Keeping your sanity intact in sales season

Existentialism as a philosophy is more complex than can be outlined in an article like this. In essence, however, it says that as there is no higher meaning in life, the highest good we can achieve is to enjoy as many good experiences as possible before we die.

As a lifestyle philosophy this is not likely to produce long-term thinkers, nor people who plan strategically. It is ideal, however, as a basis for short-term consumerism.

Entranced by live-for-the-now thinking, many of us seem half inclined to believe that there may be a fairy godmother solution to problems with personal debt.

If we can just put off the day of reckoning long enough, and stretch our moment of pleasure to the max, someone else will miraculously ride to our rescue.

In some cases, this shapes our expectations of political leaders.

I can't help feeling that, for all his personal charm, wishful thinking was one of the factors behind the remarkable rise of Barack Obama to the American presidency. He rode into office not on the back of his experience as a legislator as much as his ability to embody a promise; a pledge to solve big problems with a minimum of turmoil or fuss.

In retrospect he has failed to live up to anything like the hype surrounding his election. A recent poll Washington Post-ABC News poll showed his approval rating at just 43 percent. Only one other president, Richard Nixon, has had a lower rating at this stage of his presidency (29 percent).

Nobody could have lived up to the expectations Obama faced - and encouraged - because they were based on voters' wish fulfilment.

In the end, there are no fairy godmothers. A positive mental attitude often serves us better than the alternative, at least when it comes to facilitating innovation. But a drive to 'keep believing' will not, on its own, turn things around if our attitudes to earning, saving and spending are built on shaky ground to begin with.

Whether on a national or a personal level we each have to pay the piper sooner or later. There really is no such thing as a free lunch.

Perhaps it's time we learned how to say 'no' a little more often, to delay gratification knowing that there's more to our personal value than what we earn, own, or have the financial capacity to give away.

In his influential book Affluenza, British journalist and psychologist Oliver James warned that our keep-up-with-the-Joneses consumerism is like a virus spreading through our culture. It is leading, he said, to higher than normal levels of personal and social distress.

The Affluenza virus, as he called it, is a pandemic arising from our obsession with having more of everything - money, status, fame - at the expense of being more.