Penury as a lifestyle choice

Symbolism / Paul Gauguin/ Peasant Woman and Cows in a Landscape

Been pondering things lately.  We probably ain't going back to normal anytime soon so I will need to craft a life built around the possible rather than the desired.  Oddly enough, this doesn't bother me much at all. 

I suppose I got caught up in the societal nonsense of unearned affluence and rent-seeking of the past forty years.  I am not ashamed, it was a blast.  Income exceeded outgo and convenience and gratification weren't particularly scorned.  What's not to like?

But my analogy of a party just keeps coming around to allow me the insight that helps me cruise.  In the day, back during days at the 'Varsity when things were easily as tight as they are now, the success of a party in our crowd was measured by the "fun unit".  When one was partying, one used fun units in a profligate manner.  That was the purpose of the party.  If it was a great party, one cast away forethought and kept burning fun units, running them into the arena of negative fun units. 

Now, just so you know, negative fun units, when being deployed, are every bit as much fun as fun units.  Don't kid yourself.  An argument can be made that fun achieved during this negative fun unit phase of the operation might have actually had a greater net effect than the positive fun unit stage.  While this is just a theory, it seems likely to me.

Now, lets talk about cost of negative fun units.  It is my observation that negative fun units have a next-day repayment cost that is higher than the withdrawal amount the evening before.  My best guess is that one negative fun unit need be replaced by no less than 1.4 of that next day's allotment. 

That explanation behind us now, I think that I am in the somewhat luxurious position of being at net-zero in fun units.  That being said, if I want to maintain my neutral-buoyancy state, I will need to analyze the current status of fun units and their actual value (they seem to "float" in the lingo of that pseudo science "economics".

More to follow.