Ah! So I can blame the people who come up with the ideas! The marketers are only the message bearers, I get it!
Not so fast, Buckaroo. That long line of people includes you and me. In the end, the responsibility rests entirely on your shoulders as a consumer to decide what it is that you love, respect, and value and to bring your actions, including pulling out that piece of plastic which opens all these doors to fleeting happiness (and not so fleeting interest charges) into alignment with those values.
Wait. Buying a Triple Whopper is a values decision? I suppose you wear Birkenstocks too, right?
Guilty as charged, but only when I'm not going barefoot. But hear me out. If you are like 95% of the folks I know, you are working your ass off for your money and trading a lot of valuable time and energy for the privilege. And, for that very reason, you may feel inclined to treat yourself with Dove bars, a fabulous dinner out, a new superfine pair of shoes far sexier than my Birkies. And of course you have a right to do that. But recognize a Band Aid when you buy one. And recognize that slippery slope of earn til you drop, medicate to keep going, oops that debt is growing, fight to make that bonus you have come to require to make ends come close to meeting and buy even more expensive material medication to numb yourself from realizing you are on one hell of a big hamster wheel and you have no idea how to get off of it. (And a strong suspicion that even if you want to your family may object.)
Values are not abstract concepts. They are the very foundation of your life. Those purchasing decisions you make already are reflecting your values, the ones you actually live by. You may buy that Whopper because you value easy and fast rather than healthy and homemade. No harm in that single decision but if you scan back and look at larger patterns in your life, you may or may not like what you see. What you say you value and what your life reveals may be terrible disconnected.
Can you give me an example?
Sure. Let's take health insurance.
We all want it and we want to be able to afford it. On the surface, one might assume it's because in the end, we do value our health. But is that really true? Is this because we really want health or is it because we don't want to face the consequences of our actions and the pain of realizing we can't 'do over' the damage we do when we neglect and abuse ourselves? I can't tell you how many people I have heard since my dad's bypass talk about this being routine now going so far as to say it isn't a big deal and if you do have cardiac problems due to diet, they can easily be reversed. I heard this a lot!
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