Previously: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 and 4
So here is where the grim regularity kicks in. Leftover pasta is freshened up with some sliced kalamata olive and pan-toasted Turkish bread with garlic butter. These were the top slices whose counterparts were consumed the preceding and following night. (Waste nothing!)
The following night, in an effort to use the Turkish bread before it goes stale, and the tinned ham before it's a biohazard, I go lazy. This is the sort of thing I'd have prepared for myself in the bad old days, before I started looking after myself. Ham and eggs on toast, with pumpkin and coleslaw.
It's a bit perfunctory, and too light on the vegetables for my liking. Also stirs up bad memories of dragging myself out of bed, hungover as usual, with the promise of a breakfast fry-up as the early highlight of a rapidly degenerating day.
To round off the week, it's back to the lamb chops. This time with potato salad rather than coleslaw. You may now be getting some sense of the difficulty of maintaining variety, while eating cheaply and without waste, from a bar fridge and cooktop. This week has seen a higher meat quotient than usual, but it hasn't been too far from average.
The reason for posting this is not to say "woe is me; look at my meagre lifestyle". I've been living more or less like this since initiating some huge life changes from a starting position that was very far from ideal, and I am tremendously proud of how far I've come. On the specific issue of keeping myself vertical and free of scurvy, I find it an interesting technical challenge, and when the stars align and I make a very satisfying meal, I'm very pleased with myself. Apparently, a lot of people in this situation feel the same.
Moreover, since this year at least, I've been living like this as a deliberate choice. I have a lot of things I want to do with the rest of my life, and none of them are compatible with a full-time job. I'm not exactly thrilled by the discomfort or precarity of my situation, or that I'm destined to work till I drop off my perch, but I do accept a significant measure of responsibility for it.
What has shocked me is the degree to which I'm merely ahead of the curve when it comes to my lifestyle. Most of my close cohort in age and general demographic background (i.e. the most white and middle class people imaginable) appear to have at least some equity in a comfortable and secure place to live. However when I look to people ten years or more younger than I, such security becomes a more remote possibility, and among non-Anglo or other minority communities, forget it. A lot of my work colleagues in recent years are pretty much resigned to living with chronic housing stress, underhoused, insecure, and with no prospect of seeing out their years in comfortable retirement. (Or else they're not yet old enough to see they've been sold an empty promise of advancement.)
As I've looked into how the Australian housing crisis is mirrored by the US housing crisis, the UK housing crisis, the Canadian housing crisis, and so on, regularities emerge that are hardly surprising. Take a set of broadly similar countries and punch the same policy prescriptions into the system for half a century, and one shouldn't be shocked to observe similar outcomes. It's especially visible in housing, but it generalises to a broad systemic economic dysfunction which leaves nations of historically unprecedented wealth apparently unable to adequately meet the basic needs of substantial segments of their population.
And the mainstream of the economics profession is unable to account for this degenerating state of affairs, or to suggest any response, beyond crude Malthusianism. The poor will always be with us; sit tight and let the market sort it out. Let us explain to you how the system is actually in a finely-honed optimal state. Don't touch it; you'll only break it!
Anyway, I'll be working on this for the foreseeable, while living modestly and eating relatively healthily. Fundamental uncertainty permitting.