The Stupid Person's Guide to Life: Shopping

If you feel powerful and wealthy carrying around a credit card with plenty of room for charges – get over it! Your financial health is determined by your income, expenditures and assets, not by a card. Credit cards do give a margin of security in an emergency, but they pull the rug out from such common-sense security measures as saving money, following a budget, living within one’s means, etc. Those things are hard to do, especially when one is living in a dream world of making minimum monthly credit card payments while purchasing more and more luxury items.

Luxuries

Luxury items are things that aren’t basic to your survival. Food, shelter, exercise, reliable transportation, a rainy day fund, insurance, ability to communicate to friends and family, being productive and having goals -- those are basic to survival. An exercise machine, bottled water, specialty ice cream, mochas and lattes are luxuries. Delusion enters in when luxuries – the exercise machine and bottled water – are justified because, “I’ll be healthier.” If the water in your town is suspect, get a faucet filter. If you want to run, run on the sidewalk.

Stopping by a drive-through Starbuck’s is a luxury. If you like to drink hot stimulants, make your own coffee or tea and buy it in large enough quantities so the unit price is low. Still a luxury, but don’t delude yourself that “If I stop for a triple-shot mocha, I’ll be more alert and get that promotion.” Hard work gets promotions, not caffeine and delusions.

Oral Entertainment

Food is necessary for the body’s health and energy. You could live quite well on rice, a little fish or meat, and soy sauce. Millions of people do it. Some foods are more properly classified as oral entertainment. Coffee, tea, sugar, spices, alcoholic drinks, desserts, are all entertainment, most of which have an adverse effect on the body’s health and energy level. There’s nothing wrong with a bowl of ice cream or a cup of coffee – just don’t delude yourself into thinking that you are partaking of nutrition. You are entertaining the body and yourself. That’s all. And if you have a fat bottom and pant going up stairs, don’t blame Ben and Jerry.

Three Thousand Chinese Kids Get Electroshock for “Internet Addiction”

More than 3,000 Chinese kids who spent too much time on the Internet -- defined by the Chinese government as more than six hours per day -- have been forced into a mental hospital and treated with electric shock and psychotropic drugs by a psychiatrist known as “Uncle Yang,” according to media reports in the Beijing News and UK’s Guardian. But Dr. Yang Yongxin – who runs an Internet addiction treatment center in a Chinese mental hospital – can no longer continue the practice under an order from the Chinese Ministry of Health which said that electro convulsive therapy has no foundation in research.