Spending your life like you were spending a dime

Lyall Lovett sings “You spend the night like you were spending a dime, that’s just a crying shame.”

When I first heard the song, I thought it said, "You spend your life like you were spending a dime."

I thought it was a pretty cool comment about a shallow decision maker.

Either way,spending a dime takes little thought and is usually over some trivial food item like kiddie’s candy, although back in the day I could get two Steamies down on the Main at 2 AM for a dime, complete with mustard and relish.

Spending a life in a broader context is like consuming a life. As a consumer, taking spending cues from advertisers and society at large as we ‘spend’ our lives in front of a tube showing actors pretending to live ‘real’ situations which we vicariously consume instead of going out and DOING something.

We buy ‘stuff’ and feel good about owning the upscale, the Beamer, the Condo, the iPod, the Laptop, the whatever makes your ‘life’ easier, and ourselves portrayed as having taste, evidenced by ‘quality goods’. Please note that “quality” as a word is meaningless until a modifier like poor, or good, or low, or high is stuck in front of it.

So the best advice I ever heard about living a satisfying life was to live it doing complicated things that absorb your attention, engage your sense of justice, beauty, love, awareness of the universe.

So how many people settle for consuming an easy life, allowing others to make the important decisions, watching virtual people living imaginary lives, on Reality Television.

I threw my TV out ten years ago. I was tired of the same old same old, predicting the sit-com punch lines and watching the cops solve all the crime in just an hour.