In a famous cartoon, blogger extraordinaire Hugh Macleod once wrote: The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.

In my family, in an effort to stave off any kind of unpleasantness resulting from resource scarcity, we have committed to purchasing ‘hard goods’ second hand as much as we are able to.

We are also committed to ‘making do’ in circumstances where we can survive without the latest shiny new toy.

So at the risk of belabouring this, I used to have an mp3 player with a radio on it, and enjoyed listening to both. Then the headphone jack went wonky, and I had to replace it – with a used $10 iPod Shuffle (1st gen) from Kijiji.ca. All good, except now I couldn’t listen to Metro Morning or Radio 2 Drive.

Then, while looking for something else entirely, I stumbled across my old Walkman style cassette player. It was gigantic by modern music player standards, but it had a working radio. Ta da! The solution to my 1 ¼ hour GO Train commute problems.

The real problem was, it turns out, that the average household income of a passenger on the Lakeshore line is just about six figures, so iPads, E-readers, and iPhone 4s abound.

Then there’s me with my hooptie-radio.

The first couple of times I pulled it out, I got the look…you know the one you want to give to the scruffy looking teen staring through the window at Christopher’s. The “here, take a couple bucks, get yourself something hot to eat” kind of look. I shrugged it off, but then started hiding it behind me on the seat while I listened.

Then I gave my head a badly needed shake and decided – I’m not the crazy one for not replacing my electronics every ten minutes, or always having to own the latest toy…I’m the sensible one for wanting to make our increasingly scarce resources last just a little longer.

When you work in the ‘office’ world (as opposed to retail, food services or non-profit, where I find people are more tolerant), and you tell people you grow your own veggies, they usually get that, and may do so themselves.

When you tell people you are part of a CSA that operates down the street, most people can wrap their heads around it. Or when you tell people you try to drive as little as possible, and either walk or use transit when you need to get somewhere, they think of you as an ‘enviro-guy’, but it’s understood.

But there’s something about dragging out a 2 lb cassette player on a crowded GO train full of impeccably dressed business people that steps right over society’s clearly drawn line in the sand.

If the main difference between our lives now and the lives we will live in 20 years is going to be the sacrifices we make, where will you draw your line?