Our Economy is based on Consumerism. We ourselves are the engines that keep it going.
We are caught up in a "chicken or the egg' argument. Business can't hire if we aren't buying and
we can't buy if we aren't working! That is a difficult egg to break.
I don't know the statistics but Billions and Billions of dollars are spent to encourage us to buy new
stuff, the latest and best, new and improved! More is better and we are induced to buy stuff a dozen at a time.
This is trickery that has worked for the last 50 years or so. It is the secret to the SUV success. We needed the bigger automobile to haul the bigger stuff and more of it.
I have made my living for the past forty years because of this desire for more. I made houses bigger,
adding rooms and pushing out walls. More room for more stuff. My customers would have to work harder to pay me and pay for the added stuff they needed. It is an engine. Keep feeding it and it grows.
Happiness has even been connected to material possessions, even Spirituality with eight story Mega-
Churches. Bigger, taller, closer to God.
It is the Garage Sale Season and it is pretty amazing. I see fat people selling three exercising machines.
Three of them. I see poor people with boxes of CD's or the old VHS tapes, hundreds of them originally purchased for five bucks each! Falling apart furniture less than five years old is pretty common too.
Kitchen gadgets, small appliances are pretty common. No one cleans a microwave any more when it is easier to just buy a new one. Maybe a better color too.
I look at all of this stuff. There is seldom anything cool from grandma there. This is stuff they worked for,
saved for or charged to their accounts and paid dearly for. Something they needed. Happiness on sale.
Now they are selling it by the pickup load, yard after yard, block by block, all over this town.
Somehow or another all this seems to be okay. It is expected that whatever we buy will be used up, sold or thrown away. We get rid of our possessions like we were changing light bulbs. The paint fades, it has a scratch, the color isn't right, it doesn't fit. It isn't what I thought it was. It doesn't make me happy!
So we do it again! We work hard, give our best third of the day to some job, come home tired and maybe think of the weekend and shopping!
It is interesting though. It is an engine with one cog broken. No job, no buying. No buying, no job.
I am going to get a bumper sticker for my truck: "I would rather be fishing".
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