Item: 25 pairs of shoes (revisited)

I was thinking when I was writing the previous shoe entry about the old saying that if you own more than 1 pair of shoes, you're rich.  It comes up in different contexts, but the idea is that if you're looking at the global scale, owning shoes makes you richer than 90% of the world, or something.

So, I guess I'm rich.  How do I like being rich?  I'm not sure.  If I compare now to the leaner times in my life, I like that a certain level of worry is eliminated, and that I have more capacity to be generous.

But it's still hard to get away with buying something like new shoes that I clearly don't need.  It's always clothes that my conscience starts being a pain about.  I don't ever feel quite as bad about my other major temptation, which is books, I guess because I see them as edifying in some way, while clothes or shoes are only about my appearance.

Sometimes I try to assuage the guilt by giving away at least the same amount of money that I spent on whatever it was for myself that I feel guilty about.  Or, it's happened before that I end up returning something because I feel so bad that I can't enjoy wearing it, no matter how much I like it.  There is, I suppose, a lot of discomfort involved in being rich.  That's without even thinking about things like my responsibility to the rest of the population and the impact of my consumer choices.  Just going along with this definition and identifying myself as a rich person leaves a sort of smug, unfamiliar taste in my mouth, and not one I really care for.