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At some point, everyone has “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” Over the last 25 years, we’ve even been peddled the “you can have it all” myth from every direction, including the media and the government.
The truth is simple: you cannot have it all. You can have anything, but you can’t have everything. In order to have one thing, you have to give up something else. It’s a law of nature. If you have $5, you can either get a burger or an overpriced cup of coffee, but not both.
“But wait!” you shout, rudely interrupting the narrator, “I have a credit card. I can have both!”
Wrong.
And stop interrupting me.
If you have $5 and borrow $5 to get some coffee to go with your burger, you will eventually have to pay that money back with interest. You will have to give up a future-burger AND a flavor shot in your overpriced coffee.
Everything you buy needs to be paid for, some day.
If you have an Atari income, but insist on living the XBox life, you will wake up one day, buried in bills, forced to live the Commodore-64 life out of sheer desperation.
There is a solution.
Don’t get all XBox-y until you are making XBox money. That way, you’ll never have to worry about going broke tomorrow paying for the fun you had yesterday.
Even when you have an XBox income, ideally you’ll restrict yourself to living a Gamecube life, so you’ll be able to put some money aside to support future-you instead of constantly having to worry about your next paycheck.
I think part of it may be the epidemic of ‘but I deserve it’ mentality. Or, ‘I may die tomorrow’. There is so much justification for overspending it drives me crazy.
I wonder if my grandma’s generation would have ever bought an Xbox, or if they would have seen how frivolous it is. (if you cannot afford it.) Or, am I just idealizing a generation I was not a part of?
I usually assume that any “golden age” nostalgia is just idealizing. 🙂 Then again, my grandparents grew up during the depression and never wasted anything, ever. It all got saved, no matter what, from money to wrapping paper.
I have to say that the video game analogy made me laugh! Definitely a good way to reach out to the younger generation in terms they understand because the entitlement mentality seems to particularly prevalent these days.
There’s a line in a song by Cee Lo Green: “I guess he’s an XBox, and I’m more Atari.” The song makes me laugh the whole way through it, but I can’t post the name of the song here, because I try to stay PG.
This post cracked me up and it’s all true.
My son has an X-Box. Guess how he got it? (Hint: It wasn’t from Dad.) He bought it from somebody who was broke and needed money.
awesome title! One of my faves from this week’s carnival.