From Open Hands to Careful Ones

Jan 10 , 2026
By Kidist Yidnekachew

---

Stinginess is easy to judge and hard to understand. This reflection traces how responsibility, rising costs, and quiet fear turn once-carefree people into careful savers, revealing that frugality often signals survival, not selfishness.

---

I used to believe that stinginess was a personality trait, something stitched into a person’s DNA at birth. In my mind, you were either born with an open hand or a clenched fist. The world made sense in binaries: generous people trusted that tomorrow would sort itself out, while misers guarded every coin with near-religious devotion. I didn’t believe anyone crossed that line. A reckless spender could not become someone who counts coins in a jar.

Life enjoys dismantling tidy theories. A recent encounter forced me to rethink mine. What we often label as "being cheap" rarely revolves around money alone. More often, it is the visible symptom of invisible pressure: fear, responsibility, and the creeping realisation that life has become aggressively expensive. What looks like stinginess is often a defence mechanism.

We all know people who live by a strict code of economy. Their homes exist in a state of permanent dimness. You walk into the living room and only the centre light is on. Lamps in the corners, the ones that soften the space and make it feel human, remain dark. To them, those bulbs are not comfort; they are consumption, small drains pulling money from the wall.

These are the same people who treat a half-finished plate of food like a moral failure. "Don’t waste it," they warn, eyes tracking every abandoned grain of rice. Ask them for a small amount of money, something that feels insignificant to you, and they react as if you have asked for an organ. Out comes the familiar sermon, money doesn’t grow on trees. Every penny carries the weight of survival.

Judgement is easy from the outside. You look at their steady jobs or modest savings and think: they are not poor, so why live like this? They do not live in misery, yet they never live freely. They will wait forty minutes for a bus instead of spending a few hundred birr on a taxi that would get them home in five. They will pass three nearby grocery stores to shop at a wholesale warehouse on the edge of town because the price is ten birr cheaper. The inconvenience is not a burden. It is a victory. Every birr saved feels like a small win against an uncertain future.

I did not understand the "why" until I visited an old friend. When I met her years ago, she embodied carefree living. Reckless, vibrant, allergic to budgets. She was not wealthy, yet she lived as if tomorrow was guaranteed to be generous. If she had five hundred birr, she spent six hundred. Youth convinced her that things would always work out.

She was the one who treated everyone, who went on spontaneous shopping sprees she could not afford, who never gave a utility bill more than a shrug. Then life arrived, unapologetic and heavy.

When I visited her recently, the woman who opened the door felt unfamiliar. She has a family now: a husband, children, rent. The weight of those anchors has reshaped her. As we sat on the cushion catching up, the room felt controlled, tight, measured. Gone was the chaotic ease of our younger days.

At one point, her son ran down the hallway and left the bathroom light on. She did not ask him to switch it off. She shouted. Sharp, instinctive, wildly disproportionate to the cost of a single LED bulb burning a few extra minutes.

Later, she exhaled and admitted she was exhausted. She began listing daily expenses, lingering on groceries. Eggs. Bread. Prices she recited with an intensity that bordered on obsession. She was cutting back everywhere she could.

"It’s overwhelming," she said. Feeding, housing, and holding four people afloat felt like climbing a mountain that never flattened. She sounded startled by her own transformation. "I used to be so different," she whispered. "Now I lie awake thinking about bills."

Watching her, something clicked. Her so-called stinginess was not a flaw or a choice. It was pressure made visible. When you are single and reckless, your mistakes hurt only you. When you have a family, recklessness becomes a direct threat to the people you love.

The shift from carefree to cautious is paved with fear. She is not yelling about lights because she is cruel. She is yelling because those lights feel like leaks in a ship she is struggling to keep afloat. Frugality is protection. Ten birr saved is ten birr redirected to another unavoidable cost.

Inconvenience has stopped being an irritation and become a sacrifice. What I once dismissed as stinginess now looks like survival. It is what happens when someone realises no one is coming to rescue them, that every penny is a brick carefully placed between their family and disaster.

My friend may one day become deeply frugal. Others may even label her stingy. I will not. I see the silent calculations running behind her eyes each time she checks a price tag. I see the fatigue that comes from cutting back while the world keeps getting more expensive.

Sometimes people are not born with closed hands. Sometimes life forces them shut. We rarely know the full story behind someone’s relationship with money, the debt, fear, and responsibility that push them to choose the bus over the taxi.

The next time I step into a dim room or watch someone agonise over a few birr at the grocery store, I will pause before judging. I will see someone carrying a load heavier than it looks.

---

PUBLISHED ON Jan 10,2026 [ VOL 26 , NO 1341]

---

[ssba-buttons]