Expatrician

I spend more time at the supermarket these days. (And it's not always because someone pays by cheque in front of me.) It's because I've started comparing prices. Any brand loyalty I had is unceremoniously ditched wherever I can save a few centimes.

This penny-pinching behaviour is not really like me at all. I don't enjoy it, and I dread the day I start clipping coupons. There comes a point in one's bank balance, however, when thrift happens.

Back in Australia, coming from a comfortably owner-occupied DINK household, it had been many years since I'd had to worry about price checking. I'd pile my trolley high with premium brands, blue-ribbon cuts and over packaged gourmet goodies, rarely even looking at the total as I punched in my PIN. Yesterday, replacing the outrageously priced packet of heritage Puy lentils with its generically cut-price "Euroshopper" cousin, it dawned on me.

I am an Expatrician.

We're quite common here in Europe. You'll often find us spread out on a picnic blanket somewhere, pretentiously al fresco, quaffing a sensibly reasonable rosé. (Have you seen how much they charge for drinks at cafés here?) We also congregate in the Louvre on the first Sunday of the month (no entrance charge). Free outdoor cinema? The grass is thick with tight little groups of us. Frugal foreigners, trying to wring a champagne experience from a backpacker budget.

I recently met an architect who traded her Sex and the City loft studio in Sydney for a student dive in London. Shared bathrooms, cleaning rotas and no closet space for the Manolos. At least she's earning pounds sterling: I am paid in Australian Dollars, which come in handy if you ever want to play Monopoly. So I walk instead of taking the métro. And do creative things with chickpeas. And suggest drinks at our place instead of going to a bar.

And now you may ask it. The question that's been bubbling and growing inside you as you read this self-pitying bleat of a post.

Why the HELL are you still here if it's all so hard, you pathetic whiny foreigner - why don't you just GO HOME where you were so much more comfortable?

It's a question I've been asking myself a lot lately, as it happens. And in searching for an answer, I've come to realise a few things.

"Back home" in Sydney, I had started believing that my main purpose was to buy stuff. My partner and I would find ourselves with nothing to do on a weekend, and so we'd go and buy a new LCD TV. Or a stainless-steel side-by-side fridge. Or a few Ben Sherman shirts. We consumed out of boredom, not necessity.

Giving up jobs and moving to the other side of the world is, it turns out, an excellent form of priority-shifting shock therapy. It forces a complete reappraisal of what's important, and what you need to be happy.

I'm re-reading a book called Stumbling on Happiness. In it, Daniel Gilbert reviews the research behind the psychology of happiness. He reminds us of a fact which resonates with my newly-embraced Expatrician outlook; that more money does not always mean more happiness.
"Wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but [...] it does little to increase happiness thereafter."

So until I hit abject poverty, I must conclude that I am still, essentially, happy. And so much happier to be petit bourgeois in Paris than soulless in Sydney.

Although I wouldn't mind, just occasionally, not having to scrimp at the supermarket.