No really, you can afford it

Driving home from church today I saw, for the millionth time, a sign along the highway outside of Dockside Marina.
"You CAN Afford it"
Usually I think to myself, "no I can't."
They're selling boats, and I know full well I can't afford a boat. I can hardly afford everything I already have. Like my car and it's gas and insurance, or my phone bill, or the speeding ticket I still have to pay, or...the list goes on and on.
The fact of today's market is that we are bombarded with sales and people telling us what we need.
We need a new car, because right now they're getting cheap.
We need a house/apartment/condo/ect. Because now is THE time for first time buyers.
We need it to be bigger, faster, better, with more memory, storage, RAM, ect.
Mostly, we apparently need "New". Because old is, well...old, and new is new.

Do we really need new? More and more the answer is yes, because a consumeristic culture has been created and things are actually designed to break. Ask any kid who owns an XBox 360 and has gotten the "red rings of death". That is a fundamental flaw with the system, and if you're unfortunate enough to have this happen after the warranty expires, guess what, you're getting a new XBox and it won't be compliments of Microsoft.
The generation of today is referred to as the age of entitlement. We think we've done something to deserve all this stuff we suddenly own or have the potential to own. We want the newest toys, the nicest cars, and the luxuries our parents worked hard for, and we want them now, and we want them cheap.
We fully accept that absolutely everything is disposable, replaceable and upgradeable. We will spend money we don't have for things we don't need. We want it. And if we want it, we think we have the right to have it. Money doesn't need to grow on trees because it exists in the form of debit and credit cards. Many of us have no clue the damage we are doing to ourselves economically because we really can't see it. It's computerized and it's taken care of.
A lot of my generation comes from homes with families that have worked hard to be well off, and so they never had to work. This doesn't describe me as much, because I've been working since I was 14, and I do pay for all my own stuff.
But the fact is that I too have been sucked into the "must have" way of thinking where I make a purchase without thinking of the financial consequence of it. I realize several days later that I no longer have money for other things I might actually need, like food or gas.
Because of all the things in our lives today we have the attention span of a goldfish, and almost as soon as we have something we're focused on something better, newer and, dare I say it, shinier. We have a million options, and a million things vying for our attention. We're torn by bright ads that claim to offer happiness in a box.
The fact is, they don't.
We can't always have the newest, shiniest, most expensive toy. The world doesn't work like that. An honestly the world shouldn't work like that! Sometimes we should actually have to make do with what we have and be happy with that. But on that note, products shouldn't be designed to break, or need replacing/upgrading in six months.
I'm not sure what the point is, or if there is a lesson to be learned somewhere in here, but the choice is actually out there.
You can choose not to be the blind consumer, buying whatever you're told to buy. You can choose to get by on a little, or a lot. But the fact is you need to make that choice, and it needs to be a conscious decision.
The first thing we all need to do, not just the "age of entitlement", is look at our lives face on and see just how much stuff we have filling up our lives, and how much of it we don't actually need. Then we need to make an effort to change that lifestyle.
Sometimes you need to go through everything you have, clean out the bad, the useless, the unnecessary and get rid of it. If someone else can use it, give it away. Donate it. Just remember that if you don't need it you don't need to hold on to it. Having stuff doesn't fulfill you.
Free yourself from the chains of marketing and having.
Money doesn't buy happiness.

And I was hoping not to end this blog with a cliche.