In the course of writing his perfectly work-safe food-and-lifestyle blog, Daniel of blog Casual Kitchen offers thoughtful insights that are applicable not only to food and home economics but sex and relationships as well.

Consider his post responding to the criticism that he’s not consistently orthodox about frugality.

However, I’ve also written posts you’d never expect to see in a frugal food blog. Many people would make the case that articles on Kona coffee and champagne, or posts about our extended visits to Chile, Hawaii and New Zealand have absolutely no place here. Some readers have pushed back hard against these posts, saying essentially that it’s misleading, even hypocritical, to write with one hand about lentil soup at 60c a serving, and then turn around and write with the other hand about $29-a-pound coffee.

Does the world of frugality require this degree of rigid orthodoxy? And if you don’t adhere at all times to an impossibly high frugality standard, are you, like, some kind of a cheater?

Some of us even internalize this frugality standard to the point where it becomes a source of guilt. I’ve seen talented bloggers beat themselves up on their own blogs because they weren’t always following all of the frugal ideas and recommendations they offer their readers.

Winners, losers and lentils

And then there’s an exact opposite reaction I often see: people will react with inappropriately magnified revulsion to a certain frugal tip or practice, as if a certain tip, like eating lentils, psychologically pushes them over the edge into a place where they feel like a cheap loser.

Look, this is all ankle-biting. It misses the point.

So what is the point? It’s this: frugality is all about making thoughtful choices about how and where you spend your money. It’s about allocating your money to things that are most important. And when I say “most important” I mean most important to you. Not what meets some imagined and impossibly high frugality standard.

You are not on this earth to make spending choices to meet some imagined social construct. And you are most definitely not on this earth to impress your neighbors or social peers, either by what you save or by what you spend. Frugality is not some kind of a contest with winners and losers.

The right to break your own rules

Here’s the ultimate truth and the real advantage to regularly using your frugality muscles. If you make conscious and intelligent choices with how you spend the bulk of your income, you’ll have extra money around to break your frugality rules if and when you want to. You’ll have the resources available to splurge on the good stuff from time to time. That’s the real reward of a life of conscious spending decisions.

He said it here.

Note: Yes, I’m reposting nearly the whole thing, but I think it would be a mistake not to go read large parts of his blog for yourself. Especially but not only if you cook for yourself at home. But I digress…

Feel free to substitute your relationship to orthodoxy in matters of sex, gender, orientation, fidelity, kink, and so on. Unorthodoxy or inconsistency is hypocrisy if and only if you insist you adhere to standards you don’t in fact adhere to. It’s only hypocrisy when you insist that others adhere to standards you advocate but do not yourself live up to.

In other words the point of standards isn’t to be an end in themselves — a possibly-natural misunderstanding that can result in straining gnats while swallowing camels. Instead the point of standards is to create a space where everyone can generate the most possible light with the least possible heat. Except, of course, when it makes sense to generate a little heat as well.

In other words the benefits of standards are almost the opposite of the intentions of orthodoxy.

You eat lentils at sixty cents per (perhaps-surprisingly delicious!) serving precisely so you can enjoy $29.00/pound coffee… if that’s what you want to drink. You work your ass off to preserve and expand and canonize choice so that you and everyone else can have all the children they want. And even if you’re heterosexual you stand up for universal marriage, not just because it’s the “right thing” that everyone enjoy the social, legal, and financial benefits but also so you can marry whom you choose, and not just because of those social, legal, and financial advantages.