Ruthie has been especially impressed by the baseball stars who, remembering their own impoverished childhoods have recently brought out cut price sneakers for 15 dollars. The verdict so far? Cant tell the difference from the 150 dollar ones.

Possessing stuff is fun. Sure being spiritual and having love and friends are all necessary (more important even) but its the toys that add the fun. They aren’t mutually exclusive: you can have lots of toys, and aspire to more of them, without being shallow; while having an artistic soul; while having social compassion.

A hair shirt looks good but it kinda itches.

As for the 60’s; Geeklawyer really is a bit of a hippy at heart, you know, drugs & free love ‘fight the man’ chill-out etc, but the hippies were a tiny infinitesimal minority and the 60’s zeitgeist wasn’t really flowers & Haight-Ashbury. The period was as much about greed/aspiration as any other era: corporate asset stripping, strip mining, property booms etc etc, for example all started then.

Ruthie recently spent the weekend at a houseparty with one of her old schoolfriends: it was a great eye opener. Ruthie seems to spend most of her life with middle aged men for reasons generally beyond her control so it was odd to suddenly be thrown back amongst her contemporaries.

After a weekend with them she was glad to get back to her middle aged men; she has never met a bunch of people who were so unhappy despite being very successful. Ruthie found the constant comparative discussion about cars/houses/size of wage packet/love life/academic qualifications utterly tedious. Thatcher did a good thing when she encouraged us to be aspirational. She didn’t tell us how to know when we’ve made it, or warn us that all this stuff may not, of itself, make us happy.

Ruthie cant help thinking that those who grew up in the 60’s have a much healthier attitude about whats really important.

Anyway: back to Dan. At a certain point in ones professional life virtually everyone you meet is “rich”, in the sense that no-one is struggling along on the breadline. The difference between driving a small car and a big one is far less in terms of the impact it has on the quality of your life than the difference between having no car and a car. But advertisers need to keep telling us we need this stuff and that we are some how inferior without it, otherwise why would we keep buying stuff we don’t really need?

So it you’re rich its easy to throw money around. Far harder to actually try and understand people.

As for the Big Mac, yeah Ruthie has the occasional dirty habit. But generally only because she does lots of gym and craves the salt..