I have a greed mentality. I've carefully calculated my next 500 purchases. I know what possessions I want to replace. (They're not me. They're inferior. They're upgradeable, and most importantly, they're not PERFECT.) I have some possessions locked down as...regrets.
I am pushed back to my childhood where I looked at an ugly ballpoint pen and thought...awesome...and I mean wow. Somebody somehow made it. A pen. With no greed in mind, I accepted this pen as mine, too much and not too little. The metal pieces, machined metal pieces, to own something somehow made beyond imagination. When you're little, you appreciate every color and every invention.
But I've lost that now, and I think it started with Christmas and I think it started with the money to buy things -- the earliest point being Christmas since I had a small to no allowance. And in the sense that it was Christmas, it might have been in the sense it was wealth. We have an insatiable desire for wealth...once we get into it. Christmas gave me wealth, and wealth took away appreciation. Christmas, actually, made me too wealthy. There was this low level of wealth that, when kept, didn't bother me and didn't give me anxiety, like I mentioned from childhood. Now, post many Christmases, cherishing possessions is a CHALLENGE. I've DAMNED most of my possessions as "not-perfects" and am working on "liking things" as I mentally remove the fact that there are millions of versions of everything on my desk (and this is the one I ended up with?). You need to take away money and accept your current level of wealth and see if you can mentally just "like" everything you own (plan not to replace it). I have to be the happy wealthy with low net worth.
Christmas, for me, resulted in instigating greed and increasing yearning: making a list, waiting until Dec. 25th, and getting everything at once instead of distributed throughout the year. I basically exercised greed in a big way that transformed my brain into a "shopping brain." Now wherever I went I was considering buying things. If too expensive now, well, in the future. Like I have said, I have lined up my next 500 purchases. I have no money, but there's a vacuum cleaner, car, tupperware, fancy face creams, etc. Now I am poor and I find myself needing to like everything again. I live with too many regrets, and I have to whittle away the ones I can.
Anyway, I think Christmas was this big "shopping brain" creator, and I needed to receive one thing every two months instead.
Should Christmas be replaced? Reduced? How do you like the thermos you own? Your old textbook? You shirt that was a compromise? Are you spartan? I'm scared at how Spartan a single person can be.
