Deep Dish

All Life is an Experiment

virtue

Make frugality great again hat

Make Frugality Great Again!

August 19, 2020 | Richard Meadows

What comes to mind when you think of the word frugality? For me, it’s a used tea bag sitting in a saucer, waiting to be re-dunked. Or arguing with the store manager to try to get a discount. Or ‘mum says we have food at home’.

And that’s coming from someone who loves this thing. The first post I ever published was my viral 2016 ‘coming out’ essay on the life-changing power of frugality. This is still the best experiment I’ve ever run, and set me up for everything that followed.

But longtime readers might have noticed that I’ve moved away from this kind of material over the years. Partly, it’s because I find early retirement blogs interminably boring. If I see another ‘monthly income report’ post I will scream.

I’ve also been feeling a little uneasy about the virtues of frugality and the early retirement movement. My upcoming book is about how I fell out of love with these ideas, and my attempt to build a more well-rounded philosophy. Whether or not you read the book, I feel like I should explain how my thinking has changed in recent years…

Inevitable Coronavirus Post

March 14, 2020 | Richard Meadows

The truly horrifying part of becoming an adult is the realisation that other adults don’t know what they’re doing. Remember the feeling of falling asleep in the back seat while your parents drove you home? You will never, ever experience that level of security again. Growing up is the constant disappointment in discovering that no-one is infallible: not your parents, not your teachers, not your personal heroes, certainly not your politicians.

It’s dangerous to rely on the judgement of ‘grown-ups’, or to wait until someone gives you permission to act. Sometimes you have to take the initiative, even if it means doing slightly goofy stuff…

Digital Minimalism review - cover image gazing into the abyss

Digital Minimalism Review: Gazing Into the Abyss

Last updated: July 3, 2020 | Published on February 12, 2019 | Richard Meadows

Maybe you hear a mischievous little voice in your head that whispers ‘jump!’ every time you walk across a bridge, or lean over a balcony. In a similar way, I have recurring fantasies of shutting down my social media profiles, deleting this website, and generally trying to erase my presence from the Internet.

And so, I need to read a book called Digital Minimalism like a depressed person needs a lecture on antinatalism. Of course, I read it anyway…

The Brave New World of Wireheading

Last updated: March 22, 2020 | Published on September 14, 2018 | Richard Meadows

The rat’s paw moves constantly, sometimes becoming a blur as it depresses the lever over and over. Once, twice, ten times, a hundred times, five thousand times in the space of an hour. With each push, an electrode sends a jolt of electricity coursing through its tiny rodent brain. The rat will push the lever for as long as 24 hours without stopping. It won’t eat, or sleep, or make any effort to leave the confines of its stainless steel cage. Unless the men in white lab coats cut off the current, it will stimulate itself to death.

It’s 1954, and science has just stumbled upon the brain’s pleasure center. Heady days! The excited researchers repeat the experiment on monkeys, and find, again, they can reach right into the hypothalamus and light it up like a Christmas tree, transforming their subjects into blissed-out automatons. The seminal paper concludes that these results could “very likely be generalized eventually to human beings—with modifications, of course”.

Of course…