The battle with the purge

Have you ever won­dered why the human species have a need to buy, col­lect, and own mate­r­ial pos­ses­sions? In the not-so-distant past I have tried to make sense of it. The out­come has been a bet­ter self aware­ness of my needs, wants and desires.

I have eval­u­ated my sit­u­a­tion and have came to the con­clu­sion that con­sumerism is a dis­ease. Con­sumerism is a byprod­uct of cap­i­tal­ism. With­out con­sumers, there would be no need for pro­duc­ers. How would a pro­ducer exist with­out con­sumers? They wouldn’t.

Con­sumerism is a social and eco­nomic order that is based on the sys­tem­atic cre­ation and fos­ter­ing of a desire to pur­chase com­mod­ity goods in ever greater amounts.

(straight from Wikipedia)

I’m not par­tic­u­larly talk­ing about needs, but wants. Clearly needs like food, shel­ter, trans­porta­tion and the like will always have a need. What about snow globes for exam­ple? What fun­da­men­tal pur­pose do they serve? Not much, other than siphon­ing cur­rency out of com­mu­ni­ties, and col­lect­ing dust as some would say. If you don’t agree that con­sumerism can be a dis­ease, go check out the show Hoard­ers. I think this dis­ease inflicts us all at var­i­ous degrees, but the extreme exam­ples are clearly shown on that TV show. These are peo­ple who are much more weaker to the inflic­tion of this dis­ease than the major­ity (although it’s prob­a­bly more com­mon than we seem to believe because most of them keep it on the hush hush) .

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not knock­ing cap­i­tal­ism. I am very fond of cap­i­tal­ism (and intend to use it to my advan­tage), it’s what made this coun­try great and makes the gears go round. But I also think it has done much dam­age. Just look at the sav­ings rate com­pared to decades ago.

My expe­ri­ence has var­ied to some degree with this inflic­tion, but I think I’m man­ag­ing much bet­ter now that I have gave it some thought.

I watch peo­ple gob­ble up wants in good times, only to suf­fer in bad times. They try to ful­fill their wants (to a limit, it really never is enough) only to suf­fer in bad times. I have seen this with fam­ily, friends, and even myself. While I can con­trol my out­comes much bet­ter now days, it pains me to see oth­ers blindly repeat the vicious cycles.

In the past my inflic­tion was specif­i­cally tai­lored to my per­son­al­ity (every­one is inflicted dif­fer­ently). I never had issues buy­ing cheap garbage, but I would save and splurge on big­ger pur­chases. Some peo­ple are oppo­site, they buy lots of small garbage, and can never afford big­ger splurges. It’s really the same either way.

My wants would always start by jus­ti­fy­ing the pur­chases. It always starts with jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. I would tell myself “oh yeah I really need this for this rea­son” only to never think about the other ele­ments that would jus­tify the actual need. I ended up with a lot of weird stuff. From buy­ing a ID card printer for that hookah shop that never even got off the draw­ing board, to the CNC machine for pro­to­typ­ing cell phone acces­sories — again, never even got off the draw­ing board. So I have ended up with a bit of not-so-cheap items that I can’t throw away because they still have hun­dreds of dol­lars of value, but have depre­ci­ated sub­stan­tially which means I will never recoup the money I blew. And now that I know these facts, I feel like such an idiot. This pain has put me on the right track.

I have some exam­ples here.

• HP 2600N Color laser-jet ($300) — I thought I would be cool and print fancy color pro­mo­tional mate­r­ial for my kratom busi­ness. It ended up col­lect­ing dust. The black HP 4M+ printer that I bought for $40 is still my pri­mary work­horse. Plus this new printer is cap­i­tal­ism at its finest, when 1 of the 4 inks runs out, it wants them all replaced, regard­less of the level of the other inks. Will prob­a­bly fetch $40 on Craigslist.
• PVC Id card printer ($500) — I thought I’d print awe­some mem­ber­ship cards for all the happy hookah cus­tomers I thought I would attract. Dust col­lec­tor. On eBay right now with 1 hour left at $202 (w/14 bids).
• Sher­line CNC mill ($1500) — I thought id make a neat acces­sory for a cell­phone, and needed to make molds. Dust col­lec­tor. Will prob­a­bly fetch $1000 or so on eBay.
• Inno­vate LM1 Wide­band ($400) — Got this because I thought I could tune the boosted car I sold last year. Ended up being frus­trated because of issues with the ECU. Sold for $80 when I got rid of the car.
• Elec­tric gui­tar ($350) — Thought I learn to play, col­lected dust for 2 years, still don’t know how to play. Will prob­a­bly fetch $100–150 on Craigslist.
• Midi keyboard/Mic/USB pre­amp ($300) — Fig­ured I’d make some beats, made a few lame ones, but mostly been col­lect­ing dust these few years.
• Guns — FPK Dra­gunov w/extra gear ($900) / Walther P22 ($250) — Ended up using them maybe 3–4 times over the years, not worth it, we now just have a 9Mil Beretta. Sold both guns for $600 on Mon­day to a gun shop.

You can see that’s already a loss of around $2000. Not to men­tion thou­sands of dol­lars spent on upgrad­ing both PCs each year. And I’m sure I can think of another half a dozen things I bought like an idiot. Kim has been an angel com­pared to my buy­ing habits.

Those are just a few exam­ples, and I can assure you there have been more fool­ish splurges. My recent one that I’m hav­ing sec­ond thoughts about is a IP-TV cam­era that I thought I would use to mon­i­tor my dri­ve­way. My jus­ti­fi­ca­tion was some­one get­ting stabbed across the street (seri­ously), and the fact that it was on sale on NewEgg ($200). But since I fig­ure I’ll be mov­ing soon, it hasn’t been installed and sits and col­lects dust — so far been a month or so.

Any­ways, you get the gist of the sit­u­a­tion, and I hope you all give this some thought. As for me, I will con­tinue try­ing to refine my approach and fight­ing the purge. I now know very very very well that a dol­lar lost is a lost oppor­tu­nity for com­pound­ing. Now I highly pre­fer putting my money to work in real assets.

Tagged as: consumerism, finances