Description
Welcome to Frugality Version 2.0. Never has such a compelling case been made for putting your wallet away and looking around at every other form of pleasure with freshly attentive eyes.
Annie and Adam are lifelong cheapskates who operate on the principle that enjoying life is a lot more likely to happen if you learn how to do it on little or no money. Decades of this approach saw them realise they also had more free time, savings, and flexibility than many of their more fiscally-oriented peers. Not to mention smaller ecological footprints, and blissful immunity to a raft of common modern ills, from social isolation to obesity.
The Art of Frugal Hedonism reveals their core strategies for lowering your consumption while raising your quality of life. Whether you are already challenging cultural consumption assumptions (but would love a little backup), or are looking for a real kickstart to help you revise your current relationship with spending, there is something in here for you.
Online preview of The Art of Frugal Hedonism
Reviews
“The freest and most contented people pretty much follow the advice in The Art of Frugal Hedonism.” ~ Clive Hamilton, author of Growth Fetish and co-author of Affluenza.
“The Art of Frugal Hedonism is an absolute joy. It is good-natured not pious, humane not self-righteous and a guide to ethical living that makes the impossible possible. I am happy to make this my bible.” ~ Christos Tsiolkas, author of The Slap
“An invaluable harvest of tips oozing with hedonistic wit and wonder. Packed with ideas about why and how we are to live with less to ensure we have a hell of a lot more.” ~ Meg Ulman, co-author of The Art of Free Travel
“In an age that is obsessed with consumer trinkets and oblivious to waste, the philosophy of frugal hedonism provides a welcome and necessary antidote. The simplicity of this message is profound. Be frugal and be free.” ~ Samuel Alexander, co-director of the Simplicity Institute
Published May 2024
Melliodora Publishing
Paperback, 224 pages, b&w, A5.
ISBN: 9780645606539
About the Authors
After being born in a snowstorm in Boulder, Colorado, and raised in the baking summers of Western Australia, Annie ran away to Melbourne in search of Art. She found it; grew cynical about it; became a professional horticulturalist, an amateur ecologist, and a passionate long-distance hiker. Journeys up many volcanoes and across several deserts ensued. At some point she became cynical about life without art, and started writing.
Her interest in human relationships to landscape led to teaching workshops on foraging, which led to co-authoring The Weed Forager’s Handbook: A Guide to Edible and Medicinal Weeds in Australia and the children’s book Let’s Eat Weeds: A Kids’ Guide to Foraging. Lust for life and extreme scepticism about consumption as a route to contentment led to writing The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide To Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More.
These days, Annie has run away back to Western Australia, where she’s working on her sunburn, her backstroke, and how to think better thoughts about the Anthropocene. Her first novel Once was shortlisted for the 2025 Western Australian Premier’s Book Award. A second novel and a book about human-animal interactions is taking shape.
Adam has voluntarily spent much of his adult life as a frugalist, including stretches spending radically tiny amounts – think under AU$2000 annually. He loves the challenge. What’s more, it gives him time to do unpaid work, such as the years he spent founding and developing the energy news website EnergyBulletin.net (now Resilience.org).
He’s also one of the co-founders of the global permablitz movement of volunteer-executed garden makeovers, and has hosted weekly radio shows Food Fight and Greening the Apocalypse on Melbourne’s 3CR and Triple R respectively. For a living, he is a permaculture designer and educator in his business Very Edible Gardens in Melbourne, Australia, co-founded with Dan Palmer. Plus he lets Annie cajole him into writing books with her sometimes.
