What is with the culture of indulgence and extravagance?

For a long time it's seemed like it's become cool to be extravagant.

Gold chains and diamond rims.

It's all well and good to portray this wealth if you want...but it's seemed to get worse and worse lately. It's not just a $100k car and fancy ass clothing. It's spending everything you got and more to portray this wealth and extravagance.

I suppose I should have seen this coming when I was a kid and I was pushed and bullied to buy Nike's and Tommy Hilfiger. Nike of course is just garbage made in China overpriced to make rich people richer. Tommy Hilfiger shouldn't be bought by anyone! That guy is racist garbage, and his clothes are garbage! They're just Chinese and other outsourced labor companies making cheap shit, but then some American company putting their logo on it, hopefully at least after inspecting it and doing quality control, and then selling it for massive profit.

There is no reason anyone should buy this garbage.

The kind of extravagance portrayed on Instagram and Snapchat is some next level garbage though. Some of the things that they buy might be actually good products, but they spend so much and waste so much every single day it's shocking. All while being driven around in their black luxury SUV's.

I guess you can get enjoyment from whatever you like...and maybe that's spending your money on fancy overpriced shit, or seeing people on social media that do this...but I worry about this whole image of extravagance.

Poor people don't have the money to live in this extravagance, or even close to it. Middle class people don't have the money to live in that level. When I was going to school I saw all the other kids with all this stuff and I wondered how the hell they got all this shit. The irony was that my family actually earned more than most of their's. My dad just wasted his money on different things. He had cars he could enjoy, and went out far too often. So, I had off brand sneakers...or Doc Martins...which I loved...and he had imported new cars every few years...and we had a big house that still isn't paid off.

I have no doubt that they're probably in similar situations now, where they don't have nearly enough saved due to the financial crisis.

So, maybe they were right. Maybe they enjoyed their money in their own way.

But I know how my dad wasted his money was wrong. And I know how those other kids wasted their parents money and had fancy ass gaming consoles with tons of games, was wrong.

Not wrong in the sense of right and wrong necessarily, but wrong in the sense that it was a huge fucking mistake.

None of us plebs can live anything like this. We can't afford to buy shitty name brand garbage just to make asshole rich people richer. We need to buy actually good products at actually good prices, because we're not fucking rich.

Even rich people don't fucking live like this, because if they do, they won't be rich for long!

They need to be fucking wise about their purchases.

You know that $5000 or $10,000 watch that that rich guy wears on his wrist? He's worn it for 20 or 30 years and has taken care of it and taken it in for repair. Because that's what you do.

Those idiots that seem to waste their money all the fucking time, you know what happens when they get out of the limelight? They get normal jobs, because they wasted all their money. Hell, sometimes they end up turning to crime in some cases. Or their extravagant lifestyle was faked and it all belonged to a studio.

But, I guess all this crap isn't for me. I don't even like diamonds. I don't even want to buy anything diamond. They're fucking overpriced rocks. If I'm gonna buy an overpriced rock, it's at least gonna be pretty, like a fucking emerald or some shit. Even if my dad made his own mistakes in buying stupid shit...and I make some of my own...I was never raised to care about portraying some false extravagance of wealth.

That's not how you stay wealthy.

You wanna stay wealthy, you invest in companies selling overpriced shit to stupid people.