Review: The Year of Less by Cait Flanders

I am pretty picky about the books I read. But from time to time I try to pick up a book almost entirely at random. I’ve found great new authors and grabbed books at the library for almost no reason and discovered that it was exactly what I needed to read even if I’m clearly not the intended audience and sometimes, like with “The Year of Less” by Cait Flanders what I took from the book was only tangentially related to the subject of the book.

What is “The Year of less” by Cait Flanders

Cait Flanders is a finance blogger. She began her blog trying to dig herself out of 30,000 dollars in consumer debt thanks to the use of credit cards, and once she did, she began to save money for the future. In “The Year of Less” she took this one step further by not shopping for an entire year. She would of course buy food, and she could replace something that broke (like her phone that stopped working partway through the year), but she wouldn’t shop.

I would reiterate at the point how little relevance this really had to me. I have never been in debt and never bought much of anything I didn’t need besides from time to time buying something in the Steam Summer Sale that I didn’t currently have time to play. But as I began to read the book, I understood the shopping ban was really more about something I could understand. Trying to control your impulses and desires and choosing to face things rather than hide behind habits that let you ignore them. For Cait, this was shopping. I have my own walls.

Beyond that, like any good blogger, Cait can mix her personal life and her the subject she is writing about. Turning her book into a sort of memoir for the year and discussing major events that happened in that year and how the shopping ban intersected with that. That gave me a lot of insight into her and made it easy to pull for her as she struggled with being sober, not shopping, and several major life changes all in the same year.

And while all of that was interesting, and I enjoyed getting to know her and listening to some of her struggles and triumphs, but one of the major things that I focused on in this book was completely tangential to that. Cait is a blogger and a freelancer and as I listened, I was often most interested in those things. I am what you might call a binge marketer. I work to market my work and myself over a few weeks or even months, and then most of those habits fall away and I return to spending almost no time actually selling the things that I make. And simply hearing the story of someone who can make money doing what I want to be doing reminded me I needed to focus more on that.

Thais is probably a classic example of observer bias, and I doubt anyone else would get any of that from the book. But I’ve already begun to work on some basic things that I’ve been putting off for far too long. And that is less tangential related to this book. Because as Cait said near the end of the book changes pay compound interest. Changing one part of your life impacts everything else. Good changes make everything else better. They give you confidence that you can do things you didn’t know you could do. In Cait’s life, that might be making candles or learning to garden. For me, it’s getting over my nervousness at talking about myself. But either way, it’s about changing a habit that feels useful but is actually holding you back. And while the path that we need to take may be different, I can honestly say that seeing someone else improve their life always inspires me to do the same.

Conclusion

Most of what I got out of this book wasn’t really what the book was about. And yet I recommend it, especially to people who feel the desire to cut back on spending and learn to by happy with less. But even if that isn’t your thing, this is a well written and smart book that delves deep into the mind of someone like so many of us with bad habits and addictive tendencies and shows part of the path out of that. And that is always worth taking the time to look at.