[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]In Michigan you get[.small-caps] ten cents for returning empty cans and bottles, and my parents used to pull over and pick them up off the side of the road. My mother still drives six miles out of her way for the cheap gas in the rougher part of town, and most nights she eats whatever’s about to go bad in the refrigerator. She’s had the same dishwasher for forty years; the door slants down now, so the dishes slide out every time you open it. When I visit and offer to take her out, she’ll tell me she’s got some hot dogs in the freezer.[.article__paragraph--cap]

My father, who died twelve years ago, taught high school history, and my mother was a visiting nurse. She is eighty-three years old and has two and a half million dollars in the bank.

None of this is about the money. For my mother, thrift isn’t a means to an end, or an identity. She isn’t running the numbers or turning thrift into a self-improvement project. She has no real philosophy, and couldn’t articulate one if she did. It’s closer to a reflex – the visceral reaction of someone who can’t stand to watch a plate of food go in the trash.

As a kid, I thought my parents were idiots. Why would two working adults spend twenty minutes scrounging around in a ditch or risk getting carjacked at a gas station in Detroit? And it wasn’t that they were all that cheap. They may have spent a lot of time arguing about which gas station didn’t charge for air, but they’d drop seven thousand dollars on a family trip to Europe every summer.

What I didn’t understand until I was much older was that I’d had it backward. It wasn’t a calculation – it was a discipline. And it leaked into every aspect of their lives: what they threw away, what they let stay broken, how they treated the people around them. What I’d mistaken for stinginess was a practice. There’s a word for it, though we mostly use it now to mean cheap. The word is frugality – and we’ve forgotten it was ever a virtue at all. I caught the tail end of it, just before our culture stopped treating wastefulness as a vice and before we forgot that there is such a thing as wanting too much.

My grandparents would have recognized it instantly. My children have no idea it exists. My father was born in Detroit during the Depression. My mother’s parents were Mennonites who grew up in Ukraine during the famine of 1921 that killed as many as a million people. My oma told us stories of eating grass and the straw from the roofs of their houses, in a countryside ravaged by civil war. A few years later, the family emigrated to Canada. The empty pop bottles were an echo of all of it.

When my mom was little, her opa would ask her if she was the biggest one in her class. Not the smartest, not the prettiest. The biggest. My parents were raised by people who had starved – for whom waste was unthinkable, and saving was never only about yourself, because giving meant survival. Waste was a sin.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]The language of sin[.small-caps] was there to remind you that you were a divided creature – that part of you wanted things you shouldn’t want and would lie to you about it – and that becoming a decent person meant struggling against that part instead of just giving in to it. Lose the words and you lose the struggle. The divided self is still there but you stop seeing it. Without the fight, there’s no character to develop – nothing left to shape you but your own appetites. It’s all id and no superego – a self to satisfy instead of one to get over.[.article__paragraph--cap]

All of this reflects a much bigger shift. The old moral language assumed the self was a problem to be worked on; the modern one treats it as an oracle: live your truth, trust your gut, you’re perfect exactly as you are. And once the self is sovereign, there’s no place left to stand from which wasting something, or wanting too much, could register as a failing at all. It’s just a choice.

My mother doesn’t understand any of this. If you tried to explain the divided self, she’d get irritated, say “Oh, Robert,” and go back to wrapping the heel of the bread and putting it in the freezer. Last Thanksgiving I watched my sister scrape half a roast chicken into the trash. My mother called it a sin. She wasn’t moralizing. There was no thought behind it at all – the words just came out of her, the way “ouch” comes out before you’ve decided if it hurts.

You don’t need to understand why waste is wrong any more than you need to understand why you flinch at a snake. Understanding was never the point.

We forgot that frugality was once a virtue, the same way we forgot what sin was for. Both were ways of telling ourselves that we are imperfect, divided creatures, and that appetite is to be mastered, not indulged. A self with no gap between impulse and act isn’t free; it just does the next thing its animal appetite demands. This is the oldest trap in the business. Satisfying a desire doesn’t get rid of it; it feeds it. Desire begets desire. All the donuts in the world will never be enough.

Philosophers from Aristotle to the Stoics and Aquinas organized a life around virtue and asked what a good life was; we have organized ours around freedom and ask only what we want. They feared that a people without limits would become tyrants or hedonists. But the truth was smaller and more pathetic. We became consumers – reaching for the next thing, driven by appetites we mistake for choices.

So we keep reaching. But we’re no longer chasing pleasure; we’re trying to fill something. Waste isn’t bad because it’s inefficient. It’s bad because of what it reveals: the residue of a self trying to fill a hole, in a culture that has engineered the friction out of wanting. A click on Amazon, a tap on DoorDash, one more scroll – each shrinking the gap where you might have sat with the hole long enough to ask why it was there to begin with. But the hole was never an appetite. It was the place where meaning, a sense of purpose, and what your life was for were supposed to go. We’ve been trying to fill it with stuff because we lost not just the words for what belongs there but the whole moral order they described. You can see it in what we consume and what we throw away. My grandparents ate grass and the straw off their roofs to stay alive. Two generations later, the average American throws out more than three hundred pounds of food a year.

When the self becomes the highest authority, when nothing stands between wanting and getting and everything is permitted, the shared moral order dissolves. We lose any agreed-upon sense of better and worse, and can’t even talk about how to live a good life without feeling embarrassed. The culture’s answer has been to wave the problem away: follow your passion, do what you love, and let the hard parts take care of themselves. But that misunderstands what life is. Meaning isn’t found in a hot tub with a margarita once all the dissatisfaction and pain are gone. It’s found in the struggle. The struggle isn’t the obstacle to a good life; it is the good life.

You can put that struggle off, or paper it over by buying something every time you feel restless, irritable, and discontent so that you never quite have to feel it. But you can’t escape it, and if you keep putting it off, you never grow. You will always be ruled by your appetite, wanting what you want the instant you want it, unable to bear even the smallest gap between wanting and having.

But spending less is still not a virtue. The miser hoards out of greed, the man saving to retire at forty does so out of ambition, and the minimalist shows off his bare apartment out of vanity. All three spend little and waste less, but they’re as ruled by the self as any Amazon shopper – still wanting.

Real frugality – what the word used to mean, before we turned it into a synonym for cheapness – is what all three of them are missing. It’s thrift without ego. It’s not being stingy to add to your pile, or saving so you can quit your shitty job, or driving a twelve-year-old Honda so people will admire your values. Frugality is a practice. You don’t throw half a chicken in the garbage, because waste is a sin. Because what you’ve been given is a blessing that was never only yours to throw away. It is the virtue we forgot. It’s what turns the small daily acts – the cans, the cheap gas, the heel of the bread – into a way of living.

The food you scrape into the trash was grown by someone, on land that could have fed someone, and it ends up in a landfill someone else has to live beside. Most of what you waste doesn’t disappear; it just becomes someone else’s problem. This is what we forgot: frugality was never about you. It’s about everyone else – the recognition that you are not alone in the world, that you are one of eight billion, living, as my father used to say, in your own small corner of the universe.

On Ben Franklin’s list of thirteen virtues, frugality was number 5: “Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.” Number 13 was humility, which many, including Franklin, saw as the governing virtue because it’s the one that keeps the others honest. Without it order can become tyranny, temperance joyless asceticism, and conviction zealotry.

But you can’t practice humility directly. There’s no drill called “being humble.” That’s the problem with most of the virtues: they’re hard to get your arms around. How do you practice courage while filing your tax returns? Wisdom while doing the dishes? Generosity while mowing the lawn? The occasions come rarely, and never when you’re ready for them. It’s hard to schedule an hour of moderation.

Frugality is different. Its occasions are everywhere, woven into the most ordinary parts of the day. Every time you stand at the gas station, or fill a grocery cart, or scrape a plate, the choice is right in front of you: waste or don’t, spend or don’t.

And practice, it turns out, is everything. Fifteen years ago, I came up with what felt like an ingenious solution to my heroin addiction: I would lock the drugs in a timed safe and wean myself off. The first time I set the timer for six hours and spent the last ninety minutes staring at it, snorted my ration, and then reset it for ten hours. Three hours later I smashed the safe open with a hammer. No one understood my addiction better than I did. I understood everything except how to stop.

Self-knowledge didn’t get me sober. Going to meetings, making amends, and helping others did. Doing those things ten thousand times, until the doing took root somewhere in the unconscious parts of me that act on their own, without asking permission.

Frugality works the same way. It isn’t a philosophy you study and adopt; it’s a practice you repeat until it stops being something you do and becomes something you are. My mother never decided to be frugal. It wormed its way into her long before she could question it, put there by people who had no choice – and it’s still there, running underneath everything, quietly doing its good work whether she thinks about it or not.

But like the other virtues, frugality can be hijacked by the very self it was meant to discipline. Like meditation – a practice meant to dissolve the self, repackaged as a way to improve it – it can get enlisted to serve the ego. What protects both of these practices is the one virtue the self can’t conscript: humility. Every other virtue can be hijacked by pride – you can be proud of your courage, your discipline, your generosity. Humility is the exception. The moment you’re proud of it, it’s gone. Humility is what turns thrift into frugality. It’s the difference between hoarding for yourself and saving for everyone else. Thrift only becomes frugality when it stops being about you.

Frugality resists several sins at once – greed’s hunger for more, gluttony’s worship of appetite, pride’s need for display, sloth’s love of convenience – which is why a culture built on all four can no longer see frugality as a virtue at all. We can still see budgeting as prudence and minimalism as taste, but we’ve lost the moral core: frugality as a way of decentering the self, of admitting that you aren’t the only thing that matters, of leaving the last slice of pizza for someone else. We didn’t lose the virtue by escaping poverty or getting richer. We lost it by building a culture where the self is sovereign and getting what you want is the highest good – because a culture organized around endlessly feeding the self can’t recognize a virtue whose entire purpose is to feed it less.

[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]My aunt Betty[.small-caps] was ten years old when she left Ukraine. She never married and never had children of her own, but she had nine nieces and nephews. She spent most of her life bottling ketchup at the Heinz plant in Leamington, Ontario. She lived in a one-bedroom house and often ate cornflakes for dinner. A few days after Christmas every year – what we called Aunt Betty’s Christmas – she had everyone over, cramming all the families into that little house. Every family went home with the same two gifts: a big bottle of Heinz ketchup and a five-gallon jug of Tide. No wrapping, nothing shiny, nothing you’d throw in the trash by February. When she died, she left more than a million dollars, divided among some twenty-five grand-nieces and grand-nephews.[.article__paragraph--cap]

I caught the tail end of my family’s frugality. I freeze the heel of the bread and get upset when food is thrown in the trash. But I’m the watered-down version. I was raised with coupons but a refrigerator that was always full; my kids think whatever you want shows up on the porch the next day.

In the end, you are what you do, not what you think or believe. Repeated across a lifetime, these small acts harden into what we used to call character. My mother knows none of this, and if she ever read this essay, she’d quit somewhere around the word “superego.” She didn’t send us to the movies with our own popcorn, give us powdered milk, or jam the nearly empty bag of chips into our lunch boxes rather than waste a Ziploc because she wanted to embarrass us, or because she’d thought about appetite or stewardship or the bondage of the self. She did it because waste is a sin. Because there are hot dogs in the freezer.

[.smalltext]Visit The Laughing Ape for an expanded version of this piece.[.smalltext]