Garden Tool Set

Don't be a conned-sumer

Ha, you see what I did there. Consumer - Conned-sumer. Well a conned-sumer is what I feel I've been for the past couple of decades.

Made to feel that I need certain objects to be able to live my life. I remember feeling great as a teenager because I'd saved up paper round money and Birthday money to buy me a good old Playstation. The only problem was that after I'd bought it, I quickly found it quite boring. It was fun when I used to play on one at a friends house, most probably because after half an hour I'd be away from it again. My favorite game on the Playstation was a demo of Destruction Derby. I enjoyed the demo so much that I eventually went out and bought the game. I did enjoy the game, but frequently went back to the demo. It was my favorite track and it loaded pretty much instantaneously, unlike the real game which had to load saved data and what not!
I eventually sold it to my girlfriend at the time. And I never missed it.

More recently I've been conning myself into buying things. I love to read books. The only thing I didn't realise was that owning books and reading books are very different things. When you own a book you have to store it before and after reading. Then you have the responsibility to consider reading it again in the near future. Not that I did consider that in the first few years. It all started when I moved to Wiltshire to move in with my lovely girlfriend Loopy. I became a book collector.

As you all know, I'm into nature. So I started buying these little Collins Nature Guides. I eventually had a few of them and because the designs were the same, I then bought more! I eventually drew the line at buying the Nature Guide for Dinosaurs, as there's no way of knowing the colour of them and the details are most likely to change over time. This year I even had time to start using some of these guides (that's right, they'd been sat there, looking pretty, but unused for 4 years) and they're actually pretty rubbish! Apart from the Wild Flower book, which complements my other book as it quite simply separates the plants into flower colour. Luckily they weren't too expensive and the Wild Flower book has probably given enough value this year to make the whole collection worthwhile.

Another collection I started was Wordsworth Classic Editions. They were always on offer and again looked great because they had the same designs. Before I'd even read 1 of the 3 I'd buy each time, I'd be buying 3 more! Stupid, eh!? YUP. I caught myself quite quickly and stopped buying and used the time to read them instead. They're a great set of books. But and there is an important but; they're free as ebooks! In fact the Kobo I recently bought came with 100 free classic books and most of my physical collection are on it!
I won't be selling these any time soon though as they do look fab in the dresser that we were recently given by my parents and I do like the added benefit over the ebook version - the cool illustrations :)

So, yes. I have very much been a conned-sumer. However, in the past two weeks I've sold books and DVDs and CDs that bought in £40. The pessimist in me says that I must have originally spent over £100 to buy all this stuff. But at the end of the day I did use all of these things, it's just that they hold no value for me anymore, so a £40 financial return in addition to the enjoyment I'd had out of them was a good overall return.

Are there any of you that have been like me? Am I the only conned-sumer out there?