Brag about your scarcity mindset intrusive thoughts / rituals

Every refrigerator door has a finite number of open/closes before it breaks, so I get a little frisson of having cheated the grim reaper (grim crisper?) of its prize when I consolidate putting the milk and three half-finished drink cans covered with foil back in one go.

I smash the little used bar of soap into the big new bar of soap

oh and I never buy ziplock bags, but I wash & hoard the ones given to me, usually by my stepmom

The inside-out ziplock on the drying rack should be a gang sign!

I smash the little used bar of soap into the big new bar of soap

same!

I was raised by parents whose childhoods and youths were shaped by the Great Depression and WWII rationing, and there were half a dozen years in my young adulthood when I could have told you my cash assets (I had no other kind of assets) down to the penny on any day you asked me. Nothing like years of poverty to sharpen up that scarcity mindset when you finally get your hands on enough money to indulge it.

Our pantry is like a small-scale food bank, constantly replenished with every shelf-stable staple we use. On the other end, the only food waste that leaves the house are stems, pits, stalks, shells, bones and other inedibles. I fret when my wife goes to a potluck or similar gathering of her friends and she comes home with leftovers or their excess garden produce in unexpected quantities, because it creates a disturbance in the smooth calculations required to exactly match the food inflows with our consumption needs. The prime directive is Food Must Not Be Wasted!

Abundance, my old Frenemy, we meet again!

I have a ritual: when I buy a new bottle of dishwashing liquid, I'll use it for awhile until there's some space.. then I'll take the OLD bottle, and rest it upside down and let it drip for a couple hours into the new bottle

I got a lotta spare change. I got some huge amounts I need to go through for the old change, as I got alot of old pennies and other change. I take it in to a bank where they don't charge me to run it through the machine. I had like 315 bucks last time. But I still use cash.

My family has always kept and sold aluminum cans. I think going out to the garage and smashing them to put in their can was about my favorite chore as a kid. I'd go out and put a Dio cassette into the boombox and go like Godzilla on the cans.

We reuse packaging for various things.

A list:
- team inside out ziploc bag on drying rack (especially the large ones)
- look at cost per oz at grocery store
- calculate when it’s profitable to pay the $1.35 credit card fee for utility bill payment vs credit card cash rewards amount
- use a “foreign” atm at most once a year because fuck those fees
- add water to dish soap and various cleaning products to make them last longer
- re-use plastic utensils
- wait for things to go on sale before buying
- buy the thing on sale even if it’s my 2nd choice
- smash the little soap slivers into a frankensoap
- don’t pay for cosmetic body damage on my car to be repaired because the car runs fine as is and the damage makes theft of car less likely

oh and I never buy ziplock bags, but I wash & hoard the ones given to me, usually by my stepmom

― Andy the Grasshopper, Thursday, 3 July 2025 19:24 (yesterday)

The inside-out ziplock on the drying rack should be a gang sign!

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, 3 July 2025 19:32 (yesterday)

-team inside out ziploc bag on drying rack (especially the large ones)
- look at cost per oz at grocery store
- add water to dish soap and various cleaning products to make them last longer
- wait for things to go on sale before buying
- buy the thing on sale even if it’s my 2nd choice
- smash the little soap slivers into a frankensoap

― sarahell, Thursday, July 3, 2025 10:58 PM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

these are my people

- look at cost per oz at grocery store

every time.
also any kind of weighted prepackaged item (such as nuts) I will pull out all of the containers to find the cheapest one
if it's a splurge (more than $5) I will do this in the hopes of finding one that's improbably underweight

hoarding plastic shopping bags (especially now they're banned) to take out my trash because I have never once purchased garbage bags
if I have one or two that are just the right size or a nicer color, etc I will try to hold onto those for, idk, a special occasion or something, like a holiday or my birthday

re-use plastic utensils

also plastic straws... kind of gross to keep using them but it's only me doing so and it pains me to throw them out.

xp lol yeah i resent having to now *buy* bags for the trash.

Over the turnstiles and out in the traffic
There's ways of living
And it's the way I'm living, right or wrong

My grocery visits involve a lot of digging into unit prices and calculations around how they might be affected by different coupons and discounts.

I have very vivid memories of my mom and grandmother having lengthy conversations on a regular basis regarding comparative pricing of various items across multiple grocery chains, and which coupons were available where. They had that stuff down to an elaborate science.

I see your ziplock bags and raise you washing (well, rinsing usually) greaseproof/baking paper. we bake homemade pizzas on it weekly and get a good few uses out of a sheet.

Can't compete with reusing baking paper !

Ordinary things include:
- Checking prices and only buying meat / wine on sale. Generally, I assume that the sale price is the right price, and normal price is inflated. Also use coupons and the pantry is a shelf and a half in the cupboard. Simple dishes (pizza, burgers, pasta) eaten 95% homemade. Making French toast with old bread.
- Increasingly buying second-hand clothes, often high quality / brands though. We don't even go and look at the sales anymore, because buying on sale is still more expensive than not buying, and the risk is to buy for the sole reason that price is (comparatively) low(er). Also often wait to buy clothes when going on vacation in Europe.
- Reusing bags / avoiding plastic bags.
- Washing colors at 30°C
- Making sure I don't speed and pay my parking tickets.

Irrational quirks / things that don't make much of a difference:
- Making sure the bin is thrown away at its full 35 liters capacity because garbage bags are taxed and worth about 2 CHF. Also we recycle everything and compost.
- Trying to bring gas consumption to the lowest possible average (right now 5.4 L/100km, when it's officially listed as consuming 6). Refill the tank when it's half-full just because price has gone lower / passing by the stations that are up to 10-15 cents cheaper per liter.
- Manually controlling the amount of water I use to flush the toilet + using as little water as possible to do the dishes. Similar behavior with electricity: used to never leave the computer on standby etc.

Some things intersect with being climate change conscious but there's definitely an ingrained mindset of not needing anything that costs money / sparing expenses. I can only attribute it to being passed from two generations ago, having survived the consumerist years / ample means that my father's salary gave. Relative influence of Protestantism as well. My partner is also thinking aggressively about saving and achieving financial security. Even though most of her life she was not lacking anything, she has witnessed poverty from up close.

I feel like my family (like many German families) has the deadliest combination here: grandparents who lived through WWII raised their children with that mentality, children then grew up to become environmentalists and reinforce the same impulses for other reasons.

I understand the general validity of all this but will admit I get a liberating thrill every time I am even slightly wasteful.

Yeah my grandparents went through food rationing (WWII), odd jobs to help build big infrastructure (Grande Dixence dam), line work (watches). The country was still poor and developed late, all in a time of pre-social welfare and learning on the job. My maternal grandmother was born with a hole in her palate and was only operated in her teens when some benefactor gave them money. Things I learnt very late. All changed with my parents generation but some friends have tales of poverty as recent as their parents' childhood. Humbling stories.

is scarcity mindset different to thriftiness

Depends on if you identify as poor or smart

I think many of the habits here are just common sense stuff, it does help stretch the usefulness of things but there was never any real reason that we should throw away a lot of items after one use. Disposability has to have been a creation of plastics promoters, I can't prove it but I'm 100% sure.

Personally I cut open tubes and packaging to make sure I'm getting all the toothpaste, lotion, etc out, this is just making sure I receive the product that I paid for.

I should be making my clothes, it would be cheaper and I'd have better clothes. Plus they would be made out of natural fibers and I could fix them when they aged & wore out.

Stuff I learned from parents, both of who themselves grew up not poor but not with a lot of money:
- Utility of leftovers & asking for stuff to bring home from the restaurant
- coupons etc
- turning stuff off/being disciplined about not turning on heat etc until necessary (biggest influence easily)
- fixing/mending things
- keeping receipts and guarantees for everything (my mother has receipts in the attic that are almost as old as I am)

Stuff I learned in school:
- cost per unit
- false economies
- anything to do with shopping and maximising value

However, though both my parents grew up with barely any money for themselves until they left home and worked, they definitely moved away from stuff like the tombot example of mashing up soap slivers. I remember my dad laughing at me when I said about a similar example, and I said it was because (my now husband) had grown up without much money and was very conscious of using up stuff etc and not wasting stuff. He said, “well you know about my childhood and I have any number of those sob stories but seriously, buy a new one, it’s a fucking euro.” So… I have that mentality as well. They also comment if we travel very early to get cheaper flights cos in their opinion, if you can afford to travel at a more convenient hour, the money savings can’t possibly outweigh lack of sleep and arriving tired. Obviously they’re older though and that’s more of a consideration.

Probably not precisely related but I did also learn from both the utility of wasted time vs wasted money, ie if you’re not enjoying something the money is (usually) already spent and there’s no point in wasting your time further. We had family holidays that we cut short because two weeks is simply too long for us and honestly, big influence on my mindset today.

The parental stuff is very interesting. My mother grew up in pretty extreme poverty and my father without tons of money but they went on to be very successful business owners who made a shit ton of money and subsequently a shit ton of bad financial decisions. I don't think my mom knew what coupons or sales were. I think she had such a miserable time growing up and then they both worked so hard that they wanted to enjoy it. It was great when I was a kid but means that I never learned any of this stuff and am not the best with money. I do cut things open to get more product out but that's about it. Never occurred to me to rinse and reuse something like ziplocs though obviously I repurpose plastic bags. I'm sure having ADHD contributes to this too but I'm not great with money/saving and I wish I was better at it.

Lots of reuse at the bar: agave nectar squeeze bottles get washed out and used for egg whites. One-liter Wodka bottles hold syrups, infusions, etc., and now for making freezer bottles of martinis now that we have some more freezer space. Bitters bottles with dasher tops get reused for things where I need dashes or drops like absinthe or saline solution, when I can get the smell of Ango out of the dasher.

oh right then:

energy:

90% of our electricity usage is at the night rate

70% of it is at the 2am-5am pittance rate

best believe i have a decent sized anker pack that gets charged at work twice a week to take any further sting out of day/peak rates

food:

prepare almost all meals we eat at home from scratch, have a few bastard sauce recipes that use up pretty much anything that is nearing end of life and those get bunged into the freezer in batches, and leftovers are lunch or next dinner. the last time something edible went into a bin in our house was probably pre dog, three years ago

consumer goods:

second hand, or last year's model on sale, and replace only when end of life.

most have interesting second uses as network storage or hobby boxes.

clothes:

hang/brush instead of washing where possible to keep wear down. follow the cycle of good wear- everyday wear- chore/walking wear- charity shop.

have recently signed up for vinted because of having lost enough weight that my stuff needs to go out but is still worth something, otherwise everything lasts years.

toiletries etc:

multipacks of soap ensure my sports bag has shower requirements met for about a fiver a year

mach three blades get cleaned out with an old toothbrush and dried after every use, each lasts about three months minimum

a thirty quid philips trimmer has met my beard and haircut costs for the past five years, only recently supplemented by a wahl foil shaver for head shaving (which saves on mach 3 blades tbh)

what else, what else

we grow our own tomatoes, herbs and flowers, the garden runs on compost and coffee grounds, the car is a hybrid and 70% of the mileage is at the above mentioned pittance rate

the other side:

we own a nice house, a new car, we eat out a fair bit and travel a fair bit. my whiskey shelf isn't thrifty, nor is her shoe collection.

as in all things, balance

In terms of family stuff, my dad’s parents were very frugal when he was growing up —- they became adults during the great depression and came from a poor area, so my dad just didn’t spend much money on anything really. He never developed expensive tastes. My dad’s YOLO retirement car purchase was a Camry. He went from a Corrolla to a Camry. My mom’s parents were of different class backgrounds and were still “kids” during the depression and they were very generous with their spending as adults. My grandmother had bourgeois tastes, my grandfather was accomplished at getting “great deals”. His “good suit” was $10 (even at the time he bought it, it was very cheap for a good suit). My mom was the anxious “little adult” who worried about her parents’ financial decisions. They made a few really bad ones, they got lucky most of the time, so their bad decisions turned out to be good… but they weren’t always lucky. My mother was the person who would have excelled at starting her own restaurant. She dreamed of doing this for decades. She never did it because it was too risky, based on statistics and personal knowledge of how many new restaurants fail.

i'm definitely not a scarcity mindset kind of person, but my partner is. so i've converted over into reusing ziplock bags and honestly now it seems insane not to. still don't try and save money by shopping with coupons and the like, like he does. one time i got in my car with the groceries and realized i got rung up 4$ more than i should have. i contemplated going back in, having to deal with the hassle of getting the refund, and decided it wasn't worth it lol.

my "getting a lot of uses out of one thing" isn't based on thrift but on laziness. i.e. using a towel several times between washes.

Xp map - do you have issues with this re your cultural background ? I once had a roommate who grew up Mormon and years after she moved out, in a cabinet I never used, I found … the food storage cache

My ex - who also grew up Mormon was very anti-that. He was more like you.

i've definitely been spending above my means many many times since i became an independent adult, as my current credit card balances can attest. also pretty poor the whole time. both things true, one doesn't justify the other. the thing i am "not thrifty with" at the moment is nutrition and supplements. i have also been 'not thrifty with' clothes. but that one i needed to cut. i'm the sort of person who likes to go all in with spending on something or just not spend on it at all. right now i'm treading water. learning to be happy with less and not always yearning for something more is a beautiful thing. used to strike fear in my heart but since i discovered meditation it's much easier.

at some point i'm gonna have to get a new car. poor ole eduardo isn't going to last forever. i'm probably going to have to evacuate my retirement fund for a down payment. i mean the way things are going i'm going to be working until i'm dead so. unless somehow i get some family money - though if that happens i don't think it'll be much.

xp yeah the food storage thing. i think you're onto something about being "anti-that". like mormons were extremely thrifty. and then they raise kids who want to be anything but. my mom was an "anything but" kind of person, and so was my dad. so that was one thing i inherited from them. if anything their "we'll just buy more" attitude was just another side of the same neurosis. i think how i've reacted to them was wanting "a few things of high quality" rather than "infinite stuff of low quality".

My parents have a habit of grabbing salt and pepper sachets from pubs, restaurants etc. On the one hand they've probably saved around £4 over their whole lives by doing so... but on the other hand it's sometimes handy to have a tomato sauce sachet in your work bag, so I'm not complaining. As far as I can tell there's nothing to stop someone from walking into Wetherspoons and grabbing a fistful of tea bags or indeed actual bottles of ketchup, but my parents aren't that poor, dammit.

They also make salad cream and tomato sauce last a bit longer by putting vinegar in the bottle and swishing it around - that way they got every last drop. But that seems to be fairly common. It's incredibly frustrating to have a bottle of e.g. mustard that has about one-tenth of the mustard trapped just underneath the lid. Along similar lines if you add water to washing up liquid it lasts even longer, but again that's not especially clever.

British Telecom used to have a line rental saver deal whereby if you paid a year's line renal up front, you got a free month. It was a good example of how the very, very poor are penalised, although eventually BT stopped offering it:
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2023/07/bt-ditches-its-line-rental-saver/

But on the other hand if you have good signal strength and an unlimited mobile deal there isn't much point having a landline any more.

It's very tempting to save a little bit of money, and then go "I should celebrate my financial acumen by purchasing a Moog Subharmonicon".

"i paid rent with a few hundred more than expected left over, i should celebrate by buying a $330 wool sweater with the credit card i was going to cut into pieces at the start of the year."

My habits are less rigorous in general, but probably just combine and evolve from demonstrating examples/modeling or just thinking about it when occasionally crunching numbers. Or I can just stumble into it: for instance, I'd argue one of the thriftiest things I ever did was simply never to bother with a car (and thus, no gas/charging costs, auto insurance, etc. not to mention any accumulated stress). You could argue it kept me from some things perhaps but time easily demonstrated to me that the fact that I love walking, have always lived near spots with ready access either via walking or public transit to markets I enjoy and places to go to, and similarly was first able to bus via about forty minutes either way to my regular job for almost two decades and then simply walk twenty minutes either way to my current one for a decade now. I'm not pretending this is some kind of universal condition but I've made it all work well, and living directly in a city now where I was in the extended suburb that is OC means I have plenty more ready access to many things, with the occasional Lyft ride as needed. (Obviously things can be chancey with MUNI/BART funding about now as Bay Area folks are well aware, but I take comfort in knowing that there are two major high traffic bus lines that have stops a block over that probably aren't going anywhere.)

at the time i was able to buy a bunch of filson clothes because of my dj gig, which are the highest-quality clothes i've ever worn, it felt like i was playing some kind of high-stakes gambling game or something. but a year or two later i like them even more than i did at the time, and i'm really glad i did it, even though my credit cards took the hit. i feel like everyone deserves to have "the nicest" of something. the nicest pen. the nicest knife. etc. pretty rich for me to say that i guess.

many xps: I think the difference between scarcity mindset and thriftiness is it's more like scratching a mental itch -- you should get a little dopamine hit from it when you do some little thing that evades or swindles the beast of real or imagined lack one more time. Thriftiness seems more bound up in duty?

I’m a pro at repurposing the last of condiments.

Jar of Dijon mustard with scrapings left needs a ratio of 3 tbsps oil to one vinegar, which gives you a reasonable vinaigrette in its own little shaker jar.

Got a squeezy ketchup bottle with remnants? Add some squeezy lime juice and soy sauce in roughly equal parts to any remaining ketchup, shake, and brush on jerk chicken or similar for a glaze.

Mayo jar with scrapings left? Either turn it into ranch dressing with some ranch powder and milk (cover and shake jar, then finely dice some chives and add), or crush at least half a dozen garlic cloves and add to jar with a few squirts of lemon juice, some salt, a little ground white pepper and a big teaspoon of olive oil. Shake the jar. This is cheater’s aioli.

I make a jar of chilli/garlic/ginger paste once a week and I make a batch of beef/lamb/red lentil bhuna once a week that supplies 3 days of food. Not sure if I'm doing this thread right here.

i feel like everyone deserves to have "the nicest" of something. the nicest pen. the nicest knife. etc. pretty rich for me to say that i guess.

Agree with this. I bought a really nice pair of headphones some years ago that I absolutely love and use every day. And we bought some very nice knives — a carving knife, a paring knife, a bread knife and a set of steak knives — a few years ago that have brought us great pleasure.

Yeah there are definitely “itch-scratching” things that aren’t just customary …

second hand, or last year's model on sale, and replace only when end of life.

yeah so on the rare (i don’t remember the last time tbh) occasions i have bought anything brand new, i will keep it untouched with all packaging, tags, whatever intact until at least the end of the return window. i can’t estimate my last minute return rate on that stuff except to say very broadly that it's pretty high

many xps: I think the difference between scarcity mindset and thriftiness is it's more like scratching a mental itch -- you should get a little dopamine hit from it when you do some little thing that evades or swindles the beast of real or imagined lack one more time.

yeah so an extreme case of the above that i remember, 10 years ago- the one time i wanted a proverbial $330 wool sweater from bloomingdales desperately enough to pay full retail, i did not wear for almost a year because it felt so extortionate. i figured i'd i monitor the price instead, and every time it dropped, i'd return it to bloomingdales in new condition and repurchase. that way i’d secure it, but pay the minimum amount in the end. so i returned it like 5 times and ended up paying around 15% of the original price. the dopamine hit was real and only grew in inverse proportion to the purchase price.

My ex used to call me 'Hector the Collector' as I was always finding useful things on our walks.. 'Look at this piece of leather! This'll come in handy' or 'who would throw out a french wooden wine box? these are pure gold' etc. Dishware, glasses, books.. I've really tried to stop doing this though, unless it's a real keeper

i ..have a collection of horseshoes that have been thrown on the racecourse where i walk the dog

madness, i mean they just leave them there. got to be worth.....cents

they shoe horses, don't they?

since my mom went into memory care i receive all her mail

and there's *so* much of it. most of which is either scams or pleas from democratic politicians in states my mom never visited. and i can't make it stop

on the bright side, my mom is pretty cheap -- i've had to surreptitiously leave extra tips at restaurants -- so if she ever gave these people any money it was like $10

yesterday I was waiting in a long line at the grocery store, and the guy in front of me had no groceries but I could see he had a Coinstar receipt he was waiting to redeem

ten minutes later, he finally made it to the cashier and got his jackpot: $4.26

Like, you could just use that much to buy something! Why go through the hassle? SMH

(unless it was four hundred and twenty six pennies which could annoy a cashier I guess)

I have a white plastic bank that looks like a cross between Hello Kitty and one of those "lucky cat" sculptures you see in Chinese restaurants (cat sitting upright with one paw raised like it's taking an oath); I throw all my change in there and when it gets to be about $50-75 I take it to the bank and deposit the contents. It always makes the teller laugh when I hand it across the counter.

I just got a bag of soups for $5 through Too Good To Go!

(unless it was four hundred and twenty six pennies which could annoy a cashier I guess)

This is exactly what self-service is good for.

the one time i wanted a proverbial $330 wool sweater from bloomingdales desperately enough to pay full retail, i did not wear for almost a year because it felt so extortionate. i figured i'd i monitor the price instead, and every time it dropped, i'd return it to bloomingdales in new condition and repurchase. that way i’d secure it, but pay the minimum amount in the end. so i returned it like 5 times and ended up paying around 15% of the original price.

I think coinstar waives the fee if you use the proceeds to buy a gift card to the store where the machine is? I have all the coins that aren’t quarters (those are laundry money) in a blue vase that I found many years ago. The Safeway up the road has a Coinstar and I only redeem the coins when I want to shop there, which isn’t that often since I stopped being a night owl.

Xp Andy — those wine boxes are great! Really great for storage.

In terms of the itch/anxiety stuff… when I buy food that goes bad before I can eat all of it, I have major guilt and feel like a failure.

The apartment buildings on either side have frequent tenant turnover…. I see no need to buy utensils or dishware ever because of the free boxes of stuff left by tenants moving out.

at the time i was able to buy a bunch of filson clothes because of my dj gig, which are the highest-quality clothes i've ever worn, it felt like i was playing some kind of high-stakes gambling game or something. but a year or two later i like them even more than i did at the time, and i'm really glad i did it, even though my credit cards took the hit. i feel like everyone deserves to have "the nicest" of something. the nicest pen. the nicest knife. etc. pretty rich for me to say that i guess.

― five six seven, eight nine ten, begin (map),

Agree with this. I bought a really nice pair of headphones some years ago that I absolutely love and use every day. And we bought some very nice knives — a carving knife, a paring knife, a bread knife and a set of steak knives — a few years ago that have brought us great pleasure.

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson), Friday, July 4, 2025 3:31 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I don't think I agree with this, certainly not for everyone.

i'm the sort of person who likes to go all in with spending on something or just not spend on it at all.

I really struggle with crippling perfectionism in so many areas of my life. there's an unhealthy mentality that if something can't be absolutely perfect, it might as well be awful.
such as, if I can't make this room look exactly the way I envision it in my wildest dreams, I might as well live in squalor. there's a tendency to devote too many resources (especially time and attention, but certainly also money) to the small areas where I can meet a very exacting standard, and to quarantine these things (objects, spaces, moments, possibly also relationships) in a narrow tunnel of vision and neglect everything in the wider periphery, including my own comfort and health.

a very on the nose example of this is that I became so obsessed with these candy stripe roses my ex gave me a few months ago that I bought new ones each week, which was either very inconvenient or unreasonably expensive, depending on where I found them. and spent a lot of time making the arrangements perfect (or perfectly imperfect), the placement of each flower just had to be just so. and decorated my dining table with my nice run cloth and cheap chinoiserie. and photographed this in my otherwise very cluttered, messy and dirty kitchen. and avoided cooking (which means not eating properly, because I cook everything) so the flowers wouldn't wilt. and slept in a freezing cold room with them so they would last longer.

there's a line in the Yijing that i cast pretty often,

'carrying (a burden) on the back while riding (in a carriage) / causing robbers to come'

and that can mean all kinds of things but I often take it as a warning to address the imbalance. It makes no sense to devote my money and attention to having the *nicest* of anything and also force myself to carry trunkloads of shit on the subway on a regular basis because I'm too cheap to take a cab. what's important is that I take better care of myself and everything I'm responsible for maintaining.

not everyone has this problem! maybe it makes more sense to "treat yourself" if you're relatively untroubled by intrusive scarcity mindset shit. I kinda think of everyone itt, gyac's dad is otm along these lines though

100% guilty of making myself suffer on a daily basis but then going "all in" on this one perfect thing or this one perfect moment, it is very bad and unhealthy, I do not endorse it and it's something I'm working to change.

I'm a child of parents who were themselves children during the Great Depression and I think I maybe inherited some of their food hoarding mindset. They were obsessive about growing produce themselves and freezing and canning everything for us children to eat.

My parents are long dead, but when covid hit I started buying dried beans and rice and canned goods, and like my parents I started jarring and preserving fresh things, and now I have a full pandemic pantry, which I'm still trying to use up 4 years later because I have no space. It's insanity

I recently went through a really awkward “splurge” purchasing experience, which I don’t usually do for myself, but my work gave me a decent chunk of money as “points” for my 10 year work anniversary. You can redeem the points for a prepaid card, or for merchandise through some online points merchant. The caveat was that, if you cash out for a prepaid card, you have to pay taxes on the income, but if you choose merchandise, you don’t. Under normal circumstances I would always choose cash or a prepaid card that I would be sure to use, and just “bank” the money rather than picking something out for myself. But I thought I’d be better off choosing some merchandise rather than paying taxes on additional income. So I looked and picked a few things out, but then I said, I should look elsewhere and see if I can get these items for cheaper. So I looked online and found that the “points” prices were jacked up and I could actually get the same stuff for cheaper if I got the prepaid card and used it to buy the stuff, even accounting for the taxes. But then I said, why do I need to get these same items if I’m not constrained by using the points merchant? So I found some other stuff I preferred. I went through the whole process of buying the prepaid card, activating it, and using it to buy myself some things I wouldn’t normally spend money on… and in the end, I don’t understand why I didn’t just “bank” the prepaid card and use it for groceries or something. I didn’t really need the stuff I ended up buying. So now I’m dealing with that guilt and shame.

is this secretly a crossover thread with the microplastics one, what with all of the ziploc bag reuse?

It’s so easy and so sensible imo to reuse ziplocs, especially the larger ones which tend to use thicker plastic. The only trick is to make sure you are letting them dry out without having two wet surfaces stuck together. You don’t even need to turn them inside out. Occasionally if I want to hurry the drying process I’ll stick half a paper towel inside. If I use one for storing raw meat, I probably won’t bother trying to clean and reuse it.

Otherwise you can keep reusing them until they don’t zip anymore.

i've never bought a bottle of ketchup, we just put any extra satchets we have from takeout etc in a container and use as needed

I started cutting my own hair during COVID lockdown in 2020, and I've kept it up since. Once it starts getting too long, I just grab my clippers and shear it all back. Keep it simple and never pay for a haircut. Obviously not an option for people with longer hair who like to style it, but it works for me!

If I buy a new instrument/guitar pedal/music gear, I always sell something I already have. One in one out. I'm not a professional and I also just don't like having too much shit cluttering my space.

Well, ditto. During lockdown I bought a Wahl 100 Groomease, and since then I've just shaved my own hair. Number four all over, three at the back, two at the very back, remember to use the oil. That was June 2020, at a time when hair clipper sales were booming. £14.

I remember doing the maths. If I cut my hair twice, I would break even. If I cut my hair three times I would make a profit. If I cut my hair ten thousand seven hundred and fourteen times I would be able to put down a deposit for a house. Which would only take eight hundred and thirty years. Assuming that each cut removes one-half of the hair on my head I would end up with a pile of hair weighing fifty kilograms. Which seems surprisingly low for eight centuries of hair-cutting. I might have missed off a zero.

The hilarious thing - I use this anecdote all the time - is that my local hairdresser had a deal whereby after five cuts the sixth was free, and I was due to have a free cut, but then lockdown happened and I lost the card. So technically they owe me a free cut, but there's no way to prove it. I like to imagine that I'll walk into the hairdressers one day and say "remember me", and they'll say "no", and then I'll turn around and bend over backwards so they can see the top of my head, and then they'll say "actually yes", and then I'll get a free haircut.

I have a spinach pie that is how 9 days old sitting in the fridge and I still would eat it.

Most of mine revolve around food. Intrusive thoughts and scarcity mindset are indeed quite different from garden variety thriftiness imo.

xps Likewise started cutting my own hair a few years ago. I'd been getting basic buzzcuts for years but was wary of trying to do it myself. Eventually bought clippers recommended by NYT Wirecutter and found it mostly easy to do.

*now 9 days old (and not visibly moldy yet)

eat it, eat the spinach pie

when a parcel comes packed with brown kraft paper (ala Amazon), I smoothe and save the paper and use it to wrap presents

I don't think I have intrusive thoughts about scarcity. I get a perverse enjoyment from unnecessarily thrifty/self-sufficiency-type things that are probably more easily accomplished by modern methods (like buying pickles in the store) and I do them bc I like it. Pickling, canning, growing my own stuff, drying herbs...a few years ago I was obsessed with trying to grow potatoes so I could have my own calorie crop stashed in my basement for the winter. (I failed at growing potatoes). I know I'm not alone here bc I remember in 2020-2021, sleeve and their partner were canning their own locally fished salmon! (To my great admiration.)

Anyway my point is that potatoes are $2 or $3 for 5lbs and I know for a fact it was more expensive to try growing them.

(I failed at growing potatoes).

lol
I recently made my own pickes for the first time because the ones at the supermarket were $6-8, and the fuck am I paying that for pickles.
It cost < $2 to make my own and they were way better than store bought. don't buy pickles, folks

(and not visibly moldy yet)

if it was moldy but not completely covered in mold I would just cut off the moldy part and eat it anyway tbh

I'd been getting basic buzzcuts for years but was wary of trying to do it myself.

whaaat

when a parcel comes packed with brown kraft paper (ala Amazon), I smoothe and save the paper and use it to wrap presents

I hoard all the packaging for anything I buy online so I can reuse it incase I ever sell something on eBay
this means I haven't ripped open a package in forever, always cut it open very carefully to keep the mailer intact

I'm now much more likely to throw away food than try to salvage everything when we clearly failed to eat something in time. Scarcity mindset is not worth having diarrhea.

The 'best before' on most fruit and vegetables is the big lie of our time. Most things can go on for a few days longer. Fridges and freezers work.

I happily ignore most best before dates, much easier to use vision and smell to work out if it's off. with vegetables it's immediately obvious.

Do they put expiry dates only on prepackaged vegetables and fruit or also the ones sold in bulk ? Both make no sense, but I'm curious.

It's all sold in bulk where I shop. There was a brief trend of wrapping vegetables up, but luckily they went back on it. I have vague memories of Americans putting everything in fridges.

I have cut my own hair since I was 18. I used the clippers my mom bought when my dad was in the Army before I was born. Those lasted until like 10 years ago, and I now have a Wahl set. …. I do my own blended haircuts, length depending on season lol.

i was cutting my own hair for a while but i had ~no~ idea what i was doing & made a goddamn mess of it last time. so i now accept defeat & go to Super Cuts.

i guess im missing what scarcity mindset/intrusive thoughts are

is this an american thing

Oh hey i am not suggesting that LL or anyone should eat moldy food, please dont. that was just my confession, equally boastful and shameful

Supercuts is an american thing and horrifying yes

I have no idea why anyone would brag about intrusive thoughts tbh. They are horrific and disturbing ime.

to my thinking scarcity mindset is less rational than simple thriftiness in that it is driven less by a rational desire to minimize waste and more by fear that the want or lack of necessities is constantly lurking just out of sight and must be vigilantly anticipated and averted.

That is correct — it’s maladaptive rather than virtuous.

I know what I’m talking about here!

Yeah, I can’t brag about any of it, because it’s terrible and taken a whole lot of work to get out of the mindset.

I keep thinking about how when my grandmother's sister passed away, she didn't have any close relatives left (and lived in the family home she grew up in) so my dad and uncle pitched in with some cousins to clear things out. There were entire cabinets full of empty cocoa tins, other storage containers, farmers almanacs going back to the 1970s. I think it went beyond "this might be useful to store things, so I'll hold on to it" and into some darker mental places.

okay then, my contributions to this thread have been more 'waste less, want less' vibes and not some paranoid fear of going without and starving to death

You can have two vibes at once. They sometimes harmonize!

re: packaging

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8NwTUF2ZNY
irony is that they're living on a post-scarcity magic ship

Having a paranoid fear of going without is nothing to joke about or minimize. It can be debilitating and/or extremely difficult to remedy (as Jeff mentioned)

I can only really speak to my own experience with it but it does frankly help me to see it manifest widely and variedly with others.

“It” isn’t the same thing though — mindful thriftiness is fine and doesn’t hurt anyone. Intrusive thoughts and persistent scarcity mindset are trauma responses?

Well, I'm eating blueberries that fell on the floor (I washed them!) because I can't bring myself to toss them. To me, that's a bit of both.
re: trauma response, for sure that does resonate a bit (maybe even as inherited trauma), but in some sense having mindful thriftiness drilled into me also feels like an artifact of some generational trauma, just operating differently.

so its hoarding?

Same symptoms so probably ??

I’m super familiar w hoarding. It’s very different from thrift. They’re related but not identical by any means.

I don't know - the initial post is about desperately preserving the *useful* things you have, rather than just pointlessly pack-ratting away misc odds & ends
At least that's my reading of it

from what I've read of hoarding, it has a different mentality than fear of scarcity, more on the order of an inability to decide how to dispose of any item that comes into their possession. a hoarder sees some potential value in nearly everything, often extending that idea to include the possibility the thing may be of value to someone somewhere and thus should be retained until its theoretical purpose can be fulfilled. iow, disposing of 'stuff' constitutes an insoluble problem that is put off forever.

I watched some hoarding reality show a couple years ago, and while it was exploitative, I felt like the authorities handled the people with really sensitivity and kindness
But some of these places were insane health risks

There are at least several different types of hoarders. Some are organized, some are disorganized. Some are caught in the acquisition phase, some are not. Some people believe their stuff is synonymous with themselves, and getting rid of stuff feels like eliminating themselves. Others are less attached, more apathetic.

And yes some people save for other people’s utility — someone might use this— and that provides a sense of purpose to the acquisition. I know the dynamic well. Regardless of the nature of the hoarding activity, the basic fact that hoarding requires professional help to overcome is consistent.
It’s not the same thing as thrift or a tendency toward wastelessness that people seem to believe colloquially.

is it scarcity mindset ?

cant really seem to get a fix on what the op meant by this but it seems ti be an understood term for the american posters?

I too had grandparents that went through the Great Depression and developed these coping strategies (like obsessive canning of green beans), but I don't know if it's exclusively an American mindset

I suppose wartime UK might have caused a similar thing? Ration cards and all that

I characterize it as a kind of omnipresent weight, or a beast nipping at your ankle that kind of makes you implement your own personal austerity program to deal with the anxiety versus say an abundance mindset, where there's just a serene lightness, a sense of security that everyone's needs will be taken care of. I guess maybe in Europe of today, austerity feels more like something enforced on Greece by the WTO or something?

Kids who grew up during pandemic I feel are going have all of this x10.

Hoarding is more on the mental illness spectrum than thriftiness and/or scarcity mindset but there’s a venn diagram there I think

Scarcity mindset defined https://health.clevelandclinic.org/scarcity-mindset

“A scarcity mindset does a great job of sucking the joy out of people’s lives,” says Dr. Alexander. “Because everything starts to revolve around this thing that they don’t have.”

yeah, that's not me at all

I don't know where I first heard of it but the sense I got was it was more tied up in political alignments (politics of scarcity vs politics of abundance) made personal. It didn't occur to me to think of it as a clinical term but a lot of those things listed do resonate -- it's definitely a joysucker and fixational.

Scrupulousness and over-scrupulousness and intrusive thoughts can be about a lot of things, including anxiety and control. I understand they're pretty terrible (they definitely sound terrible). Imo the thread title is more of a sheepish admission and people have answered it a lot of ways, all of which I think are interesting.

I used and understood "bragging" itt to mean that this is in the 'playful one-upmanship designed to help us get to know each other' genre of ilx threads

All Gone!

An uproarious card game where you brag about your scarcity mindset intrusive thoughts / rituals

We've hit a DSMV round - every player gains 5 knowledge points

I wasn't really thinking too hard about it when posting, so the premise being flip about anyone's serious struggles is on me. I'm working through eating my third bowl of spilt blueberries in two days and the situation struck me as absurd and hopefully relatable (Sigh, filthy groundberries again?)

But this same kind of compulsion has also gotten me in not-as-fun situations and I shudder to think of things progressing worse than that, so apologies for conjuring or belittling stuff in that vein.

i think its ok to have threads

I didn't think the question nor the answers had a pathological angle. Avoiding being wasteful is a sign of a much more positive mindset than the reverse imo, and goes beyond money (thriftiness): I associate it with healthiness, discipline. If you push it, with ascetic or spiritual tendencies. The historical link with actual periods of scarcity that we have heard through our families came up naturally and was interesting, but ultimately our present fears are different. You could also make a link with religious / virtuous figures, but ultimately they're universal ideas.

I appreciate the acknowledgement of flippant belittling — that was my primary objection. I obviously don’t have a problem with thrift (as one of the thriftiest people I know) and do have a problem with joking about debilitating mental challenges. It’s like calling fallout from a garden variety setback PTSD. It’s insulting to people who may be struggling with PTSD. Or OCD. or whatever.
And yes, “it’s ok to make threads” but could we be less glib? Maybe we can’t.

I allow myself some leeway to joke about my own mental preoccupations and bugbears aa it allows me to acknowledge them while noting that these are not the rules of the world, and should not govern my life. The risk is in allowing the joke to excuse harmful behavior that you could change

I think depression-era life experiences and poverty definitely lend to the scarcity ideation, although not for everyone. It also becomes something you can get locked into, not realizing that the world you experienced when those thoughts set in are not the world that exists.

so

not hoarding, or thriftiness, but a preoccupation as if sufficient or plenty today cannot be planned for in future to the extent that provisions beyond what might be considered reasonable are made - indeed, to the extent that impacts negatively upon the subject's other affairs

interesting.

id say not much of the thread took up that torch tbf, but ive learned something

I mean another common preoccupation is hyper control of things that are accessible as a palliative against the anxiety about things that can't be controlled. Like if I save this little scrap of food or I compost all my waste maybe climate change won't kill us all, that kind of thing. Taking (mostly futile but who knows!) action against the uncertainties of life.

I had a great-grandma who survived the Depression and couldn't throw away the smallest scrap of yarn. We also had a family friend who was LEGIT a hoarder. His long-suffering wife forbade him from bringing stuff in their very clean and orderly house but the basement, a barn, a pole barn that he built just for storage, were FULL of cigar boxes, coffee cans, antique furniture and tools. I'm sure I've mentioned him before, he was wonderful, and the couple were surrogate grandparents to my family. But he 100% had turned past trauma into habits of saving unneeded things. He was very much that guy who had a piece of wood just the right size for that thing you were doing, hold on a sec I'll be right back...and he would just give it to you.

I'll spare you all my thoughts on this one.

..... hoarding them?

agree with you io, tho the overlaps and the spaces between what the textbook (aiui) definition of the term is and what it was used for (i presume from reading) by our threadstarter and subsequent posts is an interesting progression in and of itself.

pop psychology terminology has an overlap with our words and grammar thread, i think- whatever the group thinks it means, it means, and defending or insisting that the conversation is or isnt (or must be!) correctly adherent is probably the bigger sin to me i think as far as the human need to share ideas and experiences goes.

im now trying to think where i might have experienced what i now understand this to be, in the narrower scope.

id find it very difficult to throw out eg crockery or cups or cutlery as long as it still did a half a job no matter how battered, and id go so far as to say that short of moving home i may never have jettisoned a chipped mug (strangely i feel differently about glassware?)

electrical goods are each and all some manner of precious in their innards and it is impossible to me to justify *not* keeping them in a box in the attic, spare room, office or hall no its not in the way honestly (after taking thr batteries out, im not a weirdo). i dont even think of this as hoarding, but if I actually set my mind to wondering why i do this the first two people/characters i imagine i shall emulate are (ofc) macguyver and (less obviously i hope) yerman with the bike copter from that mad max sequel.

upon a moment's consideration i would happily acknowledge that this does in fact begin to look like at best magical thinking and at the unkindest definition a form of mild mental illness, so lets say that it counts.

im literally currently throwing away, or charity boxing, or hosting for sale, old clothes so no fears there?

i dont think my thriftiness as set out upthread, nor not wishing to waste food as a rule, counts at all now as far as i understand things.

i mean first of all, "intrusive thoughts" isn't just some "pop psychology" terminology, and this strawman you make of "correctly adherent" just makes me think of people complaining about having to be politically correct or something.

when I was 5 or 6 my grandma arrived at my house to declare my bedroom "a pigsty" - she then took most of my paper-based things (drawings, activity books, etc.) and burned them in a small bonfire. This is probably why I've been a low-key hoarder since then, though having everything in boxes in the garage means it's thankfully not obvious. In the last few years I have finally accepted that I should start getting rid of things, but not until I've digitised all the films, tapes and least importantly the scraps of paper I rescued from my school bag sometime in the 90s. This is all going to be used in a project, this is my excuse.

xp the pop psychology term i referred to- id have thought obviously but perhaps not?- was the actual one used in the thread title, which does appear to have meant all sorts of things to different people throughout the thread

i guess im not seeing the link to whatever i said that made you think of whatever you thought, i dont really feel responsible for that tbh.

xp to CAAL we moved every year, or more often, until i was 16 which i think must have affected me to some extent on this kind of stuff but im still picking my way through it!

re: bonfire -- yikes! Was this because that's how her generation disposed of things, or was it to be extra dramatic?

yeah I don't know, she was a strict Catholic matriarch from Liverpool, it wasn't necessarily her generation, but that was the culture. her sister, my great aunt Josie, was much worse.

it's been this funny anecdote for 40 years and only recently have realised that this was an actual trauma that led to a lifelong problem throwing anything away.

the catholic church is built on trauma

Well if it hadn't been for her demanding my clearly incompatible parents marry as soon as they were cohabiting then I guess I wouldn't be here today, so uh not sure what point I'm trying to make sorry.