Privilege and personal responsibility

I've been pondering, for a long time now, what constitutes personal responsibility. Obviously I can make certain choices that benefit myself and others that don't, and nearly all of these choices will impact people who aren't me. If I choose to eat cheeseburgers every day then my family will have to bear the burden of my poor health and shortened life, the healthcare system itself will pour resources into keeping me alive, and the world will face the ecological problems caused by all that beef consumption. But could I make that choice? Sure. Would it be a good one? Not for me or anyone around me, but the fact still stands that I could make that choice if I was so inclined.

When people talk about "personal responsibility" many people have the unspoken underlying assumption that it also implies a responsibility to others, most especially to those around you. After all, if you are responsible for yourself then others don't have to waste their time, energy, and resources taking care of you. It is, in many ways, a privilege just to be able to take care of yourself. However, I've been seeing more and more the idea that "personal responsibility" is just about an individual. You don't owe anything to anyone but yourself! Or, so the idea goes. Eat those cheeseburgers! You got yours, who cares about anyone else?

I see this even more in how people spend their money. Even if no one will say that they have this idea, spending all of their resources without putting any money by for things like life's inevitable disasters--everything from hurricanes to broken bones--means that they care more about their immediate desires than their future, no matter how stupid those immediate desires are. It really bothers me that so many people out there, people with high incomes and plenty of advantages, still 'can't manage to make ends meet'. Just do a search for it and you'll come up with hundreds of articles like this one and this one. Frankly, I think their definition of "struggling" and mine is vastly different. You see, I sort of feel that if you go out to eat for every meal and hire a maid service and a lawn service and buy expensive clothes that sit in your closet, that's not really 'scraping by'. If you have the means to save money but choose instead to squander it that does not make you an object of sympathy.

On the other hand, the ability to save money, any money, is often a privilege. I can't very well tell someone who's working a minimum wage job without healthcare that it's easy to save money with just a few simple tricks. For many people out there, frugality is a necessity. For even more of those people, credit cards are the simple way to get what they want and not have to practice frugality. That's the worst of all worlds, because it's neither privileged nor personally responsible. This is not to say that all credit card use is stupid, immoral, or what have you. That's merely to say, buying things on credit when you know you can't pay it back is willful self-deception that harms not only those who practice it but also everyone who ends up bailing them out. (Friends, family, or society - through bankruptcy.)

When I was a little girl, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents. They were part of what has become known as the Greatest Generation. They both lived through the Great Depression, and they came of age during WWII. Both my maternal grandfather and grandmother served in the military at that time. I didn't understand what all of this meant until I was older, of course, but I saw the myriad ways those major events left their marks on my grandparents, in particular my grandmother. She saved just about everything because it might be useful "one day". Plastic bread bags? Drawers full of them.

I do not aspire to be like that. However, the ethos they shared to not waste things has also left its mark on me. I remember watching my grandmother scrape the very last bit of egg white out of the shells as she used them and, to this day, I do that myself. I didn't even realize how odd it was until I read a story from a Jewish woman whose grandmother did the same thing. When she asked her grandmother why her grandmother answered that her husband had starved to death in a concentration camp. How could she ever waste food? That has, obviously, stuck with me. The ability to waste food is very much a privileged position to be in and the US sure takes it to an extreme.

When I put it all in the bigger picture, it makes me mad. How many children's lives could be saved by simple things like mosquito nets, rather than going to clothes that will be donated or thrown away with their tags still on?  How many kids in my own neighborhood are going hungry while others buy things they don't even want or need, or are wantonly throwing away food? How many communal resources (water, energy) are used to make the goods that people buy that they don't even really want?

Which circles back to what we owe others, and what constitutes personal responsibility. You've earned your money, who am I to judge how you spend it? Excellent point! ...But that squandered money does impact me and my family and my community. Do I get a still not get a say? Where is the line drawn between what we owe to ourselves, and what we owe our families, and what we owe to our communities? To the global community? Do we all have to become minimalists or suffer judgment?

I am a parent. What do I owe my child, vs. what I owe other children? I can afford to get my child into swimming lessons. At a heated pool! Luxury, amiright? And she loves them. She loves water to the point that she's not at all afraid of it. She'll dunk herself in and come up gasping, spluttering, without that healthy fear of drowning that a parent would want her to have. She's ready to go right back into the water without the least sense of danger. So in many ways, swim lessons are a calculated expenditure. She gets fun, we get to worry a little less that she'll drown one day. But...not all kids get swim lessons. What right does my child have to get swim lessons when there are kids in our community who don't even get enough to eat? What do I owe my child, vs. what I owe my community? Is it personal responsibility to ensure that my kid grows up knowing how to swim (a valuable life lesson) or is it privilege because not all kids (particularly children of color) get lessons or know how to swim? Why do lessons when we could (theoretically) teach her ourselves?

There are so many different ways to approach this question and in the end, it's always unfair. It's unfair that many of the people who could benefit the most from a little extra are the very ones the system has made it harder for. We can tell people all day long that they need to be personally responsible, but at the end of the day some people just can't be due to circumstances beyond their control. What do we owe them?

I think about these questions pretty much daily. I have a nice house that I can afford to heat and light up and still put food on the table AND save money for the future. To say that it's fortunate undercuts how hard we've worked to be in this position. It erases all the years when we really, really didn't have much. We know what it's like to be a bit poor, to scrounge and scrape and always be close to disaster. It's part of what makes me so keen on not living like that ever again. I don't want my kid to eat soup that's maybe kinda gone bad already, hoping it doesn't make her sick, because we can't afford to waste food. (Yeah, that's actually something I did.) I don't want my kid to wear a hat and gloves and a blanket indoors because we can't afford to heat the house. (We did that too.)

As strange as it might seem, what begins of
necessity can sometimes turn into a privilege.
I dreaded the thought of walking to work in conditions
like this, but soon loved it.

Even with those experiences, however, we don't really know what it's like to be poor. Our privilege is that we always had a backstop. We could ask our parents for a loan, had we really needed it. We could have gotten a loan from the bank, or depended on credit until we were flush again. In many ways, our poverty was self-induced because we could have changed it but didn't because of pride or knowledge that taking a loan would mean more challenges later on. We struggled through and always knew that those times were temporary. So many people out there don't have those luxuries. For so many people, poverty is all they know and all they will ever know. I don't want all those other people to have to live like that either. What do I owe them? What is me being responsible for my family, and what is taking more than my fair share?

The world is not fair. It doesn't take a genius to understand that if your raises and "cost of living" adjustments don't actually keep up with inflation, you're losing money every year. Life gets that much harder. Those with the most money, who need it the least, are seeing all of the gains. This is so blatantly unfair and absurd that it baffles me. The only thing we can do to fight against it is to scrape and save, yet the very systems that make the rich get richer also make it harder for those on the bottom to save anything at all. It is, in many ways, a privilege to be in the class that can scrimp and save.

Read that last sentence again and take in the absurdity of it. It's a privilege to scrimp and be able to save. What the hell is wrong with our society? We're so rich and yet most of us really are not. We have more material goods, true, but that hasn't translated into more security or more happiness.

One of the reasons I chose to focus this blog on frugality is because I think that it can help equalize the world in some ways. I think of my frugal nature as a giant middle finger to the companies, corporations, and practices that I hate. I can pick and choose where to spend my money, and my family's wants and needs are low enough that we don't have to spend money with companies we find unethical. Even when we do buy from large corporations whose interests don't serve mine, I'm not mindlessly shopping.

When a person is frugal, whether by choice or by necessity, they are forced into the knowledge of what their values truly are. After all, I doubt that anyone sets out with a goal to waste money. So many people just fall into that trap, though. A few dollars here and there can really add up and, soon enough, you're wondering how you spent your entire paycheck. It's easy to get caught up in the feeling of not having enough money. However, frugality forces you to examine what your values are and only spend on those things. When there's only so much money, it's easy to know what's worth spending your money on and what isn't. Wool socks will help make keeping the heat in your house lower more bearable, and they're far cheaper than heating an entire house or apartment. (She writes while wearing warm and fuzzy socks with the heat turned down.)

If you're forced into frugality, you spend only on your values because that's all you can afford to do. If you're frugal by nature, it's because you realize the power of your saved money is more important than fleeting desires you might have. I could turn the heat up in my house and keep it tropical in here all year long. But I'd rather save that money and spend it on, say, swim lessons for my kid. That will add far more value to our lives than heating a mostly empty house would. And I haven't even gotten to the environmental (read: societal, global) benefits that come from such measures.

If those of us with plenty of resources choose to use them meaningfully, to know what is enough and what is superfluous, then I think the world would be a much better place. I think we would be happier, have more to share, and that there would be more to share because we wouldn't have some living with way more than they need while others go without. We each have a responsibility not only to ourselves, but to each other. That's part of what it means to be a social species. The choices we make impact those around us for good or for ill, including the ways in which we choose to spend our money.