I know, I know. It's boring. "Buying things is bad". "Americans buy too much stuff". Thing is, though, like a lot of boring stuff in life, it's still true. Sitting here in BJs, waiting for my parents to finish picking out...actually I don't know what they're picking out...I feel like this makes a good theme for the blog today. What I've figured out is, it isn't buying things per Se is bad. Here's the issue: things we buy control us. Partly that's because of the ownership; they take space, they need maintaining. Possessions take work. But more crucially, every dollar we spend is like a tiny little cage. It obligates us to then earn that dollar back. The more dollars we spend, the more we have to earn. The first few dollars aren't so bad; we can do what we love and still make some money. But as we start to spend more dollars, we work ourselves into a corner. Either we have to deal with the anxiety of being broke or in debt, or we have to find something really lucrative to do. If you're lucky enough to genuinely love doing something that also turns out to be lucrative, then more power to you. But for most of us, being forced to make more money really limits our options. And many of us wind up doing something we don't love to support our possessions. And then, the irony is, if you're me anyway, you wind up spending a lot of that money trying to forget your unhappiness at what you wind up doing with your life. Which is a vicious cycle.
So, you know, like your mom always said, when you pick it up, think twice about whether you really need it. And maybe spend less time at BJs.
