The Art of Frugal Hedonism Quotes

“...travel is ultimately about creating a contrast with everyday life, thereby refreshing your mind and making time seem more spacious.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“Sometimes when you are feeling drenched by the details of your own life, it's time to pack a suitcase for your myopia and sent it on holiday.
Look up. There is so infinity much more matter than you out there, hurling forth glowing plumes, imploding into vortexes, converging into gaseous balls, then shattering into incandescent rain. It is endless and eternal and entropic and generative and holy in the most religion-irrelevant sense of the word.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“Pretend you’re on wartime rations, and eat only the humblest of home cooking for a week – you’ll want to plan your meals and maybe do an initial shop for ingredients. Then make a date to go out for ice cream during this period.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“Putting money aside to enable life to change when you want or need it to isn’t about being a financial prude. It’s about not being trapped. It allows for spontaneity on a much grander scale.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“Let yourself miss fresh tomatoes, knowing that the imported hydroponic ones sold in the cold months taste kind of like squeaky rubber dolphin bath toys anyway.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“If your pre-Frugal Hedonism socialising revolved mostly around eating out, bars, and movies, it’s time to seed your social life with a whole new crop of cheap thrills. Bring people wild berry picking with you! Invite them along to catch a train to the beach for a day. Hold a story-telling night. Play ultimate Frisbee, or chess. Take a long ramble with a friend and a dog – maybe make a date to do it weekly. Invite people round for casual dinners, lunches, breakfast and picnics. Offer to ask someone you know for help with taking up the cuffs on a pair of pants, an IT problem, or a trombone lesson. Then eat lunch together.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“The trick, apparently, is to not even attempt to resist behaviours that you want to change. Instead, notice the urge, and then put a different behaviour there in response to it.
Perhaps when you have a crummy day at your job, your urge for pleasure and escapism leads to spending big on beer and pizza and watching inane TV all evening. If you’d like to change this habit, try acknowledging the urge and what cued it, but then invent a response that satisfies that urge in a way that you feel better about. Perhaps eating soup and buttery toast while re-reading a favourite book in bed all evening. Or putting punk rock on your headphones and going for a frenzied walk to a hill you like to watch the sunset from. Invent these substitutions in times when you’re feeling potent and inspired, and once you’ve experienced a pleasure rush from them enough times, they become new habits, and you’ll go to them gladly even when you’re feeling wilted-of-will.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“With such an abundance of cheap things to replace broken cheap things, many of us have lost the most basic knowledge of how to care for them, and instead have almost fetishized the pleasure of not bothering.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“We can equally choose to relish and recognize value in experience, atmosphere, sensuality,”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“Problem is, They are not you. In fact They are mostly not even Them, but just writers attempting to satisfy an expected tone, spitting out blurbs about a Ethiopian fusion restaurant with award-winning décor, or a great new line of handbags in the shape of marine mammals. Meanwhile, they muddle on with their imperfect lives, eat pasta, and go to the shops”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“how many would have guessed that our favourite activities would not be fiery political meetings, masked orgies, philosophical debates, hunting wild boar or surfing monstrous waves, but shopping and watching other people pretending to enjoy themselves?”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“...notice that you do not have to buy something to actively
consume it.”
― adam grubb & annie raser-rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“Look up. There is so infinitely much more matter than you out there, hurling forth glowing plumes, imploding into vortexes, converging into gaseous balls, shattering into incandescent rain. It is endless and eternal and entropic and generative and holy in the most religion-irrelevant sense of the word.

Look down. There is the great grinding, shifting, melting foundry for all the
yawning canyons and toothed peaks and rift valleys. There is the alchemical trinity of moisture, mineral, and organic debris that has the power to birth new life, and which informs the composition of your bones, the structure of your extracellular matrix, the very viscosity of your blood.

Remembering where and what you are should not be to the end of feeling
like an insignificant speck. You are woven of this stuff, this starlight and magma, let it extend you and make you feel endless amongst it, swathed in the vastness of time, rich in your very elemental connectedness. Then scan what feels important to you as a creature...

It's not as if you can keep this stuff in mind all the time. But make a nook in your brain that remembers it, and you can step into it whenever you want to put things back in perspective. Going there can give you giant feelings zizzing through your body. It is also likely to make you feel less needy, and
maybe even a bit euphoric.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“For others amongst us however, investing a little attention in looking dashing assists in conjuring the less definable aspects of personal style – how we move, the way we use our eyes and voices. We personally find that heeding this layer of being adds vitality and sauce to our lives. Presenting yourself with some panache can be an act of generosity too: most people get pleasure from physical spectacle, be it a scintillating colour combination, a spectacular beard, a walk with a panther-like grace, or an unchastened twinkle in the eyes.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“If you currently eat out a lot, you may go into withdrawal if you try and cut down, but there a high probability that what you are missing isn’t the food so much as the ‘third place’ factor. This neat little term describes a place that is not work or home, but a third kind of place where you feel at ease, and a part of the greater world.
Town squares serve this function beautifully in many cultures where they are used as a staple of the community’s ‘going out’ life.
[…]
It took your authors some practice to establish a repertoire of non-spending-oriented third places. We very much like our local park, which is used heavily by the surrounding community, and we often go lounge there at sunset and exchange pleasantries with people and their dogs. Maybe we bring a beer and a bag of peanuts. Maybe we don’t. It feels like a proper third place occasion though, and it costs zero to ten bucks.
The library serves beautifully as a third place too.
[…]
The beach is another great third place, as is a well-used community garden, but you can definitely get more creative.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“We’ve already sung the praises of the packed lunch, so we won’t go there again now, but don’t forget the packed snack! If you know you’re going to be out and about for a long stretch, stuff some hardy food items like an apple and a few nuts into your bag so you’re not forced to blow cash on tiny tubs of overpriced sugary yogurt from convenience stores. The essential attitude change inherent in all the above suggestions is that food, by default, comes from home, and getting it from elsewhere is a deliberate indulgence, not just what happens whenever you need to eat. The savings resulting from this mental shift can be huge.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“We can also press reset on our expectation buttons. If you expect to buy takeaway for your midday meal everyday, you may be calibrated to feel that lunch is only worth looking forward to if it comes from a shop. Expect instead to always bring a packed lunch, and you’ll gradually forget about the greasy displays in the shop windows, and will look forward to tucking into your roast-dinner leftovers lunchbox enormously.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“You could experiment with recalibrating what counts as a treat or outing. Pretend you’re in wartime rations, and eat only the humblest of home cooking for a week – you’ll want to plan your meals and do an initial shop for ingredients. Then make a date to go out for ice cream during this period. That excursion is magically transformed into an enormous treat! Go out in your best summer ensemble to do it, and linger over every kick, drawing the whole evening out for as long as possible.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“You could experiment with recalibrating what counts as a treat or outing. Pretend you’re in wartime rations, and eat only the humblest of home cooking for a week – you’ll want to plan your meals and do an initial shop for ingredients. Then make a date to go out for ice cream during this period. That excursion is magically transformed into an enormous treat! You out in your best summer ensemble to do it, and linger over every kick, drawing the whole even out for as long as possible.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“Giving up regular untrammelled consumption actually feels quite easy when you have a sense that it is for a life studded with superior pleasures. Taking your kids on a month-long hiking trip perhaps, paying off your house, getting a weekly massage… or just taking time off work to think or do drawings.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“There is no better incentive for being frugal than having passions you want to chase. Let’s break it down.
1. By consuming less, you have more money to spend on doing what you really want to do.
2. By consuming less, you have the option of doing less paid work, giving you more time to do what you really want to do. (Even if that happens to be chasing the kind of paid work that you really want to do.)
3. You can do a little bit of 1 and a little bit of 2 and have both the time and money to do the things you really want to do. Cake, and eating it.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More

“We’re not inferring that you shouldn’t relish your paid-for consumption – in fact it will go much further if you do. Try ordering one espresso at a café and making it last for an hour. Revel in each drop of that oily black dynamite rolling around your taste buds. Have occasional sips of water to refresh the flavour. People-watch while you luxuriantly observe the shift in your brain chemistry as the caffeine moves in. You’ll feel astounded to witness surrounding tables fill and empty as people hurriedly consume huge meals and multiple coffees, often leaving them unfinished as they pay up and move on, seemingly unmoved by the experience. Yet simply milking the moment for all that it’s worth, you get to leave feeling like you just had a decadent experience.”
― Annie Raser-Rowland, The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More