On Jan 15, 2009, at 4:13 PM, JoelMatthews wrote: > On Jan 15, 8:52 am, Tim McNamara <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Jan 15, 2009, at 8:26 AM, Tim McNamara wrote: >> Suddenly I feel a bit embarrassed by conspicuous over-consumption. >> What the heck do I need all this stuff for? Three billion people on >> the planet have no guitars, bicycles or fountain pens- or barely a >> place to live out of the weather or enough food. About half of the >> Earth's population lives on $3 a day or less, according to the CIA >> fact book. I can sometimes make as much in a week as many people >> make in a year. Wow. Now I've talked my way up from embarrassment >> to guilt. > > At risk of topic drift, I am kind of curious how you want to work this > out.
Most of the time I just ignore it as best I can, but I do often find myself in my basement in the bike room, looking around and thinking to myself "dang, I am a lucky guy." I've got three great bikes- none perfect, each quirky and all of them make me happy as a bee in a flower when I'm out riding them. Sometimes I am in a quandary as to which one to ride, and I think "gee, what a terrible problem to have." But I do find myself, when I let myself think about it, increasingly uncomfortable with how I live compared to half of the planet's living conditions. In America I am barely middle-middle class. From the whole-world perspective, I'm ridiculously wealthy. There's some cognitive dissonance there. And as I mentioned in the thread about Rivendell having a lovely copper colored Legolas in my size.... aaarrrgggghhhh! Bicycle Acquisition Syndrome rears its head. I wish I knew a solution that would actually work. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
