our grandparents and frugality-the green thing as a way to reduce -

So many interesting posts here.
I want to add that it is very beneficial to marry someone who is similar in frugality. It makes for a much happier marriage! I know this from experience.

Frugality is also stimulating for the mind, like a puzzle: how to make use of the as-yet-unused, how to solve a problem without going to the marketplace.

My wife is probably the best user of solar energy in the neighborhood. She dries the laundry in the sun on dry days. Sun-drying gives a great feeling to the clothes. Net cost of the solar installation: a $20 portable rack, which now I could build myself from scrap, since I have the basic idea of it. For years we had a drier but never used it, so we just got rid of it. On rainy or coldest days, she puts the rack in the living room instead, and that even helps keep the heating system from becoming not too dry in the winter. Once every couple years or so we'll take bulky quilts or such for drying in a laundromat.

I was reading the 1930s diary of my grandmother about ten years ago. Grandpa and Grandma made work clothes out of burlap sacks, and enjoyed hunting raccoon. I'm sure they used every bit of it they could! Grandmother was especially a great inspiration for me and other siblings/cousins, for activities like canning, gardening, harvesting fruits, etc.

Small, efficient houses were the norm for that generation, and even till the 1970s small houses were typical. Now the houses marketed as "eco-friendly" and "eco-conscious" houses are generally huge with tall ceilings. It's just eco-virtue-signaling, as the heating  and A/C bill will be enormous, not to mention the cost of the twice-weekly maid.

Nowadays I commute past the long waiting line of cars for the food bank twice a week. Long line of cars, almost all of them nice, even new-looking. At any rate, most of them nicer than my car. Going to the foodbank is not frugality. Often it is the opposite: those people are suffering from a lack of frugality. They get deep under with loans and "financing" then can't feed themselves or their families. They buy $50,000+ cars then look for handouts. Modern society is suffering from really warped priorities, specifically from a lack of frugality. My wife and I probably earn less than most of those people in the food bank line, and we drive kinda frumpy cars, but we feel like a king and queen, having everything we need and want, eating great fresh interesting food, with no feelings of being limited by money.

So many interesting posts here.
I want to add that it is very beneficial to marry someone who is similar in frugality. It makes for a much happier marriage! I know this from experience.

Frugality is also stimulating for the mind, like a puzzle: how to make use of the as-yet-unused, how to solve a problem without going to the marketplace.

My wife is probably the best user of solar energy in the neighborhood. She dries the laundry in the sun on dry days. Sun-drying gives a great feeling to the clothes. Net cost of the solar installation: a $20 portable rack, which now I could build myself from scrap, since I have the basic idea of it. For years we had a drier but never used it, so we just got rid of it. On rainy or coldest days, she puts the rack in the living room instead, and that even helps keep the heating system from becoming not too dry in the winter. Once every couple years or so we'll take bulky quilts or such for drying in a laundromat.

I was reading the 1930s diary of my grandmother about ten years ago. Grandpa and Grandma made work clothes out of burlap sacks, and enjoyed hunting raccoon. I'm sure they used every bit of it they could! Grandmother was especially a great inspiration for me and other siblings/cousins, for activities like canning, gardening, harvesting fruits, etc.

Small, efficient houses were the norm for that generation, and even till the 1970s small houses were typical. Now the houses marketed as "eco-friendly" and "eco-conscious" houses are generally huge with tall ceilings. It's just eco-virtue-signaling, as the heating  and A/C bill will be enormous, not to mention the cost of the twice-weekly maid.

Nowadays I commute past the long waiting line of cars for the food bank twice a week. Long line of cars, almost all of them nice, even new-looking. At any rate, most of them nicer than my car. Going to the foodbank is not frugality. Often it is the opposite: those people are suffering from a lack of frugality. They get deep under with loans and "financing" then can't feed themselves or their families. They buy $50,000+ cars then look for handouts. Modern society is suffering from really warped priorities, specifically from a lack of frugality. My wife and I probably earn less than most of those people in the food bank line, and we drive kinda frumpy cars, but we feel like a king and queen, having everything we need and want, eating great fresh interesting food, with no feelings of being limited by money.