A Slight Sense of Coherence

Why Underconsuming Feels Right

After buying a carton of eggs from the store tonight, I fried three for dinner and boiled the other seven to eat later. The cashier noted that two of the twelve were cracked, so they gave me a dollar off — which brought the price from four down to three bucks. Not bad for pasture-raised eggs. Real ones. Not factory sludge in a shell.

And for some reason, that little win — that dollar off — felt good. Not desperate. Not cheap. Just... right.

I know a lot of people would be ashamed to talk like this. Or they’d feel like something’s wrong if life looked too close to the edge. As if dignity comes from being far away from scarcity. I used to feel that way a little, but now…

See, I’ve lived both ways. I’ve made good money. I’ve paid for things without looking at the price. And yet now — living closer to nature, spending less, needing less — something in me actually feels clean.

Not morally clean. Coherent.

There’s a kind of sanity in frugality. A quiet rhythm. It asks me to pay attention. Be present. To not waste. To notice. And in that noticing, something slows down. The world becomes less abstract. More direct. I can feel the edges of each choice. And those edges guide me.

It’s funny — the less I spend, the more I feel connected. Not just to my finances, but to life itself. When you’re not constantly buffering discomfort with purchases or outsourcing basic needs, you remember how little you actually need. And you start to feel your way into life, rather than almost mindlessly consuming your way through it. Or spending as a source of pride — a performance of status.

But this coherence — this rightness — isn’t what the world trains us to feel.

We’re pushed. Pushed by a society built on a very different model. A model that tells us money is the one thing we can never have enough of. That spending is a sign of success.

That value lives in what we buy, not how we live.

This didn’t start yesterday. Somewhere along the line — maybe in the late Middle Ages, maybe when market exchange began to displace mutual care — we started replacing use value with exchange value. What mattered wasn’t whether something nourished us or served a real need — it was whether it could be traded, profited from, scaled, or simply padded our bloated egos.

By the time industrial capitalism came roaring in, the script was fully written:

Make money. Spend money.Make more money. Spend even more. Drones, Jewelry, Bigger houses. Classier, sportier cars. Boats. Summer homes. Planes. Private Islands. Rocketships.

And the more we internalized all of that — even if we didn’t, or couldn’t, live like that — the more we lost the plot.

Because what we’re not told is this: The costs of that game are everywhere. The forests. The oceans. Our health. Our social trust. Our sanity. All sacrificed for an economic engine that tells us we’re not enough unless we keep consuming.

So yeah, maybe it’s odd to feel joy over a dollar saved on a carton of eggs. But for me, as I reflected on that moment, it was a thread of coherence — in an economy shaped by inflation and extraction, in a society drifting further from what matters, in a system slowly beginning to unravel.

I don’t spend money on clothes. I don’t spend much on food. I don’t pay rent.I sleep where the land holds me. And once in a while, I’ll buy a tool that helps me function or fulfill a goal.But I’ve never felt right in a life of accumulation. That always felt like trying to buy my way out of something I hadn’t faced.

Now, I just meet it.

Frugality isn’t deprivation.It’s presence. It’s orientation.

A way of saying: I’m here. I’m paying attention. I’m not trying to escape.

And maybe more importantly — it’s a return to what money can’t buy.

Truth. Connection. Freedom. Adventure.

These are the real forms of wealth we’ve been quietly starved of.Not by accident — but by design. Because the system that sells us products also steals our presence, our time, our attention — the very currencies needed to invest in what really matters.

In that sense, underconsuming might be the most radical kind of coherence we have left.