Why Do We Pay For Silly Things?

I'm glad I'm not a teenager or an under-30 year old thing. At my age I can refuse to pay for silly things and not give a damn what other people may think or say. In fact I can laugh out loud when I see people paying good money for silly things. Call me arrogant and disrespectful if you want. I will still laugh out loud.

In Finland we find our sub-standard commercial TV programmers getting people to pay for watching a young, thin and not too intelligent bimbo bouncing around in a bikini. The payment is also for ”throwing” a kind of beach ball or blow-up hoop-ring (the kind that young kids swim with around the waist) and trying to ”hit” the bimbo in the bikini. Throw a life-belt to the skinny-binny on the screen and pay for the pleasure. Some people do have more money than sense.

It gets worse. Grown up and sensible adults work all week long to earn their money and then pay extra for the banks to process their cash. Adults are usually quite good at paying through the nose for things and services they do not really need. Adults also love to pay each week for gambling tickets that will lose most of the time. Oh yes some of us do have more money than sense.

Then we look at the health and fitness gym where the main idea is to pay to use machines where you run without getting to go anywhere at all. Then you also pay for the special brand-named water. Then you also pay for the correct clothes to wear as you run on a machine that goes nowhere. But it is true that these people are taken for a ride as the owners of the gym laugh their way to the banks. Many people pay to be taken for a ride.

We know well enough about the way that women pay for thousands of pairs of shoes and millions of assortments of cosmetics that are, in the main, not really needed. But today the men are catching up on this madness. The silly market for super-spicy males is on the up. Soon the male species will need to work longer hours to pay for all this sweety-boy image value. Add this to the extra-expensive hair styling costs and the poor old male will become more poor even if he looks rather dainty and smells like roses in a bi-sexual brothel. Carry on paying if you want but count me out.

Yet we live in hope. The Murdoch experiment with ”paywall” internet news is not going too well in terms of customers that will really pay for Murdoch news. Afterall, who, in their right mind, would pay for such news? But Murdoch is no fool. There may well be people who will end up paying for things like ”The Times” or ”The Sun” when all the package is made available via the latest high-tech gadgets and the gizmo-geek type extras.

The fact remains that most of us are silly enough to pay good money for silly things.

If you know of more and better examples just write in. Tell us.

What other very silly things do we very very silly people pay for?

Steve Bowles