Conditioning Yourself to Give
By: Kamya Ramaswamy
Tags: Generosity, Changing Your Life, Giving, Inner Journey, Life Lessons

I grew up frugal. Let me paint a picture. My parents wouldn’t let me donate clothes unless I had outgrown them. We had a storage room in the basement where we’d stock food items that we found on sale, and then buy like, 10 of them and keep them until the next sale. My mother would feel like she had failed if something in the fridge went bad and she had to throw it out, and I can only remember her doing that a handful of times over 25 years.

My parents would keep everything from my childhood, including a small xylophone, which I used for practice through about 8 years of orchestra and band. We kept my childhood electric keyboard until I was married and had toddlers of my own. My dad insisted I keep both musical instruments so my kids could play them too.

My immigrant parents grew up with 8 and 14 kids in their respective families. It’s probably accurate to say that the life they built in Canada was the single largest accumulation of wealth in only one generation at any point in either of their family trees. They had much, much more, but they never left the frugal way each of them were raised. So this is how I grew up, as though resources were scarce, and to respect and use everything we had instead of thinking of it as disposable. Honestly, if everyone in every first-world developed nation went about their lives as my parents did, we would not be in the environmental crisis in which we presently find ourselves.

If everyone in Canada and the US were as careful with their money as well, it would not only tank the economy but severely curb the rampant consumerism that we as a society believe we must embrace. My family went clothes shopping at an outlet store maybe three times a year, and that was only when my brother and I were still quickly growing, up until our teenage years. And even then we each got three or four new items. We never felt like we didn’t have enough, but that was exactly what we had — just enough. Always just enough.

But here’s the flip side of growing up with decades of that frugal mentality, right from birth — you are forever in the mindset of conserving and storing resources. You spread the cream cheese on your bagel razor thin so that it’s just enough. You put a small blob of paint onto your palette so that it’ll be just enough of that colour for your picture and nothing will go unused. You think it over a few times before buying a sandwich outside because there’s food sitting in your fridge, and you’ve already got just enough groceries for this week. You don’t buy the sandwich because its addition will spill over into excess. And you’ve been conditioned into the religion of Just Enough.

Now, I grew up privileged. We were not left wanting for anything, but we also didn’t do luxuries. We ate at restaurants only on birthdays but did have fast food regularly. I suppose that conservation mentality the rest of the time gave us the money to spend on trips to India every few years, and allowed my parents to pay off their house relatively quickly in a choppy economic climate. But I also never learned to think beyond myself or my own resources. It didn’t occur to me until fairly recently that when you have a certain type of privilege (wealth; health; being straight; being cis; being male; and let’s be honest, being white), it comes with a responsibility to leverage that privilege to help balance the scales for those who don’t have the benefits of living as you have.

That wouldn’t have figured into my parents’ upbringing though. With a football team full of kids, you don’t — can’t — think beyond yourself or your immediate family. But we weren’t that family of 10-plus people anymore. We were wealthier than any of our ancestors had ever been in the old country, with 75% fewer kids.

It didn’t even cross my mind that the frugality that I’d thought was the norm was quite a fringe way of thinking. Not until I met my partner, who had grown up lower middle-class, but was raised to give one of whatever he happened to be holding, if he was holding two of it. My family gave on special occasions or when it suited our purposes, like on religious days where we honoured our ancestors by donating food, or food drives at my school. We didn’t just up and buy a bunch of clothes and give it to our nearest shelter. In fact, when I started doing that type of thing as an adult, my dad would question why because it wasn’t a full moon or a new moon day.

My partner was the one who turned the frugal philosophy of my entire upbringing on its head. When we were discussing this in our early days, he called it hording. I was insulted. I told him I wouldn’t have the savings I had, and I wouldn’t have been able to pay down debt without this mindset. He said that’s fine, insofar as my needs. But beyond one’s needs, it’s hording.

“Think about that keyboard,” he said. “Except for some dust, it doesn’t even look used. You think you were keeping it for when you would use it again, or when our kids would use it, but you kept it for 25 years, not using it at all in that time. Someone else, or several other people could have been using it during all those years. Now, it’s doubtful it may even switch on, and you don’t know for sure that our kids would even want a keyboard. If they do, they sure won’t want one that’s 25 years old. When you were 10 years old, would you have wanted a keyboard from 1967?”

Holy duck.

In my zeal to preserve and conserve a bunch of things, I’d been wasting the worst thing of all — time. I’d taken my parents’ style of life management and thought of it as gospel, going through my whole life not realising that it’s not about what I, singular, have and may or may not use. It’s about what I, singular, have that has a fair likelihood of being used by anyone, plural. It’s not about my life alone, it’s about the stuff being employed to improve someone else’s life.

Yes, I realise very few people’s lives will turn on an electric keyboard. For those of you who are anxious about that, it did switch on, and it was donated as soon as was humanly possible after that conversation. Another thing that dawned on me after hearing my partner’s take was about my parents’ dogma of saving every penny. It applied when they were growing up for obvious reasons, but they actually didn’t realise they had a lot more room to spend as adults than they allowed themselves. So much room, in fact, that my mom died not ever having enjoyed life because she was too focused on socking things away for a future she didn’t end up having.

I had to re-condition myself, and part of that involved actively telling myself that spending that extra $20 to drop off at a food bank wouldn’t take away from my retirement. What helped immensely was joining a fantastic Facebook page called Northern Canada Mini Projects, where so many of the members are like Santa on crack. The pure joy and rush these people get when they pack a box of new or gently used clothing, food, baby accessories, toiletries, or Christmas/summer gifts is contagious. Some of them even keep spreadsheets to track all the boxes they send up North to different locations, and many of them involve their friends and neighbours in group initiatives to share shipping costs.

Through them, I learned about what scarcity of resources actually looks like. It looks like $100 for a single watermelon or a $22 jar or peanut butter, because of the freight costs for everyday items to reach remote communities in Canada’s north. I learned about how hard these mostly Indigenous towns have to fight to get basic resources from the government, and how grateful they are that people in southern Canada are using part of their household budgets to help. Most importantly, I learned about the inimitable rewards of direct giving — handing food or clothes directly over to whomever they will benefit instead of donating $20 online to a charity that will use part of your gift for administrative fees and junk mail.

University me would think Today me is blowing through cash like there’s no tomorrow. But both versions of me have their budgets on the same spectrum, in the same range of what middle-class Canadians spend on extras. Only now, my priorities are different.

Also, think about it — there IS no guarantee of a tomorrow. There’s only a high likelihood of a tomorrow that we take for granted in order to avoid plunging ourselves into an existential crisis before we fall asleep at night. But there is a guarantee that there will always be a hungry person somewhere who has done everything they can to avoid going to get cans from a food bank. There’s a guarantee that there will be homeless people in Iqaluit, Nunavut, who have taken to sleeping under overturned canoes in -20 Celsius weather, who could sure use an insulated coat that’s in someone’s closet waiting to be worn for the first time in years. There is a guarantee that the women’s shelter in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut will have new tenants walk in with nothing but what’s in a backpack and what’s on their backs.

I read something profound once that I’ll always keep with me — that when you’re presented with a situation, the first thought that pops into your head is how you’ve been raised to react to it. Like seeing a lady walking down the street and immediately thinking she’s way too old to be wearing a skirt so short. But the subsequent thoughts that come into your head indicate what you’ve become, and what you really believe — like thinking, no, wait, she doesn’t need other people’s judgment. You rock that skirt, lady!

That’s the conditioning I hope to give my kids right now regarding giving. I don’t want generosity and openmindedness to be an afterthought the way it’s been for much of my life. When they have two of something, I want their immediate reaction to be to give at least one of them over to someone who doesn’t have any. When we go grocery shopping, I hope they’ll notice pasta is on sale and that we should buy a few for a box to send up North; not that we should buy a few to store in the basement. When their clothes are still in good condition but they want to buy a few different things for themselves, I hope they’ll pack them away to give to parents who can’t afford kids clothes — not pack them away to save for 30 years for their own kids.

After years of deconditioning and reconditioning to think of those people as part of my family and as part of the group of people for whom I budget, I’m happier with myself as a person. It’s the mental feeling of unzipping your skinny jeans and putting on those sweatpants. It’s the solace and reassurance that you’re going to be fine, even if you’re not in hunter-gatherer mode 24/7. But it’s also the constant awareness that unless you’re in more of a giving mode, someone else may not be fine. And I want to think of those someone else’s with as much regard as I think of my own kids.