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Happiness is not in the sofa ...
I am at the hardware store in Sukhum market buying some trifle. Suddenly an agitated lady of fifty flies in, greets the clerk and cries out: "We do not live but exist!" I got interested in such a philosophical approach to life and listened to her. It turned out that the lady had just been in the opposite furniture store, and a luxurious furniture from the Arab Emirates pierced her soul. Quite a nice lady, absolutely bewildered by advertising and Mexican serials, quite seriously thinks that living in luxurious and pompous furniture, would make her continuously happy.
Apparently, she does not know that life on all levels is settled on the principle of "winning in one, one loses in another" and generally it likes to joke at people. That is why children of too rich people and simply rich so often suffer from foolishness, and can never find their path in life. When all is available from his childhood, and in super amounts, the person often loses taste for life and right references - no need to achieve, fight, compete, and another Paris Hilton, granddaughter of another billionaire, impinges on hard-drinking, narcotics and wildlife.
In the epoch of bourgeois revolutions, when the opportunity to get rich quickly, without having highborn ancestors, in the French language appeared a notion of "nouveau riche" - the new rich. Very soon, it got a contemptuous tone, since the nouveaux riches, imitating aristocrats and trying to gild their life with ostentatious luxury, dressed, and furnished their homes with a complete lack of taste. Mansions full of things seemed to them beyond a dream.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the subject of the European irony became Arab sheikhs who received huge amounts of money from oil sales - they ordered Rolls-Royces with golden ashtrays, satin seats, silver-plated bumpers, put gold baths and toilet sinks, ravaged jewelry stores of European capitals. In 90 years one of the European Ministers became famous in a narrow circle of witty remark on the tenth gold bath used by one sheikh.
In those 90's, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the international wit reached Russian nouveaux riches, calling them "blue-eyed Arabs" for the habit of purchasing the most expensive things without considering their quality. At the Madrid airport for a long time the employees told the story of how one such man between flights’ break came to the perfumery and said: "The most expensive perfume!" The seller tried to explain to him that scents are selected on the other basis, but the buyer got insulted and stood on his ground to the end.
Our Soviet habit of encumbering one’s dwelling with suite of furniture, walls, carpets and crystal no longer corresponds to a modern lifestyle. Dwelling should be functional, living space spacious, and the owner should waste surplus of money not on a florid sofa, but on traveling - then he will see how diverse and life sated, how many amazing works of art waiting for his admiration and how many wonderful places nature created.
And then he will really enjoy life, but not a pompous and expensive sofa.
Nadezhda Venedictova
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