The Internet folk hero talks about her high-tech job and her low-cost lifestyle
Age: 41
Location: Randolph, VT
Why we care: To some hardcore netizens, Jessamyn West is an Internet folk hero. She moderates the community weblog Metafilter, one of Time Magazine's Best Websites of 2009, runs the popular librarian resource site Librarian.net, and lectures on the overlap of technology and humanity. She also gets gadgets for free and sleeps in, which makes her career success additionally admirable.
You once said: "I have always had a frugality that bordered on the obsessive. I don't like to buy extraneous paper products, I almost never buy new clothes. I reuse and recycle and repair as much as I can." Always, really? Like, from birth? Is it something you've had to work at?
It's a joke that until I got to college, I thought we were poor. My mother was always giving me a hard time about, "don't use butter, use margarine." Once I met kids who were on full financial aid, I suddenly realized that we weren't even close to poor. But it was definitely like, if you don't need to spend money on this, or you can get it from somewhere else, or you can repurpose something, or you can build it yourself...
How did that affect your outlook as an adult?
Now that I've got what I think a lot of people would consider a completely reasonable income/lifestyle/whatever, it means that I don't spend a lot of money. But when I want to spend money on something that I care about, it's available to me, and I don't really have to balance. I don't really have to budget, which is kind of a nice luxury to have when you're 41.
When you discovered that you hadn't grown up as poor as you'd thought, were you resentful?
I was definitely pissed off. There were ways that we scrimped in our family based on what I saw as my mother's concern about not having enough money, but not an actual rational assessment about how much money we had. Like, fighting with your child who wants to put butter on her popcorn, and saying, use margarine, it's cheaper, really strikes me as misplaced priorities.
What about the other way around?
I know people who are like, It's a special day, so even though we don't have any cash and we're living on credit, let's blow $200 on dinner and drinks. That's money that they don't have, but they don't want to let money get in the way of their human interactions. That's problematic too.
For a lot of people who live a more creative lifestyle, internalizing financial discipline and not telling themselves that they've become a conservative person is difficult.
I wanted to be my own boss. I don't want to have to get out of bed before noon. That's my goal. It sounds totally selfish and slothful, but I want to do the things that make me happy. I don't want to have to wake up to an alarm clock and drag my ass out of bed when it's dark out. And having money in the bank enables me to be able to pick and choose.
So now that you can get out of bed when you want to, do you have other money-related goals?
I have a house, I have a job I really like, I live in a town I really like, I have money in the bank, so what motivates me? It's like, okay, now that you've stocked away a bunch of cash, what do you do? I've been more philanthropic for the last couple of years. I pay my shareware fees now. I didn't used to. And that's kind of cool. I help other people, take other people out to lunch, because I have extra cash. But figuring out the motivation, that's the hard part. Do you just accumulate until you die, and then you leave it to the ASPCA? I don't know.
You were a guest blogger on BoingBoing, you go to SXSW, you know a lot of high-tech enthusiasts who can afford, and buy, all the latest, shiniest toys. Is it hard not to spend all your money on stuff like that?
When I was a kid, my dad was a big gadget freak. Still is, actually. I grew up with gadgets that I didn't have to pay for, and bizarrely, I am now an adult like that. I've got a pretty nice computer, and a pretty nice laptop, and an iPhone, and a crappy phone that's my actual phone that I use, and I'm sitting here in a Herman Miller chair. But I have all that because it comes along with the job that I love [Metafilter]. I didn't have to have the conversation with myself over whether I thought it was worth it. Someone else decided that it was worth it, and I thought, that's okay, I would like having that computer or that chair.
Does that extend to more mainstream technology, like cars?
I drive a 15-year-old station wagon. People make fun of me. They're like, you have a real job, why do you drive that shitty car? And I'm like, uh, it's paid for? And sometime in the past couple of years, I decided that I wasn't going to take red-eye flights anymore. I could spend another couple hundred bucks to take a flight later in the day. That matters to me. My shitbox automobile, not so much.
You also travel all over. Have you found some places a lot easier to live in on a budget than others?
It's very neighborly here, and so there's a lot of stuff you get from people that you don't even have to pay cash for. People trade stuff. You fix my car, I help you with your website kinda thing. But the other reason it's really cheap in Vermont is that there's absolutely nothing to do here, in the conventional sense. If I wanted to go out right now and see a movie, I'd have to drive an hour. But it's like, we have one movie theater in town, and it's only got one movie, and maybe I've already seen that movie.
Why did you leave the west coast?
I moved out of Seattle in 2000 because everybody there was kind of getting rich, spending more money, and I was just less comfortable there.
What's it like when friends from far away come into contact with your current lifestyle?
A lot of people visit, and they're like, so what do you do for fun around here? We sit around and play Scrabble, we read, we go to other people's houses and eat dinner with them. But what we don't do is, we don't go out and drop $50 on dinner and a movie for two people.
Are you rich now? And other invasive questions for notable folks, in previous episodes of Other People's Money:- Selling her clothes and giving to charity: Media blogger Rachel Sklar
- Saving for retirement and learning the value of a dollar: CollegeHumor founder Ricky Van Veen
- The benefits of can collecting: Day trader-turned-Wikinvest founder Mike Sha
- Real men don't buy flowers: Dating site CEO Brian Phillips, in a special Valentine's Day OPM
- Asking people for money is hard: 23-year-old mayor Justin Nickels
