Cost of Living or Cost of a Lifestyle

We started our self isolation on 20th March which was the last time we had a real contact with the outside world. Post that we have fixed a routine of deliveries or grocery shopping which includes going out once every 3 days to get everything the family needs. On 20th March itself, I took out a small cross body bag which became my designated money carrier for these trips during the quarantine period. I armed it with a sanitizer, small pack of wipes and Rs 5000. Today, after a fortnight, I had to refill that money and added another Rs 2000 to it. In 14 days, my household of 5 family members and 2 domestic help had consumed things worth Rs 5000.

And we hadn't drastically cut down on anything. Yes, we were rationing and not over eating or splurging on all sorts of things but we weren't exactly deprived. We still ate 3 square meals a day, one snack of tea and biscuits and one snack of fruits. We still had salad with lunch. We still had yoghurt on our plates. We still had milk to start our day and alcohol(weekends) to end it. The meals we've had during this period have included home made pizza, chinese, pasta, burgers, grilled veggies, cake, bhel puri, papri chat, dahi bhalla, noodle soup apart from the regular Dal, Sabzi that Indian households make. All of the ingredients sourced within the starting capital of Rs 5K. And our meals couldn't be more balanced. One could almost make a science experiment of Balanced Diet based on what we are consuming daily now.

It led me to re-think on how did i manage to spend so much money in days when my life was normal. It led me to re-examine what exactly is the cost of living for my house. On last count, as per an exercise that Mohit and I do every 3 months, we needed around 50 times that amount to sustain our lifestyle. But our living apparently costed very less. Then why are we spending so much money on things that are gathering dust currently? After all, the small cross body bag is the only one getting air these days, what about the other expensive bags that I have accumulated over the years? The only shoes I am using are my sports shoes(for exercise) and a pair of slippers(during the day), what about the several pair of heels, floaters, loafers etc etc that are lying in the closet? The only clothing I am wearing are now color coded. I am wearing Blue on Monday and Friday, Red on Tuesday, Green on Wednesday, Yellow on Thursday and black on Sat and Sunday. The bottom remains a choice of 3 track bottoms or a single loose jeans that I have. What about the other clothes amongst the moths in the wardrobe? The cars haven't been used in 14 days or the Harley that i gifted to Mohit last year with my life's savings. The only wheels getting air these days is the cycles that we have.

Did we over spend making a lifestyle out of things that we've forgotten how simple living can be? Is the money that we-the bestowed class spending the cost of our lifestyle or the cost of our living. Have we inter mingled our lives with so much that we needed a catastrophe to tell us the cost of living.
We spent an entire lifetime making our current lives into a lifestyle and it took a single virus to send us back to our living. If we understated our living then thats what life would become. We don't need a lifestyle to survive, we only need to live to survive.

The cost of our lifestyles has isolated us inside our houses!
Lets go back to our living so we never have to start afresh again.