Balance #1: Transport
Posted by Steven
One trick that allows Aristocratic Rockstars to thrive without going completely broke is the ability to know when to go all-out, when to be extremely modest, and when to hit the sweet spot in-between. We will explore different aspects of this balance in a series of posts.
For instance, let’s look at the simple problem of transport. People often find themselves needing to get from one place to another, and most people have a default method of transit that they just use, without even thinking about it. If you live in suburban America, you probably get in your car and drive. If you live in rural Kenya, you probably walk. The idea of walking to Wal*Mart is as foreign to the suburbanite as the idea of driving to pick up some firewood is to the Kenyan. By retaining a handful of options, the Aristocratic Rockstar can behave sometimes like the suburbanite, and sometimes like the Kenyan, without batting an eye. Bikes were covered in a previous post, and are a favorite of the AR, but the list might include something as fast as a jet plane, as slow as a raft, or as unexpected as riding horseback through a major downtown street.
En route to an upset girlfriend, your local Aristocratic Rockstar might employ running, biking, and taxi-cabbing (paying a little extra to load the bike in the trunk) all in the same, fluid motion. On the way to a boring job, on the other hand, the same AR might choose a scenic walk even when everyone else is zipping along at 45 m.p.h in a big hurry to be bored. It all depends on how fast you want to get there—something rarely considered by most of the population.
Exploring the more-nuanced “sweet spot”, we could consider a large group of people traveling to a nice restaurant in the bed of a beat-up pick-up truck, complete with broken turn signals and grinding noises…and then valet parking the truck. Or we might see an AR sublet their room for a month, use the money to buy a plane ticket to Europe, and then sleep on people’s couches, behind bushes, and in youth hostels, eating salami sandwiches in beautiful parks. A particularly skilled AR might actually save money over their normal expenses by doing such a thing.
More later, gentle reader, on the balance of food, the balance of drinking, the balance of housing, and much more.