Monthly Totals

Unless I decide to spend an unforeseen amount of money tomorrow, or if I decide to go out tonight--which is sitting at a comfortable 50% chance right now--it would look like my monthly spending has come to its total and it once again is slightly over $900.

And again that still feels like way too much for me to be spending, especially considering that I've managed to remain without a car, which alone saves me almost $300 a month. Picturing myself spending almost $1200 a month with those car expenditures seems even more lavish, if not almost too expensive even.

But once I remind myself--and my don't I need to constantly do that for myself?--that while my goal here is to generally do as much nothing as possible, it's specifically to spend under an average of $1000 a month for an entire year. And not only am I successfully carrying out that goal at the moment, an average of $900 a month calculates out to a mere $10,800 over the course of the year.

And while that may sound like nearly a million dollars to a third world resident--though I do not mean to speak for someone I have never met--in terms relative to my home and its financial standards of living I am far from living a lavish or even, statistically speaking, a comfortable lifestyle.

But yet, that's the very joke of it. For I am living as comfortably as I ever have. I always have enough money to satisfy my occasional consumer impulse and have even continued to save money for yet another possible trip across country or to give up work altogether for a few more months in the near future.

I don't know where this internal pressure I'm always putting on myself comes from, but once I put it into these terms and relate them to my surroundings, they seems all too pointlessly burdensome if not ridiculously unnecessary.

Though so too does the idea of having any more money than I already have.