Planning to save and invest your money? Read this first.

An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars, advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of the history man, no purpose or place, we have no Great war, no Great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives, we’ve been all raised by television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t and we’re slowly learning that fact. and we’re very very pissed off.” 
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Our society is on a perilous course. A dangerous crisis is slowly emerging. Like a cancer it is spreading slowly through society. Unknowingly it is eroding our most cherished values. I’m talking about rampant consumerism that is spreading like a infectious disease and we are helpless.

According to one recent study, that by age 16 the typical American will have seen almost six million ads. That in other language means more than one ad per waking minute. And in other countries too situation is equally depressing. Such unstoppable bombardment of advertisements is creating a very powerful effect on our culture. Watching mere advertisements may not seem like a problem, however the real problem arises when advertising convinces us that consumption is the real answer to our life’s challenges. We madly act as if all our problems can be solved by buying what is shown in those advertisements. To get in shape, we purchase an exercise video by that famous model. To lead a healthy lifestyle, we heed the mystical teachings of self-anointed beard sporting guru. Every year, some new model of that fancy smartphone comes to market and we convince ourselves to spend a big portion of our monthly salary to buy it.

With every purchase we make, we should realize that advertising is a fertile land of lies and unfulfilled promises. But we do never learn from our own mistakes just to repeat them. Instead, we keep on consuming more and more. With each new purchase we invent a more imaginative excuse for why the previous purchase failed to solve our problems.

You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

So, why should we be worried about it? Consumerism directly results into self-inflicted poverty. And we don’t even realize it. Actually television constantly bombards us with completely false sense of wealthiness. It provokes us to buy more to look like rich, indirectly emptying our pockets and making us poor and miserable with every purchase we make.

Finance expert often talk about saving and investment. How these two things are not same things and how should we plan them differently. More about it, later. However, we are completely ignorant of the fact that, before saving/investing our money, we need to protect it. Yes, protect it! We need to protect it from our own irrationality, conformity. Our irrational spending habits, instant gratification methods are making us spend more. And we urgently need to save us from ourselves.

How? Stay tuned.