. Groping works..."
Bringing this back to the theme of Broke is Beautiful (see, I am goal oriented enough to get back to my book), I put it to you that we are often so focused on counting our money, and on amassing the material wealth and objects we think will get us to our goals that we fail to see the opportunities standing in front of us in gorilla suits.
Portions of this article were excerpted from the book Broke is Beautiful by Running Press.
If you are considering ordering a copy of Broke is Beautiful directly from me so you can get it autographed, it would be a big help if you could order this week because I will be leaving for my ballet tour on June 7. Ordering now will allow me to get it in the mail before I go and prevent delays. To order-- click on the book cover image to the right. Thanks for your support!
"Author Laura Lee may have well written the Brokelyn manifesto, the recession-victims’ King James Bible and the brokester I Ching all wrapped into one. Her new book, Broke is Beautiful, is a vast, thoughtful and intensely researched tome on the value of living the cash-strapped life."-Tim Donnelly, Brokelyn
"Laura Lee gives readers a good array of thoughts and wisdom and makes for a very entertaining and fun read. 'Broke is Beautiful' is a choice and highly recommended read which shouldn't be missed for those who want to live well when they have got nothing in the wallet."-Midwest Book Review
"If you're feeling down about the state of your exchequer, pick up this cheery little book...guaranteed to make you feel better about life in 'times like these.'"-Salem MacNee, Charlotte Observer
"It's not a how-to book, but more of a philosophical study, pointing out that most creative people aren't incredibly wealthy, and that happiness isn't tied to material goods."-The Detroit News
"Lee wants people who read her book to re-envision the economic culture, look past the mentality of buying and selling and find ways to enjoy life even if you don't win the lottery tomorrow."-Bill Lynch, Charleston Gazette
Broke is Beautiful is not only book, but also a philosophy of life. Being broke is not abnormal. Being rich on the other hand is freakish. While there is lots of propaganda out there in favor of wealth, little is written about the advantages of being bust out beggard and bankrupt. And broke, my friends, is beautiful! True security comes from the knowledge that you can survive in an insecure world. That is the knowledge that is gained through hard times and hard knocks. It helps if you can look on your brokeness as a way to lighten your load and a chance to test your creativity and resourcefulness. Where once the broke person felt isolated in an affluent society, today everyone is counting his pennies. Being broke is the new black! I invite you to join me in discovering new ways to think about money.
"The only reason a great many American families don't own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments."-Mad Magazine
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