When the child was four, we travelled a lot, and once he asked me if all planes smelled disgusting inside. I was distracted and absentmindedly explained that, well, yes, except perhaps private jets. Then I had to explain private jets – how presidents and very few obscenely rich people use them, and the plebs fly commercial with hundreds of others. “Plebs” got the child wildly excited; he must have thought it was a new swear word. I tried explaining plebs to him. “Are we plebs?” he asked. The rest of the evening was spent with him charging around the apartment yelling “I’m a pleb! I’m a pleb!”

Before coming to the US, I inhabited the comfortable space in-between pleb and patrician. Part of the common population with a satisfying dusting of glam. The glam wasn’t status seeking but risk management. It was about extracting value while value was available.

Moving here was a lifestyle downgrade in many regards. It was hard to see the forest for the trees at first, the long-term benefits of a freer and more predictable society obscured by immediate discomforts.

Thomas Couture, The Romans in their Decadence, 1847

Our first year in NYC, we lived in an apartment with no washing machine - the norm here - and something I didn’t even know existed. Lugging dirty clothes to the laundry in a plastic Ikea tote was not on my menu at the accomplished age of thirty, or ever really. When the laundry came back, I would find random foreign G-strings carefully folded amid my son’s pajamas. We got a scrubbing wash bag with built-in ridges as a temporary solution in between laundry loads, which I pummeled in the bathtub. What next, I fumed – washing said clothes on a washboard in the river, 19th century peasant style?

In first grade, the school whipped the children into a frenzy over Greta Thunberg and our dying planet. The kids made overwrought posters and marched around the school with them. It left such an impression that my son kept turning the water off when I was brushing my teeth. The performative water rationing lit my already shortened fuse. My own kindergartener, demanding that I atone for every meagre comfort, was the final straw.

Air conditioning involved a microwave-like unit stuck between a sliding window and a sill. I was always worried it would kill someone. Sometimes, random squirrels got trapped in the flimsy walls of this “charming historic brownstone”, which left the landlord nonchalant, and you waited until the scratching gradually subsided, and death befell them. The radiators hissed and spat at odd hours of the night, like the inner workings of the depths of hell. If you touched them, you’d get burns.

Soon enough I couldn’t take it anymore and demanded the husband break the lease and we move to one of the few new buildings in the area, equipped with modern washers and dryers, as well as heating and cooling fit for the 21st century.

I was certainly not going to turn the water off when brushing my teeth. I like twiddling my hands under the calming warmth of it, washing off any spilled toothpaste. I need my half-hour scorching showers, when I transform into a dreamy, pensive lobster luxuriating in the dense fog of the bathroom. What kind of life is this, if a woman can’t even enjoy her water?

When it became apparent that we’d be here for a while, I tried to research local ways of living in my effort to adapt. This led to a deep dive into a Dave Ramsey-type ethos – never buy yourself a cappuccino or take a memorable vacation, save everything until you’re old and decrepit, and then live on that.

This coincided with moving to the suburbs. Perhaps the shift was city versus provincial, an ideological chasm between the sinful avocado toast eaters and the frugal proper people persevering at “building wealth”. I’d never encountered the second type before, so it was all new and revelatory.

I come from a very fatalistic part of the world. Nothing is guaranteed, not even tomorrow, let alone the value of your money, the system of government, your safety or prospects. We watched and learned when our grandparents’ savings turned to dust in the 1990s and they were left in humiliating, crippling poverty. When parents couldn’t find a niche for themselves in the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, their education and work experience rendered useless by the flipped reality. We internalized that carpe diem is the only thing there is.

When I first started working in the mid 2000s, Russia was undergoing an economic boom of epic proportions. Oil money fountained in Moscow, and a young person with a degree and decent knowledge of a foreign language could rake in money with little effort. This continued all the way down to 2020. With both partners working, solid professionals in the capital, it was almost a given that you could afford a cleaner, eventually European getaways, a nanny, and whatever else made your life a little nicer.

I knew nothing of my new environment. I came from a place where universities were free if you could pass the entrance exams. If you couldn’t, there was always the “Daft Department” where you could pay modest tuition, with the possibility of going back into genpop every year through good grades and academic accomplishments. I’d never heard of student debt until I moved here. Healthcare was a given, and you only paid extra if you wanted elaborate bells and whistles. Companies lured you in with private insurance that got you into fancy clinics, gym memberships and so on.

What I’d do at sixty never crossed my mind throughout my twenties or early thirties. It was all parties, bars, restaurants, and travel as much as you can. Moving to the US surgically removed *la vida loca *from my existence. After spending several years in denial, I ultimately accepted that the move will be more permanent than I’d thought.

An unpleasant milestone was getting a Costco membership. Costco is one of those gigantic warehouse stores in the middle of nowhere, where things are sold in quantities meant to survive a nuclear event. We begrudgingly got the membership a couple of years ago. Both in Moscow and in New York, we’d shopped in stores within walking distance, often specialist shops or markets for fresh fruits and vegetables, fish and meat. It was on-demand shopping - “Oh, I’m out of aubergines. Will just pop out to the shop downstairs.”

In the suburbs there are no stores you can walk to. Civilization begins and ends in the parking lot. The kindly husband took it upon himself to drive to this dystopian silo every month. I felt the sting of demotion, like I was now living on a collective farm with the provisions truck coming in at set intervals, albeit with imported cheeses and eight kinds of nut butter. Mostly I missed spontaneity, a texture to my surroundings, and daily human contact.

The Dave Ramsey-esque worldview preaches that you must forgo earthly pleasures like new clothes or fine dining, and toil away to save like a dragon stashing treasures. Only when you are old and diminished, perched atop your pile of gold, can you consider enjoying it. Everything inside me revolts against this. I will never be as young as I am today, or look as good, or have as much life energy. Yet I must give these years away like the little mermaid did her voice, in exchange for all that shines. And I can only get my hands on those shiny things when those hands are bony and wrinkly. This bleak financial puritanism is pretty unenticing.

I’m learning to find a middle ground on this spectrum between joyless hoarding and wild abandon. Fine, I even agree with Ramsey on certain things like his disdain for consumer debt. Like Fergie and Ludacris taught us in the aughts, “If you ain’t got no money take yo’ broke ass home”. Definitely don’t buy gadgets and such if you can’t pay cash. However, life is happening every day, right now. It can’t be all stick and no carrot.

One personal priority that has been painfully absent over the years caught in the bureaucratic grind has been travel. I think experiences are always worth spending money on. I cannot wait to take my son to all the cities I’ve been awed by, stumble across the cobblestones together, eat all the delicious things, watch his neck twist in wonder at centuries old architectural masterpieces. Sixty and seventy won’t do it – he is at his most impressionable now, and time together is quickly sifting through my fingers, as he grows up and sets out on his own. I might not be able to do the 20-odd kilometers a day from dawn to dusk at that age. I might not even live that long.

William Hamilton, Marie-Antoinette Being Taken to Her Execution for Eating Avocado Toast, “I regret nothing!”, painted 1794

The audacity of assuming political continuity, economic stability, and general reliability is still very exotic to me. I don’t trust abstractions like retirement projections over lived reality. Learned trauma tells me that when these assumptions fail, you lose your deferred life forever.

Money can be earned, lost, regained. Time cannot. Your physical capacity will decline irreversibly. The window of time for shared experiences with your young children will close forever.

I refuse to Spartanize my life into oblivion. Here’s to running the water however damn long you please - even the Ancient Romans understood this was a crucial luxury. This pleb wants her festive foie gras and “unnecessary” vacations. Glam now, not when I’m a grandma.