Getting Sick on Winter Holidays

 It has been happening for a while now, that I tend to get awfully sick during my winter holidays in the Old Continent. And that's not funny. It's annoying. Getting sick is annoying as it is, but getting sick on the holidays is doubly annoying because I can't get sick days out of it. And it's winter! I love winter. Even if it's not snowing - which I definitively adore - I would love to be out, walking in the chilly air, breathing hin the fresh, sharp scents of the season. And yet I am sick.

Last year, on my trip to Europe in winter, I've got very sick in Brussels, after visiting a friend, with some sort of stomach flu that pretty much floored me for days. It wasn't funny at all to drag my carcass from Brussels center to the airport, up the plane, down the plane and then all the way to my family's home. But I made it. I soldiered through it.

After a long period of not traveling - I was engaged building my house, so time and money went entirely into that noble cause - last year's extended trip was the first in a long time. I did remember, due to the symptoms, that I have had a similar experience in the past, also during a trip to Europe in winter, but then I thought it was due to some odd sort of beverage poisoning. (Now I have a different theory.) But now, as I've got sick once again - probably due to having caught a nasty type of flu on the plane here - I've started thinking about how many times have I had to suspend my plans to go places and meet people because I was nursing some sort of sickness. It didn't happen every time, but I have the feeling that it has happened more often than I care to remember. So, something needs to be done. (As for what, I'm still preparing my plans on that front.)

This year I've been to Europe twice, if we don't count that I started the year here already, and my plan is to continue traveling twice a year here: once in winter, which is my favorite season of the year, and once in spring. I don't travel to Europe in summer, because the heat of the summer is intolerable. In Spring, however, I was totally well. I guess that type of weather is closer to what I'm more used to, so I'm better prepared, but still, I don't want to give up winters. So, what should I start to do different to make sure my stays here are better? The things that are expected are: regular medical check ups, keep my vaccines always updated, always be punctual with my meds, though I actually don't take any regular medication right now.

Other things that come to mind always include improve nutrition with more fresh, natural, home made foods, maybe even include superfoods in my diet, though I'm not very fond of those. More exercise and all that, and all that is good, but... I live most of the year in a tropical country, and I come to spend holidays in the winter of Europe, so I suspect that there is a part of all of this that no amount of great nutrition and exercise is going to help me with. Shall I go with supplements? This things keep me thinking.

Then there is the other part of the question: how much will this cost me.

My whole budget plan for 2026 is already planned out, and tweaking it at this point is already quite complicated. My budget is really tight. There is a fund of health, and though I always make my best to get my health matters covered by the Social Security, I'm not sure how much out of pocket money would a potentially extended plan require. These are things I still have to think about.

Considering Going Back to Blogging

 It's been a while since I wrote last here, or more than a year, to be precise. I stopped for many reasons, none of them a conscious reason to actually stop blogging. 

The Reason

I just simply didn't post. My digital footprint was more in the shape of videos for YouTube, where I went from books to planners, both of them in Spanish. I was into booktube for a while, I was part of it with haphazard videos uploaded with no editing and no visible schedule, but that stopped at some point. From there I later moved into the plannerverse, with my own channel on planners and tips for planning. I added to the small community of planners in Spanish, which is not a group as bing as you can find in English.

That channel went well, though I do tend to keep small numbers in most of the things I do. I didn't break into the +1000 world, and was really amazed when people spoke of "small channels with +10k subscriptors". That was not me. I'm smaller than that, and I like it. My channel had a new video every Sunday, and I had a kind of set program that took most of the anxiety out of posting, and I did learn to edit. My format was simple, the editing was minimal and the content was reliable. All was well. Except that I was spending a lot of time in YouTube, and the algorithm was twisting around me with annoyance. I started hating YouTube, as a user.

The way I was using YouTube was as entertainment, also as a way to find information on things I wanted to learn, but then mostly I used it as background noise. I put some video of people talking in a calm way, or instrumental music. This kept me focused during work or at monotonous tasks. Eventually YouTube started bombarding me with annoying adds, all of which, by the end, where scam adds. It didn't matter how much I denounced them, they kept popping up, and they were notoriously scammy. This got to me so much, that I decided to walk off the platform, as a user. However, I couldn't, in good conscience, step out of YouTube as a user, but keep producing content to keep my viewers tied to the platform, subject to the annoyance I just escaped, so I moved out.

Finding your footing once you leave a platform that has consumed you online is quite hard, and yes, I miss the channels I used to follow, but now I'm finding other content and other content creators. I'm going more into podcasts, and searching more for blogs, though those are less common than years before.

The New Project

After all this, I feel that my content creator days are not over yet, and so I've been giving thought for a new idea: a podcast/blog on personal finance.

I've got into personal finance - the commercially available how-to market - last year, after I finished paying my debt on my credit card. I'm usually very skeptical of self-help anything, but after having gone through the process of becoming debt-free, I decided that I wanted more information and started looking for it. I wanted more tips and ideas to improve my finances and invest. Given my background in all-things-money (economics, finance, accounting), I had tools many people didn't have, which allowed me to discern better when someone isn't giving sound advice. I did find great content creators and quite good books, though I have to admit that many of those books are good, if you know what do apply to you and what doesn't.

I talked a lot about that to some of my friends - many of whom gave me input based on their personal experiences with money - and that's how this idea started to form: how about a podcast, a blog or both, where I can help people understand personal finances better, read a book on personal finances and know if they are being scammed or if there are parts that don't apply to their case, how to deal with their own risk tolerance, and how to actually determine if they should take risks with some parts of their financial lives.

I don't know exactly when or how, but I do plan on reading several popular books on personal finance, give them a review, explain what works and what doesn't, and concentrate on the Costa Rican market, how ever small it may be, so I can actually explain things that can be found in books written for the USA, applied to what's available in Costa Rica for the regular people.

I have other plans for the next year and the next few years, but I think I would love to do this.

Last Post of 2023

Property of Stormberry

 I'm finishing this year with:

1. A lot of plans for the next year,
2. Resolve to endure to get much closer to my goals throughout 2024,
3. COVID-19 for the first time in my life.

Yep, that last one is quite a thing. For me. I came down with what I thought was "flu" on Christmas day, but it wasn't until two days later, upon the insistence of my mother (she suspected it could be COVID), that I took the test (there was one kit at home) that I realized I, indeed, had COVID. Oh goodie. I managed to avoid it for three years, but in the end I became a member of the club.

I guess I have this new Eris variant, but if you ask me, it feels exactly the way flu feels like. The first two days were horrid, and now I'm stuck with the Runny-Nose-From-Hell. I'm pretty sure I've blown my weight in snot out of my nose by now. Isn't that lovely?

The advance on the thesis front is really slow, as the current task isn't very inspiring and quite time consuming. But it is, nontheless, moving forward. I just really hope I can finish it this year, as I'm aiming for that in one of my New Year Resolutions. I just want to be over with it, so I can start working on getting a PhD.

Both the MSc as the PhD are a matter of personal goals, and not a professional goal, as my current job hardly even recognized the actual work I do, much less my preparation I have for it, so the extra degrees are simply a way for me to accumulate and explore new knowledge. What can I say? Some people colect stuff, others like travel, others rather party or date or have sex, and I like knowledge. Now, this doesn't mean that I only read serious, scientific or philosophical things, as nothing could be farther from reality. I like stories, and my favoured type of readings are novels. I guess I like knowledge because I like the stories that come within the knowledge I seek: economics (my favored area) are full of stories.

I can't blame COVID for the slowing of the progress of my thesis, but I do intend to use the days of vacation (of which half is already gone) to work on it, and present my tutor with something of an advanced improvement by the begining of next year. I really need to get going, get all this small details hammered out so I can go on with the story behind my research: innovation policy's effect on labor.

By the end of this year I've made a couple of big decisions looking forward to 2024. I paid in advance the whole year at a gym, and so I intend so go, at least twice a week, to get in better shape. With that in mind I also ordered a new fitbit to keep myself motivated to exercise. My weight has been going up and I moved into the overweight zone, so I have to start making changes to get back to the normal weight, not only because that's healthier, but also because I want to fit back in my clothes again. It would be just too expensive to change my whole closet. And I like a lot of my clothes, so why change them?

Every year I also tend to make big budget plans to rid myself of debt - inspired mostly by the incredible success I had in 2011 when I whipped out  a staggering debt by the sheer power of my determination - and this year I have made that same decision with a small added trick: a more detailed plan and an actual commitment to get it done. I have two debts: the credit card and the loan from the FGA. The FGA loan works down in a constant fashion, but the credit card debt fluctuates as here and there I find myself in need of using the card. After much thinking I realized that the trigger for my card is always the same: vet expenses.

I've changed vets last year, as our old vet has become hideous with cats. The new vet is a place that actually specializes in cats, but I have been noticing that - under the guise of worry and care - they have been pumping out loads of money from me (my card, to be precise) for a lot of check ups and test my babies probably don't need. One of my cats -Woody - has costed me a fortune with citologies and a biopsy of an unhealing nose problem. It turns out that he has feline AIDS and on top of that a very serious skin cancer. The outlook for him is bleak and his chances to get cured are minimal, yet the vet was pushing for an appointoment with an oncologist and maybe start a chemotherapy treatment. That's where I hit the breaks. Goodness, no. I won't run myself into debt to torture my cat and make his last days a living hell.

I've decided to limit the vet visits to vaccines and that will be that. And to kill my credit card. So I sat down, mapped up all my forseeable expenses and laid out a detailed fortnight by forthnight plan. It came out quite a strick one, with nearly no wiggle room, but certainly one that needs to be implemented.

Something we sometimes forget to see is our own reality. By turning a blind eye, by not making a plan, not looking at our balance, we try to pretend that things are much better, much easier, or running much better than they are. I did not delude myself, these are my expenses, these are the things I spend on, and my only "wiggle room" are my groceries, where sometimes I run amok packing up the cart with things I end up throwing out as they rot on my shelves or my fridge (my waste basket eats more veggies than I do).

2024 is a year for me to take a hard look at things, work for my goals, carve a path for the future I want from here on and get on with the program. It's not going to be easy, I know that, but it's nothing I can't deal with. I have proven myself time and again that I can adapt and I can flourish in any situation. I am resilient, creative and I can stick to my own plans with astonishing stubbornness, as my recent Mock Lottery Project showed me this year. If I want it, I can make it happen, and I will make it happen.

2024 will be the year I'll step on the gas on to reach my goal to become the Aunt March of my story.

Thoughts and Updates

Source: Pinterest.com

In recent days I've been floating in a sort of haze. First of all, allow me to update you in matters of which I've posted previously. So, how did it go with the defense of my thesis? Swimingly. :-) I'm proud to tell y'all, that not only did I made it, but I gotten the rare honor of scoring a perfect grade: 10 out of 10. This is so rare, that my thesis director (we call it "tutor"), told me he hadn't seen one such case in his two years of experience. This is my third degree, and one could say it is my third thesis (if we don't take in account the fact that I had to write two with my team for the Accounting degree, in which case this would be my fourth thesis), and this is the first time I get a 10 out of 10.

As you remember, I was freaking out the week before the defense, and I mean fucking-freaking-out. I was obssessed with the timing of my presentation, that juts didn't want to go under 25 minutes. The topic was one I know thanks to my job and the involvement I've had with it since it became an issue in our industry. Just to put you in context (quickly and easily, I promise!), my thesis was about the impact of the LRIC costing model applied by the Costa Rican Telecom Regulator (SUTEL) on the capability of Dominant Operators to generate profit. In plain English, if the rules applied by the Government (throught the SUTEL) allowed companies considered big to make money. 

I took three days of vacations to prepare for the defense (the day of the defense and two days ahead of it), and so I went on and on and on, mixing down time and reading (novels) with rehearsal. I wanted to be rested and relaxed to be in peak conditions, but my brain would not stop. During my morning exercise routines, as well as I was walking around the city running my errands, I went on talking to myself, repeating over and over my presentation. Each of the 32 slides were etched in my inside of my eyelids, and so constantly I invoked them in my head in order while I repeated the loosely scripted speech I planned to give. Time and again I had to cut here and there, calming the protesting voices inside me with "Look, if they really want to know, they will ask, and if they do - fuck - give'em all".

Source: Pinterest

The day of the presentation I trusted myself to my gods - Minerva, Mercury and Neptune - and drove to meet my Fates. There were more people than I had initially expected, among them a professor who had been my detractor previously. I've got a little more nervous because of that, mainly because I didn't want to be rude, and I wasn't sure how to properly explain the things he had objected previously without sounding like I was ridiculing him for not noticing. Yes, diplomacy is definitively not my strong suit.

When the defense began my voice trembled and broke, and I've got tongue tied with easy words like "market" and "telecommunications", but I kept pushing on. I had this by heart. The one professor I had invited to be my supporting audience was left out, but my thesis director was there and smiled at me encouragingly. Then I loosened up, and soon switched into a different mode. I was looking at my audience in the eyes, talking to them vehemently, the same way I would at work, because I felt like I was at work, in a meeting trying to make understand a mixed audience about the importance of my work and why it must be supported and brought to the Regulator. I passed from slide to slide, but I wasn't looking at the slides. Those were aid for my audience if they didn't get what I was telling them. Each slide offered a simple scheme of what I was telling them. Imagine it like an economist, defending a Finance project to financists while using the subtle art of Marketing to attack them on all fronts (auditive and visual) so that they would open up to my message. And it worked.

I was within the timeframe alloted to me, and when the questions came, I used emotion to spice my words. My topic was about Regulators and big telecom companies, but with words I landed my issues into their pockets. I rose their spirits, made them feel like the company I was representing was theirs and that they had to defend it whatever the cost. I made them feel aggravated and ready to jump, because what I was denouncing felt to them like a personal blow. I owned them and their hearts.

When it came to an end, I felt like crying. The professors applauded and smiled so bright, I felt in a dream. One of the coordinators present at the defense asked me little after the end of the process, if she could give my work to a colleague that works at a higher Regulator body. She explained that she had commented my work with him and he wanted to read it. Oh goodness! By all means!

I stayed around because I planned to stay for the defense of my classmates (that was in the afternoon, while I defended in the morning), so as I met with professors from my other careers (Accounting and Marketing), and all of them were told of my results, soon started encouraging me to submit my curriculum vitae so I could start teaching.

I met then - almost by accident - with an old classmate of mine, from my days as an economics student. I knew he worked there, and I had intended on inviting him, but somehow it had escaped my mind, and when I remembered that I would have loved having him there, it was too late and felt improper. I still was happy to see him. For sake of simplicity, lets call him Friedrich, in honor of Friedrich Engels.

Friedrich and I have had always an uneasy sort of relationship. Back in Economics, we were mostly classmates, but he wasn't really in any of my circles. He wasn't someone I would have called "a friend", but not an outright rival either. I don't think I had ever smiled at him in those days, and though we talked here and there - and when we did our conversations were long - there wasn't an easy environment. As I cast my mind back to those days, perhaps I could describe my feelings there best as "predatorial", or maybe "on guard". I was on the lookout for him, watching him, measuring him, cataloguing his comments and running my minds about meanings and counter messages. I do know we had played poker together and he improved my poker education, which by then had some grounding on what I had learned in Hungary from my Kenian and Jordanian friends.

Those years ended in silence, as we had a fall off. Actually, I don't remember much (and I haven't actively sought my journals of that time to find out what had I recorded of the incident), but Friedrich said I've got mad because he forgot to come to a meeting we had arranged to work on a project. Curiously, I have one image in my head, of him looking at me with so much hatred and anger as I have never seen on him, while I just wondered what the hell was happening. Be it as it may, we definitively fell out with each other by the last years of our career.

We met again when my team and I defended our first Accounting thesis (the program required us to work in teams and prepare one thesis in Accounting and another in Auditig). That first time, after over fifteen years, I remember he walked out into the hall were we waited and didn't see me. Having all tense feeling fled from me since then, and having recognized him, I called him. He turned and froze. To this day I remember him there, in the hallway, frozen as he saw me. His beautiful green eyes had widened, but not a muscle moved in his body, halted by what looked like paralizing fear. I smiled and came closer, but dread came into my soul as I searched my faulty memory for whatever sign of damage, anger, violence or any other type of bullying I may have inflicted upon him.

There is one thing I said to him, etched in fire in my mind, so poisonous and unsensitive, which filled me with such unadulterated, pure hatred it had fed me and made me smile in my youth. Then and today, it makes me feel bad, and incites in me the need to atone.

He recovered his composture, and then little after invited me to his office, where we talked. If my mind serves me well, I think I then apologized for that awful incident and all other insults I may have hurled at him in our youth. From then on we kept a loose e-mail contact,  based mainly on the discussion of some economical topics.

Back to the day of the defense, I found myself apologizing again for not inviting him. I made my apology short and to the point. There was no need to tell him how much I regretted it, and how I would have love to have his familiar face and his luminous eyes supporting me when I needed courage. Funny how the world turns, right? The one I was distrusting about was the one I would have loved to hold my hand and tell me that all would be well. Then, for the first time ever, he embraced me.

No, let me put this clearly. Though we've had hugged before, as a usual form of greeting, this time around his embrace had an entirely different quality. More than friendly, his embrace was warm, sustained and felt like a pull into the heart. I've mused much over this touching embrace and the one way I can describe it best is to compare it to the longing embrace you would give to a book you've thought long lost, and which suddenly comes back to you again. A lost little treasure. That's how he made me feel, like he was happy to find me again. That warmed my soul. We talked and agreed to meet for lunch in the week. Through out that meeting and the subsequent lunch, I caught him staring at me, those glass clear green depths fixed on my features, past my skull, as if searching for something beneath my skin. His gaze held long at time, and I had no idea of their intention. On any other person I would have thought they held the questing look of someone trying to build up courage for a move, but given our current circumstances and our raw, charged past, I would put such considerations far from him.

Our correspondence seems to have taken again the old, paused pace we have kept for a couple of years now, but that has not diminished the green flame in my solar plexus. I'd like to reach out and grab into his wrist, wrap my fingers securely around it and hold like Grettel would into the hand of her brother. I think I would like to have him in my life, like a sort of another brother with whom one could be silly, goofy, and sneak out to gorge on chocolate while talking about economics.

Margin Call and Financial Responsability

I believe it was last week, when I've got to see a movie called "Margin Call". I haven't seen any trailers of it, but once I've got a glimpse of the poster, I decided that was a movie I would love to see. I hoped it would be a movie about soemthing financial, but didn't have any information on it. Sure, from the poster shown at the movie theatre it could have been an accion movie about snitching drugs or something like that, so imagine how delighted I was when the movie turned to be exactly and entirely about the financial world, and it included some of my favorite actors (Paul Bettany, Kevin Spacey, Simon Baker, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci), in a cast composition that blew me away!

Quirk of mine or a professional hazard, I really, really love financial or economics themed movies and stories. This in particular - which was about a unnamed bank realizing that they have pushed the envelop too far and toxic mortgages were about to explode in their face - had quite a strong message in many levels.

The movie inspired me to write particularly about the topic of financial responsability, but as there was the topic about the whiners, the topics started to collide, one thing pulling to the other, forming relationships and making sense into another topic, and made me (re)wake up to the fact that financial issues and whining feed on each other (too).

If you recall the last financial crisis (not the Greece or the Italian debacle, but more like the implosion that erased Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae from the face of the Earth), the one that forced the American Government to issue a $1 trillion bailout for banks, it started crumbling at the banking system due to very risky mortgages that were traded around in big bulks, much like a hot potato and generating a lot of money that had no sustance, nor any back up or support other than especulation and a crazy hunger to get money for nothing. This situation had many faces, but the one that got most of the attention was the banking sector, the brokers and the big account excecutives with the huge, juicy paychecks and bonuses.

The movie touches this topic as well, making an interesting point out of highlighting how much money some of these big heads get, how deep they are in the heart of the mess that pulls the whole system down, and yet, how in the order to cut costs to try and get the train back on the rails, they cut the heads of people who make much less than they do, do much more than what they do, weaken the company, weaken the system, but try to save their big slice of the cake. Really, do you want to cut on costs, so you fire 60 people who make under $100 K a year, and yet you keep the fat cats that work less, spend more company dime AND earn $40 million a year? I don't know what kind of economics they studied - if they studied any - but that doesn't add up. But why do they do it? For greed, endless, bottomless greed.

In this circle being "smart" isn't about being conscious, about using your knowledge to make something good, make something better, but about how can you make more money and get away with murder. But why do we allow it? Here comes the second element of the equation. We allow it, because many of us also want to be them, make that much money, whatever the cost.

Just think about it: if someone offers you $60 million, do you take it or do you leave it? How many of you would take the money? How many would ask "why?"?, How many would ask "what for?"? How many of you would actually question why the money is given, on what account, and how many of you would just ask "really?" or look for hidden traps? However, how many of you would ask themselves "and what could I do with that money?"?

As it has been noticed, there's plenty of people who whine on a professional level, and people chronically depressed and unhappy. The reasons are many and as different as people themselves, but it seems that today wherever you go you are surrounded by unhappy people. This much sadness can bring you down as well, but you don't need to let this happen. However, as it happens, unhappiness and unfulfillment are a key part of the system that allows these big executives get their big paychecks. Don't believe me? Just take a look at what's going around you. You are told that you are unatractive, that you need to change your body, make it thinner. The bar currently is set so high the actual models are being photoshopped to meet the new requirements. This will send you spending loads of money on fat burning pills and all sorts of equipment, gyms and reducing clothes you don't really need, and that will only make you feel worse about yourself, like a failure, which will generate more and more needs, for which you will be systematically convinced that you need to spend your hard earned money to "fix".

You are constantly told that your clothes are not good enough if they are not of a given brand, that your bag isn't good enough if it didn't cost you $2000, your shoes are not good enough either. And if you save and you get one of those items, be ready to get rid if it in 3 months because you can't wear "last season's fashion". The same happens with your electronics. Your mobile phone or smartphone needs to be replaced as soon as the new version hits the stands, and as it happens the "wow effect" wears out after a month or so. So you end up spending a lot of money on a thing that needs to be replaced by something just as expensive - or more - on a matter of months.

Your house isn't big enough, your TV isn't HD enough, to big enough, of flat enough, or thin enough, your laptop or netbook isn't WOW enough either, and you are told constantly that in order to be happy, you need to have everything, whether you really need it or not. Conveniently, a lot of so-called wise-people (called gurus), preech that "conformism" is a bad thing. May Hyne forbid you ever feel sated, you ever feel like you reached the level you want to be in, because that's "conformism", and that's something you must avoid at all costs. If you get sated, you won't move out of that level and you'll "stop evolving". Really? And where did that took  us to?

As it happens, for any regular John or Jane Doe like you and me, you can go on spending on stuff as long as your income allows you - if you have an income. If you make $1000 a month, you are supposed to stay within that frame. However, if you follow your common sense and the lessons you may have learned at home - or at least at Home Economy Class at school - then you know that the money you make should go first and foremost to the main expenses: pay bills, pay the rent, get the groceries. Over that you can save and/or spend on other matters. This is nice and okay, except that this doesn't allow these financial executives to cut a slice of your paycheck for themselves. So, through the market starts the preeching of this "better life" you should attain. You are made feel inadecuate, left behind, or whatever negative feeling that gets you spending. However, if you have $1000, what else can you spend if that's all you have? Well, take on loans, but maybe taking on loans might stop you when you realize you are getting over your head. So what to do? Cheat people.

You are still fed with the idea that you are not well the way you are, you are nurtured into a whiner, an unhappy person who needs to get well, and who will be offered time and again expensive, fake solutions that would offer only a temporary false sense of comfort, but from which the relapse into unhappiness will be bigger. Credit cards came into place with a lot of glam and glitter, selling a sense of freedom that only helped feed irresponsability. You were told you were free while the banks and fonancial companies where giving you enolugh rope to hang yourself. And that was okay, because the banks loved the way you spent, they loved the interest rates they could charge you, and licked their lips in anticipation for the big loads they could cash.

Things went bigger, and a lot of people bought the ticket into the fake dream, spending not only what they didn't have, but also what they didn't have the means to pay back. Banks didn't care either, as they relied also on the brokering system, the bourse and the trading, so they piled up the money, they bundled it up, sold it, and if the loans caved in, it was going to be someone else's problem. They infected the regular people with greed, rubbed their irreal lives in their noses, egged them to look for it even if they didn't have their paychecks to cover for that type of life.

From this you could quickly deduce that the guilty of the story are the greedy executives, that they tricked people into this swirl, but that's not really the lesson. Though banks and the financial sector is pretty much guilty for what happened, the whole system, and even you and me, are guilty of what happened. Why did we buy the lie? Why can't we say: "No thank you, truth is I'm happy with what I have"? Why do we believe a third person who doesn't know us telling us that we are flawed and should be unhappy and unsatisfied? Do you really need fashionable clothes? Are they really that good? A $10 bag works just as well as a $2000 one. What do you do with it anyways? You put your stuff in it, and use it to carry your things around. Why do you need a bag that's more expensive than a used car?

Do you really need another mobile phone or smartphone? Really? What's wrong with the current one, except that it isn't the latest hot ticket? It doesn't work for you anymore? Really? And why do you need to change your body? Why do you strive to look the way not even the model looks like? Why do you need a bigger house? Don't you fit in your current house? Isn't enough what you currently pay in amenities? Isn't enough the chores you have to do to keep your home looking well?

The question raises from the movie, and it got me thinking, whether this would have happened if people would have had decades ago the nerve to say: "you know what? your add is pretty, but I don't need your crap" or say "you may look down on conformism, but let me tell you this: I don't want to be trapped in an eternal loop. I want to reach satisfaction, want to know where's my level of satisfaction, and I don't need to push the envelop further from there, because evolution doesn't run on one track, but many, and if I'm already making the money I want to make, I can concentrate on something else, like the things I can do in my free time".

The media won't tell you this, but remember: it's okay to say "enough" and it's okay to say "no thank you". Your gut knows better than your account executive. Trust it.