"Growing up outside Manchester, I thought everyone kept their tea bags to use twice. It wasn't until I was at university, sitting in a friend's kitchen in London, that I realized this wasn't normal. My friend watched in horror as I carefully squeezed out my used tea bag and placed it on a saucer for later. "What are you doing?" he asked, genuinely confused."
"We reused aluminum foil, washed out plastic bags, and kept margarine tubs as Tupperware. Clothes got worn until they had holes, then became cleaning rags. Shoes stayed until the soles came off. When I moved to London for work, a colleague once asked why I was still using a laptop bag that was clearly falling apart. The zipper was broken, and I'd been closing it with a safety pin for months."
A childhood outside Manchester in a working-class family instilled habits of extreme thrift and careful money management. Small practices included reusing tea bags, aluminum foil, plastic bags, margarine tubs, and wearing clothes until they became rags. Moving to university and later to London exposed contrasts with wealthier peers who found these habits strange or foreign. The thrift mindset created emotional attachment to items and guilt about discarding usable containers even after achieving a comfortable income. Examples such as repairing a broken laptop bag with a safety pin illustrate how ingrained resourcefulness persisted alongside realization that some habits can limit social ease or opportunities.
Read at Silicon Canals
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