ON RADICAL FRUGALITY AND THE WASTE OF PHYSICAL INTERGENERATIONAL 
WEALTH

Inspiration for my dryest-sounding title yet comes from Solderpunk, 
whose old posts I've most recently been digging though, now having 
reached back to his "or something like it" series:

gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/asceticism-or-something-like-it.txt
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/technoskepticism-or-something-like-it.txt
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/radical-frugality-or-something-like-it.txt

I've been spending too much time at the computer already lately, so 
rather than attempt to live up to the title of this post and ramble 
on all day in a wordy sort of way, I'll start off by simply 
referring to some old posts of mine that touched on similar themes 
as well as what measures I enlist in search of something like 
Solderpunk's dream of a frugal lifestyle:

gopher://aussies.space:70/0/%7efreet/phlog/2020-02-10Living_in_the_Past.txt
gopher://aussies.space:70/0/%7efreet/phlog/2020-03-21.2The_Op_Shop_Economy.txt
gopher://aussies.space:70/0/%7efreet/phlog/2021-05-31Maintained_to_Last.txt
gopher://aussies.space:70/0/%7efreet/phlog/2021-08-08Buying_on_the_Brink.txt
gopher://aussies.space:70/0/%7efreet/phlog/2021-12-18.1Conceptual_Consumables.txt

The thing I haven't touched on before though is inherritance. My 
setting myself up to live alone more or less happened 
simultaniously with the twilight years of my grandparent's lives, 
with the garage sale I mentioned a post or two ago happening in 
response to my last surviving grandparent moving into a nursing 
home, losing through age the same independence that I've gained. So 
far as money goes I haven't often benefited except in going to the 
trouble of selling posessions that other members of the family 
intended to send to the tip. But what I have gained is a complete 
selection of furniture and household goods, and in the latter case 
various spares for the future as well.

The interesting thing is that in both cases I've had many cousins 
in either family approaching similar stages in life, yet so far as 
these types of items go I never had much competition for them, 
except with a skip. Obviously situations vary, such as people like
Solderpunk  needing to regularly move home internationally, but
it's a strange  attitude that willfully dispenses with such wealth
in physical  objects. As Solderpunk describes it, these goods
represent the work invested by the past generation, who needed to
make the money to buy them. Simply by taking them rather than
sending them to be buried in the ground, later generations can
potentially save themselves  that work. But it seems most often
they don't, and at best the stuff might go to an op-shop to profit
charity.

Very often the excuse for this is simply that the objects are old, 
and so devalued as per my Conceptual Consumables post. This, I'd 
say, is another approach to the idea that Solderpunk interates of 
living in the past - not just avoiding technology introduced after 
a certain date, but focusing on the technology of a generation who 
are dying out, and taking up life using the goods that they leave 
behind.

What it probably doesn't chime so well with is Solderpunk's 
milimalist aspirations. In contrast to that, I hoard various spares
for everything. Much coming from grandparents who, through being 
raised with the memory of the great depression and reaching 
adulthood around the time of the second world war, learnt to do 
much the same thing themselves. Even with the few newer devices 
that I do buy such as my second-hand router and mobile broadband 
modem, I try to keep spares so that I don't one day need to buy a 
brand new item out of immediate necessity. In this respect we do 
approach frugality in quite opposite ways.

 - The Free Thinker.