The Wilderness Diaries, Episode 2: Cutting the Cloth
That was it. I was on my own. On a melancholic Monday morning, I woke up with nothing to get up for. Everyone else was squeezing onto public transport. I was at home, and my mind still told me to hurry, that I would be late.
I was not late.
No commute. No coffee, well, coffees, from the usual chain. No dropping shirts at the dry cleaner. No booked class at the gym. No clean shave either. The stubble became de rigueur, and it is relatively trendy these days, I told myself.
What came to mind was a university lecture on household behaviour and James Duesenberry’s theory: people spend according to the standard of living they have grown used to, and resist cutting back when their income falls.
I never found that convincing, at least for me. My first instinct was the opposite. To last as long as possible without a job, my standard of living had to drop.
The most drastic change was cancelling my monthly travelcard, £171. I dusted off my commuter bike, which I still use today, even for the occasional interview. Next went my subscriptions, including a fancy AI one. Another £70 saved. Dry cleaning followed. After all, I now had plenty of time to wash and iron my shirts, albeit irregularly.
Warren Buffett once observed that you only find out who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out. I was determined to keep my trunks on. A few ex-colleagues were not so lucky. More on that later.
It sounded like a tidy cost-saving exercise, but it came at a mental cost. It was not the money I missed so much as the extras: the coffees, the races abroad, the small pleasures that make a week feel normal. I was suddenly staring at survival rather than living, and I wondered whether that would send me spiralling.
Then another idea occurred to me: should I claim Jobseeker’s Allowance? No. A financier does not do that. That was how I felt for the first few weeks. I realised quickly that claiming was not a matter of pride. It was a necessity.
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