Premature Purchases

There is an interesting trend going around today, and I have a name for it. Instancy. "I want it, and I want it now.

The bad habit of impatience has been exacerbated many-fold by the advent of  Do It With James and other similar bank schemes. It is the world's way of making more and more money out of those who haven't got any to begin with. Sure, I love James, but only if he's my husband, son, or boyfriend. But a loan? I love loans? I find that feeling extremely difficult to identify with.

Walk into many a young couple's home today and you will find many similarities to homes owned by those who have arrived in industry. Plasma screens (wrong aspect ratio for TV signals), Bose sound systems (grossly overrated), Sub Zero fridge, Blum furniture fittings, one child.

In all likelihood, these artifacts are not fully paid for, with nothing to back them up. Even more galling is the SUV in the car park, also on hire-purchase. The facts that decorations outweigh descendants and omnipotent vehicles rank higher on the priority scale than offspring are very telling on society's train of thought today. A train very soon to be derailed as the reality of hollow luxury comes crashing down upon a flimsy facade with nothing to back it during crises.

Travelling from West to East today, I spent more than three hours in various buses (while stopping along the way. I also managed to read most of my 201 material, but that is another Detenber Digression).

I noticed that the buses were mostly stationary, along with all the other cars on the road. This led me to wonder just what was so liberating about driving, and then on to why does everyone want to drive a car that cannot move amidst the hundreds of other cars?

There are really only two times in the day that driving is truly useful, ie. it gets you from point A to B quickly, without having to wait for everyone else to get there first - in the wee hours of the morning and in the middle of the day. The former occurs when most people are asleep and by extension, unable to drive; the latter happens because most people are gainfully cooped up in their cubicles and therefore unable to drive.

If you were gainfully employed, you would not be driving around in the middle of the day. Again, if you were employed in the daytime, you ought to be sleeping at night and therefore unable to drive.

Therefore, the only time when most people are free to drive would be, well, when most other people are free to drive, thus creating an enormous swarm of vehicles on the road at the same time, all unable to move.

I do not know if drivers are turly happy, because I cannot see them clearly behind their glass screens, impassively staring at the boot of the car in front of them. But I do know that I find nothing liberating, exhilarating, or ego-boosting about waiting in line behind hundreds of other cars to pass a junction, hearing the card reader go "teep!" as I pass under the gantry, searching for a parking lot alongside tens of other cars circling the parking area like vultures and then having to pay to park, and finally, not being able to put on my tie, tie my shoelaces, and read my papers sitting in the back seat while someone else negotiates the traffic.

In other words, driving is fun, sure, if you take the car to Gudang. Or Arnage. Or Antarctica. I can even understand why everyone is all excited about getting their driving license. Hell, I'm excited for myself too, ten years from now. But what I cannot empathise with is the desire to buy a car. More accurately, to buy a car without any money.

There really ought not to be so many thousands of cars on the roads today but for the fact that one can buy a vehicle with almost nothing in the bank. If you have worked ten years and saved up enough money, you could honestly buy a car and heave a sigh of relief as you stop taking the bus. Fair enough if your first job earns you fifty thousand a year. However, many of those driving new cars today are fresh out of school without fifty thousand a year.

In other words, many of those cars on the roads today ought not to be there at all but for those execrable car loans. In fact, if you buy a new car and don't take up the loan, you will end up paying more for your car. In other words, you are coerced into taking a loan.

Buy what you cannot afford. Spend what you do not have. Enjoy what you have not earned. Are these false values condoned? By whom?