Better Than (1)

I buy a lot of crap. Crap, for my purposes, is simply a term for things I don't need. I buy an awful lot of things I don't need.

I bought two books yesterday. I love books. It's hard to justify spending upwards of thirty-three dollars on new books, however, when I have many books I haven't read, I know about Amazon, and I know about book sales. I felt kind of bad about it, but at least I'll have something to do this weekend. I want to buy a Kindle. I think buying a Kindle will make me a real boy, but my secret fear is that I won't use it and it will be 260 dollars gone to waste. I want to buy a new laptop, too, because mine is old news. 2005. That's too old. I need to upgrade. Right?

I was going to buy another coat yesterday. That would make five coats. That's a lot of coats, considering I can probably only wear at the most two at a time. I decided against it--not because I had any discipline, because I don't, but because I decided it was a tiny bit too large, and I'm always looking for the perfect fit.

What's my excuse? How can I buy crap when I'm not rich? Okay, I'm downright poor. Broke as a joke.

I buy things and it becomes a way for me to feel not poor, at least for a while, because I can put it on credit and then the credit card companies will love me even more. But it's funny, because buying things prevents me from actually saving money, which in turn makes it harder for me to be anything but poor.

Everyone needs to buy things, and I guess that means me too. But do I need luxuries? Do I need the crap I fill my life with? If luxuries make me feel like a person, you could make an argument that I do need luxuries. But who needs to feel like a person? Silly question. I guess everyone does. I don't want them to feel like animals, that's for sure. So everyone should have luxuries, not just the rich.

Great. So I'm supposed to buy crap I don't need.

One could argue, though, that my luxuries will never compare to a rich person's luxuries. My luxuries are very small, indeed. And small luxuries, since they never give me what I want, will just make me more upset in the end. They will just make me more and more jealous at not being able to have what I can't afford.

I could scream right now.

Whatever happened to the virtues of suffering? What if all of these small luxuries are just anaesthetizing me from my actual condition? I'm sure it's possible for the poor to be happy, just like the rich are sometimes sad, but I'm not sure people are supposed to be happy with their condition.

I'm sure this is leading somewhere.