[quote=paramount]Not to be self-righteous, but I am amazed at people’s love of money on this board disguised as frugality or something similiar.
You came in with nothing, you’ll leave with nothing.
How many people on this board give even 5% of their income to charity, is charity even part of your budget?
My suggestion: Spend your fricken $$ and take your family on regular vacations, Disneyland, see the country, national parks and forests,camping, give $$ to charity whatever – that time with your family is what’s precious, not a damn house or even a job.
It’s always about me me me me house house house bmw bmw bmw bla bla bla.
This country is screwed, our priorities are all jacked up.
How many families have 2 incomes so they can live in a McMansion or drive a Mercedes instead of one parent staying home with their precious children.
Geographically speaking Southern California is a diseased society.[/quote]
Posts like these amuse me greatly.
First of all, starting out a post with “Not to be self-righteous, but…” is basically saying, “Pardon me while I get extremely self-righteous.” I mean, let’s call a spade a spade for God’s sake.
Now, just for perspective in the context of this post, I gave slightly less than 10% of my after-tax income to charities last year. I don’t really target a percentage, but that’s where it came out. Does this make me better or worse than anyone else? Nope. After all, the degree to which I’m charitable is driven by what I want to do, NOT by what others want me to do. If I didn’t enjoy helping others, I wouldn’t bother – trust me. So, as Bill Clinton (for whom I have no affinity whatsoever) pointed out in a recent book, “Charity is one of the most selfish acts a person can engage in.”
So, when you say that acquiring material goods is all about “me me me…” I’d point out that almost everything a person does in life is about “me me me.” With the exception of taxes and following laws, pretty much every choice you make is about YOU. You don’t want to have kids? That’s about what YOU want. You want to have kids? Again, that’s about what YOU want. It ain’t about the betterment of society. And even if it was, again, it would ultimately come back to being about YOU.
And, anyhow, if you believe that the purpose of our lives is to engage in more charity and avoid material goods… why aren’t you in Africa helping the poor? Certainly living here in the US (with all that implies from a material perspective) is awfully unnecessarily extravagant, don’t you think? I’m sure that someone starving in Asia would get a big laugh at the hypocrisy of your post. I mean, clearly you aren’t living up the ideal you’ve built up in your own mind.
So, please. Spare me the self-righteousness. If you think about it for 5 seconds I think that you’ll find that “your priorities” are no more noble than any one else’s priorities in the context of selflessness. You just view them as noble because they’re yours. But at the end of the day you’re just as self-interested as the next person. We all just have different things that make us content.
So, two points:
Where you stand depends upon where you sit.
The problem with high ideals is that they are seldom easy to live by.
