Donât be pressured to purchase by the snobby world around you
By Elliot Chan, Opinions Editor
I wonât do it. I wonât spend eight hours a day, 251 days a year working to buy an expensive car or a fancy-ass watch or anything that I donât need. I wonât do it to impress an employer, I wonât do it to impress friends, and I wonât do it to impress family. Life is so much more than being frivolous. Even if I am wealthy, I will not blow my paycheque on items that are supposed to catapult me to the next social class. Fuck that!
Today everyone is a connoisseur of some sort. Fashion, food, drinks, and so on. Everybody thinks they are experts at something and therefore are encouragedânay, expectedâto judge it. This type of snobbery extends from music, to food, to transportation, to neighbourhoods.
We have all behaved like snobs at one point or another. Most of us donât even notice it. The reason is that we all have our own interests, and we live in a democracy where many around us donât share those same values. Someone who is interested in beer and wine would know the lengthy details of how the drinks are produced, and which are âbetter.â Someone who is interested in cars would tell you that he or she would never go back to driving anything with a six-cylinder inline engine after leasing a vehicle equipped with a V6. Some who are interested in luxury handbags would tell you that it is so much more than a container for make-up products; itâs a statement on the social climate. I get it. We all have our things.
Learn to tell the difference between good and bad of course, but stop yourself from trying to discover good from great. Great is not that great. Great does not make you happy. Great is meaningless luxury. Great can be sustenance, yes, but it is also wasteful. Great is a lie you tell yourself so that you donât feel bad paying double for a bottle of wine or a pair of shoes or a meal.
Having a palette for good things and appreciating them is much healthier than constantly demanding the finest. You deserve to be happy, but if happiness is having the best things in the world, you are just getting ripped off, my friend.
âDonât be pressured into doing something you donât want to do.â I feel like an elementary teacher told me this, but it was probably some television PSA I saw. Nevertheless, that statement stuck with me. But I donât live by it. I do many things that I donât want to do. I donât like cleaning, but I do it. I donât like waiting in long line-ups, but I wait. I donât like paying taxes, but I have to. Thatâs just life. However, what I can control is what I want to spend my money on and I donât have to spend it on what you want me to spend it on.
