Instant Gratification

We are raised in a world where if we do not get things when we want them then we are being wronged. It is so hard to do shopping online because once we place the order we must wait at least one day for it to arrive, or if we choose to save some more money we must wait a few days for it to get to our door. This is hard, especially when you want something. Unfortunately this is the direction that things have gone, our time and energy was spent in making things this way so that there is no point in waiting, I think few of us understand how to properly wait. I know for me it was a hard thing growing a garden, planting those seeds and then having to see if anything came from them. It took weeks for the little plants to break through the ground and each day I waited I was wondering if it would happen at all. But, they did come as they were supposed to, eventually. The unfortunate thing is, once they came, then they had to grow, and once they grew then they had to flower, and once they flowered they then had to produce their fruit. All of this took so long, but you know what? It was so worth the wait! Our garden didn't do very well this year, what do you expect though? It was our first try. We did however get to enjoy a few squash, zuchinni, tomatoes and lettuce which was nice. Things seem to taste better when you grow them, but you have to fight this desire for instant gratification to do it, wouldn't it just be easier to buy fresh stuff from the store? Well, yes, it would, but you would be paying a bit more for it.

The poison of instant gratification hits so many areas of your life, it can be a major hinderance to taking on any type of greening task. A lot of us will buy services to cater to our need for instant gratification. We will order movies through Pay-Per-View because we can't wait until the video is returned to the store or available through our movie service. Want to see a new release? Ha! Good luck with that, the movie industry has been making it difficult to get a new release unless you buy it or pay a premium to get it. This goes farther than entertainment though, we also want instant gratification in our personal care. For example, we want to eat something, so we use the microwave to heat up a pre-prepared meal, it takes an agonizing 5 minutes or so to do this, all the while we are withering away from hunger. Once it is done, we eat it, this might take us all of 10 minutes to do, assuming it isn't so hot that it could burn off our flesh. Well, maybe these numbers are exaggerated a bit, though they're pretty close for me when I used to eat this stuff. So, what's wrong with this practice? Well, for starters, these meals aren't that good for you. Most of them don't have much to offer for nutrition and if that isn't enough what they do give you is an overabundance of salt. Have you ever looked at the salt content of the things you eat? My wife and I started doing this probably about 2 years ago and what we saw was that we probably were consuming some 300-500% of our daily requirement every day because everything we made contained so much salt! In order to get away from this I made the decision to start making more of my own things, my wife didn't join me in this right away and so I had to work on it first. I started with our bread products, it wasn't the biggest contributor but it was probably the thing that would be easiest. I had started with making my own pizza dough, I had always wanted to but buying those packages where you add water and mix was so much easier I thought. Well, at the time, they were easier. My first crust came out, well, not so great. It was thick and chewy, not at all like what I wanted to eat consistently, though the flavor was a bit of an improvement. I tried again a few weeks later, it came out a little better but still too thick. I found that each time I tried making it the process got easier, though it will always be easier to add water I found that the flavor of the homemade stuff was worth the extra few minutes.

By this time our health wasn't that great, we were overly tired from working strange shifts and eating foods that were bad for us. I wanted to do more whole grain foods, but buying the premade stuff was out of the question, I didn't have it in our budget to double our food costs. So I kept working at finding a way to make something good, the next thing I chose to do was tortilla shells. We liked to eat burritos and the white shells were, well, bland to be honest, though we didn't know any better. So, I got to work making my first batch of tortilla shells, they weren't bad, but my wife said they weren't fluffy and so I had to keep trying. I tried another recipe and thought it was the most horrendous tortilla I had ever eaten. Frustrated that the recipes didn't produce what I wanted I began researching many recipes, finding common themes and trying to figure out what should go into a tortilla shell. What I came up with was an experiment, a set of basic measurements to make a small batch of shells. The first ones were flat and not fluffy enough, the second were too crispy, but by the third or fourth I was getting the hang of it and had made a recipe I could easily follow. It took time to make a batch of shells at first, but now I can have 4 shells done in about 10 minutes, the time it takes to start cooking the frozen meat we'd be using for the dish. To top it all off, the shells actually taste good and I learned a lot about how certain ingredients work and what dough should feel like.

After this I went back to pizza dough, I now knew what dough needed to feel like and found that when I made it this time I used almost 2 cups less flour than the recipe called for. The dough came out much better, it was fluffier and had a wonderful taste to it. After a few more successes I had a feel for pizza dough and then started to experiment, I added some garlic powder and Italian seasoning to the mix. Due to all this work we now, unfortunately, are pizza snobs. We'll eat the easy, frozen stuff or what is ordered, but it doesn't compare anymore. The pizza we make is always so much better, tastes wonderful, and the crust actually has some nutrition to it, it's a whole wheat, absolutely no white flour, crust! We use the freshest ingredients we can afford, the only thing coming from a can being the sauce (did I mention our garden didn't do as well as we hoped?) and we use, if we're lucky and it's on sale, 4 types of cheese and it is the most heavenly tasting pizza to me, so fantastic, oh, the thought of it makes me drool even right now and it isn't even lunch time yet.

So, what did all of this teach us? That instant gratification is so not worth it, by taking the time to fight against it we found that making things from scratch isn't really that hard once you've done it a few times and the results are so much more worth it. This also goes for buying things too, saving up to buy the thing you want is much better than buying the cheap knockoff that doesn't work, though there are times where the cheap stuff is as good as the original, but you have to spend some time researching it. Now, I'm not saying we never fill our need for instant gratification, it's just now we try our best to not fall for its ploys of being what we want. We hardly eat at fast food restaurants, which is good on our budget and on our health. Now these foods make my wife feel sick, which goes to show that you only realize it's bad for you when you give it up. Also, because we gave up a lot of this need, at least in food, we feel healthier, we have more energy and, this one being a bit sadder, we now can tell when the chef at a restaurant doesn't know how to cook. Salt stands out a lot in a recipe when you don't overuse it in your own. Well, I know this turned out to be more about food than anything else, but hopefully you can see the importance of fighting against the need of instant gratification. This fight should carry over into a lot of aspects of your life, you just need to learn to use the weapon to fight against it, and that is patience.

It's Just...

Two dangerous little words. "It's just..." can lead you to buy many things. So can the words "it's only". You have to pay attention to your language when you go out shopping. These words will quickly help you use up or go over on your budget. When I hear these words I like to repeat them back to the person, even if I'm the one who said them, reminding them that these are dangerous words. They had no intention of buying the additional item, they saw it and wanted it then and there. Now I must admit, there are times when it is good to buy items that you didn't plan on buying, for example, you might find a great deal on some fruit or juice, but you always need to ask yourself if your budget can handle the added expense, if so, by all means get the good thing that you would have wanted if it weren't for the excessive normal cost of it. In particular we like to get blueberries, blackberries and strawberries, normally they cost so much that we never plan on buying them and they are a treat when we find a deal on them. These end up being good extras for us, but we still need to be careful what extras we add into our shopping trip.

In order for us to not spend too much on things we make a list. Often the only list we need is a grocery list, however we find that we do better by making other lists, particularly when we plan to buy multiple items. For me, I get so distracted that I forget what I was after and see something else I want instead, then when I get home I remember what I forgot and have to go back, wasting time, money and gas. By making a list and trying your best to stick to it you keep yourself in check and your budget healthy. This means that instead of looking at your budget every month and saying, "Man, I really overspent," you get to look at it and say, "Alright! We actually made it a month on our budget." You'd be surprised how hard it is to keep to a budget, even more so when you get a tight one with very little wiggle room. This is the type of budget we have and it's sad how often I have to look to see where I can squeeze some funds to pay for what we needed to get, and most of the time it is needs, not careless spending on our desires.

So I am not proclaiming that I do any of this perfectly, but I do keep it all in mind when I go shopping. With just one child my budget can quickly go from on-track to way off, it's as simple as the words, "We need more diapers." We do our best to compensate for it, adjust a few shopping trips to a couple of the stores in order to come in pretty close to what we anticipate, but there are times where it just goes horribly wrong and we end up paying for our mistakes. However, our budget for most of the time works very well for us. The areas that I have to watch out for the type of language I mentioned is in my own personal monthly spending, it isn't much and if I use this language it will be gone before I get what I actually wanted that month. Often times food, quick, fast food meals, are the biggest waste of money for me. I don't always enjoy the food I ate and it wasn't very good for me anyway, had I taken the time to make it myself I would have been better off. The other thing I have to keep in mind when I'm watching my language is my long term goals, it is easy to bring a short term goal up to the top because you have money to do it now and that "it's just" makes it easy to finish that minor goal and neglect your major goal. Hopefully this all made sense to you and will help you as well. I recommend you pay very close attention to what you say or how you think about items, it could very well be your language usage leads you to saving more money and accomplishing more goals in the long run.