I’ve been doing a lot with my personal finances in the last few months. Included in this was the purchase of a new car. Something that I undeniably need living in Houston but yet some would argue I could have gotten something more pedestrian, less flashy, and more modest. Some have asked if it is something that I can afford.
To which the answer is yes. This was something that I’ve been thinking about for over a year and the numbers do make sense. Now, I could have gotten something more modest, true but the cost difference really wasn’t going to be that great and I do feel that I got quite a bit for my money. So I still feel that this was a good bargain for me.
Nevertheless these are valid concerns. In my lifetime I’ve seen how quickly people can get in trouble with easy credit and overspending. When I was in school the message boards were crammed with credit card applications for students to fill out and even though most students either didn’t work or worked part-time jobs they got ridiculously high credit lines. Of course within a month or two these kids got into some real financial problems that took years to clear up.
But that’s just symptomatic of our culture or even our civilization as a whole. We like to push the limits to the extreme and even break the limits till we get into trouble with not just money but resources, living space, and population size.
Take California for example. The golden state with promises of endless farmlands carved out of the desert, green suburbs without end, and abundant, cheap water hauled from hundreds of miles away. What happens when the waters fail to come year after year? The answer is the tragedy that’s slowly unfolding right now and affects not just millions of Californians but millions of people across the country and the world that depend on the produce grown there.
What will happen to that population? They won’t just dry up and blow away. We’ll soon see them in our neighborhoods looking for work and sharing our resources. Problems that might have been sidestepped if we had not insisted on trying to squeeze every last resource out of a desert that wasn’t ready to take so many people in the first place.
California will heal but it will take a long time. My question is when it heals and the rain cycle is restored will we go back and make the same mistakes again or will we learn and not try to live past the capacity of the land?
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