{"id":1188,"date":"2011-03-24T01:17:15","date_gmt":"2011-03-23T17:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tzlee.com\/blog\/?p=1188"},"modified":"2011-03-24T01:54:54","modified_gmt":"2011-03-23T17:54:54","slug":"image-and-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/image-and-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Image and Social Status"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a discussion with wifey while driving home from dinner today that no matter how we tell ourselves not to judge a book by its cover<\/em>, it’s only human that we do. Afterall we have two eyes.<\/p>\n

(This is semi-related to my earlier post on the Chinese MTV.)<\/p>\n

We were at Marina Square and were window-browsing some watches. Not Swatch or Seiko – I’m talking about Tag Hauer, Longines, Rolex, etc. These watches easily cost $3,000 up to $100,000+. Then comes the question: Why do people wear such expensive watches?<\/p>\n

Back in the early days, a watch is a watch. It does one simple thing – tell time (and maybe day\/date). Mechanical watch movements have been invented long, long ago. I don’t think it gets any more complicated these days. Digital watches can do miracles as well. Even back when I was in primary school some 20 years ago, I had Casio watches that could store phonebook entries of my entire class… and maybe some exam answers. Nowadays there’s even GPS watches accurate to the millisecond. Patek Philippe, beat that!<\/p>\n

Today’s watches are jewelry. They not only make you look better; they also convey a hidden message to people who “know” them, like how you’ll know that an auntie’s pasar malam<\/em> LV bag is an obvious fake, or that a Lexus RX300 is actually a Toyota Harrier rebadged.<\/p>\n

At different “levels” of society, we use material items to communicate subtle messages related to ones’ wealth and social status. Why?<\/p>\n

When wealth catches up with us, it’s only natural that we spend some to improve our quality of life. Some of us buy a car or a bigger house, or go on a holiday in a more exquisite airline. Over time, we get used to our higher standards of living.<\/p>\n

But as with any living thing, humans are resistant to change. By change meaning anything – environment, wealth, people, comfort. We will try to keep things at our comfort level (and thus happiness), and that also means getting around people of the same comfort level. To do so, we establish a connection by using material items to send each other subtle messages: “Hi, I am as ho seh<\/em> (well to do) as you are.”<\/p>\n

Just think about it for a moment. I’m not going to cite any examples here for racial\/religious\/social reasons but you get the idea.<\/p>\n

I know, it’s weird analogy of mine, but people spend tonnes of money to make themselves look good and feel confident. People go after branded goods for this very reason. Is a LV bag really worth $3,000? Is a Rolex really worth $8,000?<\/p>\n

But how much is enough? Wealth can<\/em> buy happiness, but only up to a certain extent. Once you’ve gone over the threshold, things start to go downhill. Studies say it’s approximately $75,000 per year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To break this cycle we need to resist temptation to “level up”<\/em> further. Some of us simply just move away from a city to a town where the pace of life becomes slower. Some of us just occupy ourselves with silly hobbies. But some of us are stuck in a rat race.<\/p>\n

I don’t really have a closure to this discussion yet, so I’ll think more about it and post an update. Meanwhile do drop a note if you have any thoughts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a discussion with wifey while driving home from dinner today that no matter how we tell ourselves not to judge a book by its cover, it’s only human that we do. Afterall we have two eyes. (This is semi-related to my earlier post on the Chinese MTV.) We were at Marina Square and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[262],"tags":[271,260,272,269,273,270],"class_list":["post-1188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finance","tag-happiness","tag-money","tag-social-status","tag-society","tag-watch","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1188"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1202,"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1188\/revisions\/1202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tzlee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}