We're Always Paying Retail

Few of my very good friends or family share more than a passing interest in my passions.  I would worry about them if they did.  Or else I might be identifying with, say, a professional sports team and calling them “our” team.  Okay, no harm, no foul.  Maybe.  But what I’m talking about is personal stuff, the stuff that you want that makes up your tastes.  If you have any tastes then it’s likely you also have conflicts of interest with yourself.

I made sure that my children did not follow in my career footsteps and both gratefully found life-partners more sane, sober, and unlike me than I could have imagined.  They’re all very good people.  Your children grow up, if you let their mistakes be their own and not yours, then they leave and will get on with being human without you having made the matter of living harder.  Don't make anyone else's life harder, not if you can help it.  So do help when you can, love ceaselessly but don’t expect anyone to care about your stuff.  Your tastes like your mistakes need to be your own.

 

After all of that concern and commitment, life goes on (again, if yer lucky and a wee bit privileged) and still you have to live with yourself.  What we forget is that living with yourself is the hardest thing you ever do.

 

But we don’t really forget this hardest thing so much as we act it out.  Investing time, money, and passion into “things” has led Buddhists admonish “Attachment! Renounce!,” Christians to invoke the guilt and fear of God’s potential judgment for our bourgeois decadence (ask Max Weber), and a whole industry of self-help books about keeping things simple, reorganizing your life, and spending late nights with old George Carlin videos about stuff.  Comedy helps because it’s one of the few ways we can hear the truth without it hurting more.

 

None of us are immune to the inner conflicts.  Life’s rarely a bargain; we all pay retail at the end.  It’s a feature of privilege, success, and good luck that we live to possess what we can’t take with us.  It really gets to us when we feel like we’ve made another expensive mistake, likely because we’re not wrong about having made that mistake.  A life of expensive mistakes isn’t necessarily a wrong thing even if it’s not a good thing. But it is also likely a thing that you'd be lucky to have.

Our hard-earned money and time “wasted” presses into emotional fragilities we would rather deny and sooner than later this whole forgive yourself and move on solves nothing because truth is we’re likely to do it all again.  A life without regrets is a life without much living, a paucity of reflection, and insouciance to the usual moral lapses.  It’s better to nurture the consequences of having foibles than try to soothe ourselves with penances.  As Rocky reminds Bullwinkle, “That trick never works.”

 

You may suffer your regrets more than your stupid mistakes.  How would that help make anything better?  Usually getting rid of stuff feels good until you want more stuff and I gotta Jackson says you will want more stuff sooner or later.  It’s not only that stuff can’t satisfy us or that there aren’t more meaningful things in life.  A life without goodstuffyoulike is shabby, cheap, makes the anguish of poverty consciousness into some kind virtue it will never be, and claims virtue for itself when being a little greedy is just another thing that makes you like everyone else.  Virtue is too exceptional to be reduced to any form of self-congratulation that serves only to desiccate the soul’s reserves.

 

Give away your stuff, change your life if you like but don’t think you’ll be a better person just for that.  Being better will require living with yourself no matter what you chose to own.  And giving things of value away really does feel good.  Who doesn’t want to feel good?

 

Next we try to make the retail cost of life go away by telling ourselves we should only do what we can afford.  This is a sure path to under achievement.  Would you have ever purchased a house if you waited till you “had the money”?  You borrowed, you went out on a limb, you had to be responsible, keep a job and do the needful.  But it’s just retail and then some.

Life isn’t only costly at retail, it’s downright unaffordable when we’re unnecessarily stupid.  Things worth it are rarely worth the price but may well be worth the costs.  Living with yourself isn’t easier because you are successful but there should be little doubt that it’s harder when you are even less successful.

 

So for the sake of emotional sanity I don’t bargain, won’t quibble, don’t blush any longer at the price of anything, especially if I am somehow attracted to it.  If I look at an expensive car or a pair of boots ten times the cost of others, I might sigh and pine but if it’s not to be, then it’s not to be.  If I actually acquire said grail it’s not going to be the end of it and to ask for deliverance from desire just because you scored something nice is to reinvite the cycles of buyer’s remorse, guilt, and self-deflation.

 

Go ahead, score your grail if you think that Next Cool Thing is your endgame.  I will be surprised if it is the end and even more astonished if you tell me that at last you are truly content.  You’ll never be content enough because things that are worth the toil, passion, heartache, money, and time rise to better than average when they outlast you and nothing is going to stop death.  But no need to get all maudlin or especially glum about living in the material world.

If you want another pair of boots, a jacket you don’t need, a bicycle you will not ride enough because you have more than one perfectly nice bicycle, ask yourself not if you need it or whether having it is right or wrong.  Ask if you have the room inside yourself to live with the choices you’re making and have made. If you do, your closet or garage will find space.

 

You might have learned from mistakes, many you will not learn enough from but what you can do is your level best not to make yourself a burden to others.  Start there.  Are you depriving the ones you love?  Are you being generous and almost responsible to the planet?

We’re all selfish because it would be insane not to care about what you do. Desire tortures the soul because that's normal and if you're not feeling it then that's a problem.  But if you’re doing a bit less damage to all the rest of the world and maybe a little good then you’ll have reason to do less harm to yourself.   You might find yourself up late at night staring at some perfectly meaningless object that’s the thing to have next and that is in fact not the end of the world or ethical failure.  Live on, prosper, and try not to make life harder than it’s going to be no matter how good you have it.