"Ophelia" wrote in message
...
I think they get addicted to whichever hormone is produced when you buy
stuff. I never bought things I couldn't pay for with cash, but even
then I noticed that everything I bought ended up in the bin eventually,
so now I hardly buy anything. I intend to keep my little car (an '03
Fiesta) going for as long as possible; and if my clothes don't last for
at least ten years, I feel like I've been robbed. :-)

I find the thought of owing someone oppressive. It far outweighs my need
for the 'hormone'.

Dopamine, I think.

For me, it's a matter of does the hassle of changing to something new, which
may be worse than what it is replacing in *some* respects, outweigh the
benefit of the new thing? For me, one thing that is worse with a replacement
tends to mentally outweigh all the things that are better with it. And it
will almost certainly be different, needing time to get used to the
differences.

My great-grandma once told me about *her* grandfather who "didn't hold with
buying on credit". When his wife disobeyed him and bought a new dress "on
the never-never" he said fine, she could do that. But she mustn't actually
*wear* it until it was fully paid for. It was as if he didn't so much resent
the cost, more the fact of being *seen* to be deriving any usage/pleasure
from it. The old "what will the neighbours think?" issue. Stingy bugger :-)

I like my 08 Peugeot. It still goes well, and hopefully having had its
mid-life crisis (big bills for cambelt and diesel particulate filter/cat)
will continue to run for a long time yet. In fact it may only be replaced
if/when its emissions become too great for some cities' anti-pollution rules
that they may introduce. Certainly I have absolutely *no* incentive to
replace it with petrol (puny low-end engine torque) or electric (tiny range
before a lengthy recharge). (*)

I've never been the sort of person that *has* to have the latest mobile
phone or clothes etc, just because they *are* the latest and are in fashion.
I can't get my brain around that mentality at all. Maybe in relation to
clothes, lack of interest in fashion is a male thing, though I'd have
thought that being addicted to the latest gadgets may be both male and
female - maybe even more of a male than female thing.


(*) Although I now use my car mainly for short journeys, between which an
electric car could be charged at home, it still needs to be capable of
travelling a long way in case my wife needs it to drive to/from work or we
need to use it for a long journey (visiting relatives, holiday) if my wife's
normal car is out of action, needs servicing/MOT/new tyres etc, or needs to
carry "dirty" cargo (garden waste, furniture when moving house or when
buying from Ikea etc) that we try to keep out of her much newer car.
Electric is fine as long as you also have access to a car that can do
several hundred miles on a tank and only takes a few minutes (rather than
many hours) to add another few hundred miles range. 700 miles on a tank,
with 5 mins max to restore that, takes a lot of beating. "Never
underestimate the energy transfer rate of a petrol pump" my old electrical
engineering professor used to say, as he was describing why electric cars
were not going to be the universal replacement for fossil fuel ones for a
*long* time yet. The calculations are daunting: 60 litres of diesel in 5
mins (being pessimistic about refuelling time) is:

(60 x 40 [energy density of fuel, megajoules/litre]) / 300 [5 mins] = 8 MW.
That's like nearly 3000 electric fires on full blast. Gulp.