Wednesday, January 10, 2018

After Hours: Off-Peaking

Mr. Money Mustache is in his early 40s, and he has been retired for 12 years. “One of the key principles of Mustachianism,” begins a lofty 2013 post, “is that any and all lineups, queues, and other sardine-like collections of humans must be viewed with the squinty eyes of skepticism.” His blog explains that everything you have been taught about money and time is wrong. Mr. Money Mustache, once the subject of a New Yorker profile, worked as a software engineer and saved half of his salary from the age of 20, and his vision of time is that of an engineer: time becomes a machine that can be tinkered with, hours and minutes rewired to achieve a more elegant purpose. His primary message is that you will not achieve financial security and personal happiness by working harder to get ahead of the pack; you will find these things by carefully studying what the pack is doing and then doing the opposite.

A post entitled “A Peak Life is Lived Off-Peak” extols the virtues of doing everything at the wrong time. The Mustache family lives in Colorado, where everyone goes skiing on the weekends; Mr. Mustache recommends hitting the slopes on Tuesdays. The Mustaches drive through major cities between 10 in the morning and four in the afternoon. Thursday morning is for teaching robotics to his son, whom he homeschools; below-freezing nights in January are for moonlit walks. Holidays are to be taken only when everyone else is at work. “Most people spend most of their time doing what everyone else does, without giving it much thought,” Mr. Money Mustache writes. “And thus, it is usually very profitable to avoid doing what everyone else is doing.”

The Mustaches are not the only online evangelists for the off-peak lifestyle. In a post entitled, “I Want You to Become an Off-Peak Person!” Peter Shankman, an entrepreneur who writes about turning his ADHD to his advantage, recommends grocery shopping at one in the morning. J.P. Livingston’s blog the Money Habit features photos of New York City that make it seem like a small town: a thinly populated subway, a near-empty museum. (The bins in time’s bargain basement seem to be overflowing with Tuesdays: train rides, drinks, meals, museum visits, and movies are cheaper when they happen on what is referred to in Canada as “Toonie Tuesdays,” in Australia as “Tight-Arse Tuesdays.”)

The thesis of off-peak evangelism is summed up by one of Mr. Mustache’s calls for a rejection of conformity: “In our natural state,” he writes, “we are supposed to be a diverse and individualistic species.” It is natural, he argues, for individual schedules to vary — why should we all expect to eat, sleep, work, and play in lockstep, like members of a militaristic cult? Standardized schedules create waste and clog infrastructure. Off-peak evangelism proposes a market value to individuality and diversity as mechanisms for repurposing humanity’s collective wasted time. While not a formalized movement, people who blog about off-peaking often seem to feel that they’ve discovered a secret too good to keep to themselves — something that was right in front of us the whole time, requiring only that we recognize our own power to choose.

Off-peaking is the closest thing to a Platonic form of subculture: its entire content is its opposition to the mainstream. As an economic approach, the solution off-peaking proposes can seem unkind — it’s a microcosm of the larger capitalist idea that it is right to profit from the captivity of others. And yet off-peakers only want, in effect, to slow time down by stretching the best parts of experience while wasting less. The arguments for off-peaking have centered on both the economic and the social advantages of recuperating unexploited time, like a form of temporal dumpster-diving that restores worth to low-demand goods. (...)

Taken at its most individualistic, it can seem that the idea of off-peaking is not to free everyone from the bonds of inefficency, but to position oneself to take advantage of the unthinking conformity of others. Success depends upon continued brokenness, not on fixing what is broken — or at least, on fixing it only for oneself and a canny self-selecting few. In this view, off-peaking is a miniaturized entrepreneurialism that exploits a wonky blip in the way slots of time are assigned value; a matter of identifying an arbitrage opportunity created by the system’s lack of self-awareness.

The comment sections of off-peakers’ blogs are, paradoxically, bustling: stories of going to bed at nine and waking up at four to ensure that the day is perfectly out of step; Legoland on Wednesdays in October; eating in restaurants as soon as they open rather than waiting for standard meal times. There’s a wealth of bargains to be had by juggling one’s calendar to take advantage of deals. (The app Ibotta, which tracks fluctuating prices on consumer goods popular with millennials, determined that Tuesdays are actually the worst days to buy rosé and kombucha; you should buy them on Wednesdays. Avocados are also cheapest on Wednesdays, while quinoa should be bought on Thursdays and hot sauce on Fridays.) Many posters write that they are considering changing professions or homeschooling their children to join the off-peakers.

Some off-peakers are motivated by savings, some by avoiding crowds, but off-peaking also offers a more abstract pleasure: the sheer delight in doing the unexpected. The gravitas attached to the seasons of life listed off in Ecclesiastes is echoed in the moral overtones attached to perceptions of what is appropriate for different hours of the day. It is wrong to laugh when everyone else is weeping or to embrace when everyone else is refraining from embracing. Ordinary activities become subversive when done at the wrong time: eating spaghetti for dinner is ordinary, but having linguini with clam sauce for breakfast breaks the unwritten rules. Once you start transgressing, it can be hard to stop: The arbitrariness of custom begins to chafe.

But off-peakers are generally not hoping to be completely solitary in their pursuits; most people don’t want to be the only person in their step-aerobics class at two in the afternoon. Instead, they want to be one among a smaller, more manageable group than urban cohorts tend to allow. Subcultures offer the pleasure of being different along with the pleasure of being the same; variation becomes a passport to acceptance. The two people who encounter one another at the aquarium on a Wednesday morning appear to have more in common than the two hundred people who see each other there on a weekend. Like other choices that divide people into subsets, off-peaking allows its adherents to discover a kinship that may or may not reveal a significant similarity in worldview.

by Linda Besner, Real Life |  Read more:
Image: Movie Theater, Los Angeles by Ed Freeman
[ed. The New Yorker link on Mr. Money Mustache is a great read in itself.]