What Drives People to Spend All Their Money?

We live in a world where consumption is a big topic. Most people want to seize the moment and don't think about the future. They spend their money for all kinds of things without thinking whether it is absolutely necessary to have the certain kind of product or service or not. In this article I am going to talk about the point how important consumption really is and why people spend most of their money.

Concerning this topic, I have one very simple example from my childhood: My brother always loved candy. Every week he went to a store and spent all his money on candy. At the same time, I saved my money every week and could buy some shares after a couple of years. Of course, you could argue that my brother must have had much more from eating so much candy. He enjoyed eating the candy while I was only saving and investing.

This short story is not about the details themselves. It is rather about how people deal differently with money. Lately, I have had a lot of conversations with people concerning the way they deal with their money. Most of them tend to spend everything every month. When I ask them why they spend everything, they tell me that you have to enjoy life day by day. You never know what could happen. Fine. You can say that. But if I come up with examples of how you can just save little amounts every month and make a fortune out of it after a few decades, they are quite astonished. Let me tell you what I think of consuming behavior. I think it is very bad. More and more people get extremely influenced by the advertisements and the pressure the society puts people in concerning how they should be. A lot of people follow a specific scheme and in order to fulfill that scheme they spend a lot of money. If you want to look like a celebrity, you will have to go to the gym, get some plastic surgery and you may look a bit similar to a celebrity. But why? What has actually happened to our society that all these superficial details have become so important?

This is a question that is very difficult to answer. Our advanced technologies have benefits for sure. On the other hand, they also let people be exposed to a lot more unhealthy advertisement that will influence their behavior concerning consumption.

Finally, I would like to say that I find it extremely important that people buy things. It is not my opinion that one should not spend any money. Just think about it whether you really need everything you buy or not.
I guess most of the people spend all their money or even more because they feel they can compensate something in themselves. They don't really seem happy and want to fill the emptiness. This shouldn't be necessary. If this is the case for you, try to find out why you feel such an emptiness and work on that. I am more than convinced that afterwards you will make great progress in being able to even save some money every month.