24th
Why You Should Never Feel Jealous
These days it’s easy to covet thy neighbors goods. There’s so many cool things to buy. There’s iPods and Hondas and shiny new computers. Everywhere you go someone has something to sell, and all for a low, low price with low, low monthly payments.
But it’s all excess, and usually the people who have all the nice things only have them because the bank allowed them to. I’m not just talking about electronic trinkets and knick-knacks, but about the larger necessities of life. Homes, and furniture, and college tuition.
People buy things they don’t really need and with money that isn’t even theirs. It’s an amazing trend we have here in America—the ability to appear rich when you’re really dirt poor. Someone coined a phrase a while back that fits perfectly. The $30,000 a year millionaire.
Such people are everywhere. They flash their shiny new toys, paid for with the bank’s money. Paid with credit cards they will never be able to pay back.
I had a boss one time who was like that. He always wore name-brand clothing, the latest fashions, the newest shoes. He drove an Acura MDX, a shiny black model with leather interior. He liked to “accidentally” drop a wad of twenties on his desk when he emptied his pockets before sitting down to work.
Then one day I came across payroll, and learned he barely made more than me. I discovered through overhearing concersations that he lived with his parents. In their basement.
And all the time, until I’d learned those things, I’d sat in my office fuming and thinking myself a failure because I didn’t have all those nice things.
And then I realized that my boss was not the only one flaunting his fake wealth. There were others. Many others. And soon everywhere I looked I saw them. It was like I’d developed some new kind of radar. They were everywhere.
Billboards plead with us to buy, standing alongside the highway like lonely beggars with their hands outsretched.
Banks tell us debt is good. But in reality, a man with $100 in his savings account is probably richer than 70% of the population.
Most people, contrary to the image they try to create, survive everyday by the skin of their teeth. Luck and smarts are all that seperate the ones that survive and the ones that don’t.
You see a guy driving down the road in his shiny new car. Does he really own it? Is the gold watch around his wrist really his? Who really paid for all that stuff? Is any of it real, or just figments of an image cobbled together in the vain attempt to appear superior?
