For years I’ve made a weekly – sometimes a biweekly – ritual of going to the grocery store to stock up on what we need as a family to eat for the next four or five days.

That obviously involves a lot of planning and budgeting, not to mention the logistics of storing those groceries – drygoods, meats and produce. And as our family has gotten older and the kids have gotten bigger, those pressures have increased geometrically, at least that’s how it feels.

It was, however, a necessary evil. I couldn’t take time out from work (I do the vast majority of the grocery shopping) until late in the evening, after everyone had been fed, and by then I was usually too fatigued or mentally exhausted to really make much of a go at it. So like so many other people, I’d put it off until the weekend. Then I’d suffer the weekend crowds, the rush-hour traffic jam at the deli counter, and so on. It makes shopping for groceries — a basic, human need, unless you’re growing your own food — an unpleasant, demeaning and dehumanizing task.

When I got laid off from Macworld in September, it gave me an opportunity to reprioritize my day, and one thing I discovered is that I don’t have to do that grind anymore. I don’t have to do a “big” shop, ever. Part of it is simply a cash-flow thing. But a lot of it just has to do with peace of mind.

Instead, I’ve gone back in time fifty years, and instead of stocking up at the grocery store, I’m buying what the family will eat that night – sometimes for the next day too, but rarely more than that. It means that I can take more time to figure out what we’re going to have for dinner that night, and use my imagination a bit more. It means I can focus more on products that wouldn’t keep very well for three or four days, like fresh breads.

It’s a luxury, I admit, afforded to me because I can actually take the time to do it now — a luxury not shared with people like Bonnie, who are stuck in offices or saddled with responsibilities that keep them from doing this. But since I don’t have those responsibilities right now, I might as well take advantage of the time, and see if I can rework my career around how I want to live my life, instead of the other way around.