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Wasteful Wish Lists

03/07/2018

When I was a kid living in America, I really enjoyed going to the mall. Sure there was the part where my mom tried to get me and my siblings to try on new clothes, but that dreadful experience was quickly erased by our trip to the Burger King and then to the Toys ‘R Us just after.

Walking through the aisles of that shop was an exercise of imagination and rhetoric, where I conceived awesome adventures with all the different toys and then tried to convince my mom to buy them. Most of the time we left empty handed. But there were some success stories: this one water gun, a Super Soaker. I wanted that water gun for over a year and I eventually got it, when I did though, I quickly realized that I could barely carry it and maybe used it five times.

As a student it’s the same story, without millionaire parents or a sugar daddy to finance you, you have to pay attention to your budget, especially if you have the ambition to travel a bit. You have to be your own parent and not buy a Super Soaker every other month as a large, wasteful, impulse expense.

So instead those things are added to a wish list called ‘Stuff I want to buy list’ on my laptop where they wait. And wait. Until one day when I click on the link, ‘Error 404’ shows up on screen and the bag, coat or shoes that I wanted are no longer available.

You then realize that you can and have lived without a €200 pair of shoes for the past few months. Eventually, no matter how much you wanted them, you just can’t seem to remember why you wanted them in the first place.

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