Suing for a banana- A false sense of security and control?

Good Morning! I’d like to start the day with an observation that I make as I do the same thing almost every morning- I wake up, kiss my fiance goodbye, watch the 6:00 am news and drink my coffee. As I sat on the couch in-between commercials and waiting for the news to keep coming back on, I literally have ways to spend crammed down my throat. I mean, I’m not stupid and I know that you have to be in control and not do the spending but you would never know what’s out there or what “sales” were going on without “a little help from my friends.” I remember being in class and learning about how lighting, angles and cameras affect the mood of a movie/TV show but when you apply it to commercials, it just gets me every time. I feel like for someone with a compulsive shopping habit or any habit at all could completely lose all control. There’s shopping (of all types), food and drink, vacation deals, commercials on how to sue people for eating an unripe banana ten years ago and things to do around town that will ultimately cost you $200 by the end of the day. So how do you end up saving and not spending? Honestly, that’s a good question. I’d be a liar if I sat here and said that a commercial never got to me. It’s easy to say, “well, just have a little control and say no!” I mean, that’s not fair…what am I supposed to do, just never watch TV or listen to the radio again? We live in a society and culture where people now ultimately value their sense of worth in the things that we do and the things that we own. We’re liars if we don’t believe that at times. We need more, we need more, we need more and as Robert Kiyosaki says, “Don’t buy things that you can’t afford with money that you don’t have to impress people that you don’t like.” But when do the things that we own end up just owning us? Back a few months ago, I started reading the The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up: the Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. I thought that this may be another gimmick but it ended up being very interesting. It reinforced the Konmari Method that I didn’t need even close to what I owned, showed me that I have been folding my clothing completely wrong all these 32 years and that there’s more to my life than the crap currently in our house. Do I need 57 mugs even though they’re fun to look at (despite the fact that I poorly rotate them to begin with)?- nope. I started off small and ended up majorly “decluttering” and cleaning the house. I took over 20 garbage bags to our local thrift store, it gave me such an empowering feeling and seemed to make the employees of the thrift store cringe to have to go through all these bags now. The art of decluttering also means not filling back up from the empty spaces in the house now and I’ve tried very hard to not buy, buy, buy to fill back up. It’s still a work in progress and I have my estate sale days (my favorite) but have I filled all the empty spots in our house? Nope. We need to move into the direction that we can live without more and that we actually need less– not only for the sake of our wallets but just for our life. Marie states that we do the object (whatever it is) a bigger disservice keeping it rather than not using it and I couldn’t agree more. As I write this entry, the TV rambles off the sales for the rest of the month and taunts me to buy furniture, use medications that will make me have worse side effects that the actual symptoms and to teach me how to finance a new vehicle because “you deserve it.” I am comparing this next statement to the treasured saying (because I am an addictions counselor both in trade and in heart), “just do it- one day at a time.”