Everyone’s seen a meal deal. You want a sandwich and maybe a drink but then it’s not much more expensive to have a meal deal with crisps or chocolate. So, we buy the meal deal even though the things we really want aren’t on the deal.
So, what’s the result?
We spend more than we needed to on things we don’t like and eat more calories than we would because it looks like a good deal.
It really isn’t a good deal but we do it all the time.
How many of us do jobs we don’t like to buy things we don’t need to fill houses we don’t own?
Some people want to stop smoking but know that having a coffee with that one friend means they’ll light one up. It could be the one friend they open up with. What they really want is the company of their friend but the coffee comes along accompanied with the cigarette.
Maybe we buy clothes to go out where we spend money we don’t have and suffer a hangover the next morning when we didn’t really want to go out but our friends do or it’s just something we have always done.
Modern life seems focused on doing things we don’t want to or need to do because it suits someone else by giving them our money or time or effort.
This could be a recipe for selfishness but maybe sometimes we need to be just a little bit selfish, not completely but just enough to do what’s best for us. After all, nobody considers the people working at a cigarette company when they decide to quit smoking.
Most of these extra things creep in without us recognising what’s happening, the first step is realisation. Once you know what’s happening you can begin to use willpower and maybe then you won’t buy the meal deal.
© 2018 David G Chambers. All rights reserved.
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