Who's Got it Bad?

I was listening to one of the few radio talk shows I can still stand, it's a little program that comes on an hour a day. It's mostly about personal finance. The host stays off politics, people are polite, and even though the host gets repetitive, I generally learn a little something by listening.

Well, this week a man called up to explain that he had worked hard, saved half a million dollars in his retirement account, owned his house free and clear, owned his lake house free and clear, owned his two rent houses free and clear, and it just made him so unhappy that the value of these things had fallen!

The host asked him questions (thinking there was some logic maybe), but this man saw the down side of all his triumphs; "the rent houses had to be painted", etc. The host suggested that the man was better off than 98% of us dealing with the great recession, and that he not let the fact that things were not totally perfect steal his joy.

This phone call stayed with me all week. The man may have been clinically depressed, maybe he just had a downer personality, or maybe he worshiped at the alter of consumerism: "you are defined by what you own, how much money you have, etc."

If so, he bet on the wrong horse.

A bit later that day, I was driving down the street in an area just outside of downtown. I saw a street person pushing a shopping cart. In it looked like this person's possessions; a few odds and ends most of us would gladly drop off at Salvation Army just to get rid of. The woman was carefully adjusting her cargo to ride smoothly as she pushed it to wherever she was headed.