The Cost Of Living

It is said that everything has a cost. British novelist Deborah Levy talks about the cost of being a wife and a mother in her memoir, The Cost of Living, which was published after she moved out of a years-long marriage. Arundhati Roy, in her namesake book, The Cost of Living, talks about the national costs of raising dams and becoming a nuclear power that some have to bear at the expense of others. You can’t possibly find your way around some costs—either because of circumstances beyond your control, or simply because you can’t do without them. Among the latter are what we call non-discretionary expenses in household budgets. These expenses usually comprise the actual cost of living. But how much does it really cost to live? The answer to this simple question may not be so simple. There are tangibles, of course, but the intangibles may hold equal sway. For instance,...