Back in the balance

ARE you spending less? I am, and it feels like a lot of people around me are, too.

ARE you spending less? I am, and it feels like a lot of people around me are, too.

It's OK now to declare "I'm just not going into shops like I used to", or "I don't buy things anymore". Note, also, that word "things". Because looking back, what on earth did we spend all that money on? During those gluttonous, glary years of the early 21st century, when it felt like the bubble would never burst? And now, some kind of seismic shift is under way. Can you feel it?

A correcting, perhaps, in our spending habits, the way we live. A quietness is taking over.

It feels like we're all contracting, becoming more cautious, that we're all squirrels storing nuts for a coming winter we suspect will be long and hard. Like Antarctica crisp in the air of Tassie, this chill wind from other worlds is steely. What's next for crippled Europe? Will we be dragged into it?

Coupled with that, I suspect, is a growing revulsion over the monstrous excesses of several short years ago. I succumbed. My world was stained by it. We lived in a London pocket hosting two extremes of living - bankers in their rarified, six-storey villas, and the people rubbing up hard alongside them, in council estates erected on the bomb sites of villas flattened in the war (let's just say we were the squeezed middle.) We were surrounded by families with four cars, "one just for the motorway"; weekday nannies for each child as well as a weekend nanny; and burning Guy Fawkes effigies that wore Burberry coats. I've never felt more trapped, anxious, sour, than when living among this. It all felt so removed from the real world. These people made their money by exploiting other people's money - and expected to be rewarded with sickening sums of moolah for doing so. It wasn't creative, ennobling, inspiring in any way - and certainly wasn't cool. Who aspires to be a banker now?

In attempting to keep up with the Joneses the chap and I lived a precarious existence. Then something extraordinary happened.

We split open our lives to fate by mutually agreeing to quit our London lives and up sticks for a return to Australia. Almost instantaneously we felt a great weight lifting. An incredible lightness of being; an exhilaration. That the years of living on the edge and foolish competitiveness would all, suddenly, evaporate. And ahead, the gift of a simpler, sparer life. One that might still be beholden to monthly mortgage payments but would feel far less fretful, anxious, clenched. Suddenly I felt stronger than I had for years. Free. I'd forgotten that rupture can be good, cleansing, correcting. It was a hugely constructive time and we've lived with that sense of frugality ever since. Three kids now share a bedroom, the watch is a Swatch and the car's a Kia. We've never been happier.

Who at the moment is living gracefully with excessive wealth? My favourite: J.K. Rowling. She made her money by exploiting neither people nor land, and her large charitable donations have helped to boot her out of the ranks of the world's dollar billionaires this year, according to Forbes magazine. Then there's our own mining billionaires. Plundering our common wealth yet bleating over having to pay the mining tax on the back of eye-watering profits. To me it feels petulant, juvenile, a massively greedy and ugly dummy-spit; and out of step with sentiment brewing in the rest of the world. Warren Buffett calling for higher taxes for America's super rich; a French group, including L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt and Total's Christophe de Margerie, doing the same. Our Aussie lot feel glaringly at odds with a collective global consciousness gathering force, a sense of responsibility that's being voiced, astonishingly, from the rarefied top. Congratulations, Gina, you're now the wealthiest woman in the world. My question for you is, what on earth are you going to do with it?

[e-mail]