The ‘I Deserve It’ Trap

One of the ways I originally got into debt and bought a load of crap, is through believing I deserved extra things. I believed I deserved new things, interesting things, unusual things, lots of things and just things, things, things. If it wasn’t things, it might be a nice meal out, a day trip here and a night out there, and before I knew it I was at the bottom of a pit.
Now this was quite some time ago now. The idea that I deserved all that garbage is kind of odd to me nowadays.

On reflection I probably did deserve all that rubbish, but not for the reason you might think.

I deserved to be surrounded with lots of useless things and debt, because I brought that state of being upon myself. I believed that owning stuff would bring me true enlightenment and that being swallowed up by superfluous claptrap IS what I deserved at that time, because I didn’t know any better. But now I do know better, I have seen where my mistakes took me and because I was trying to make myself feel better, I deserved to see where that belief took me.

Now there’s another kind of belief, regarding deserving things. People think they deserve things because they’ve done something to warrant it. I posit that to think you deserve something because of a job well done, for example, is almost like saying you’re not enough, or you don’t have enough and only the acquisition of something else can validate you as a person.

I passed my exam, oh I deserve a night out – but do you? Couldn’t the wonderful action of passing the exam, for example, be the reward in itself? Does the night out make the passing of the test MORE valid? Probably not.

I suggest, if you really want a night out, have one. Do you really need a reason to have fun? Do you need an excuse to validate it? To misquote Yoda – ‘do, or do not…there is no deserve’.