Fake Tan

Sitting in one of our favorite coffee shop, sipping warm coffee and falling in love with every bite of inhumanly delicious cake, I looked over the table and two comfortingly familiar, beautifully intelligent faces and smiled.

We all shared the view that for the past five years we had felt out of place in our own country. We felt strangers in our own homes, foreigners in our own country’s streets. We had all left to university to experience the pain of feeling out of place only to come home and realize that we no longer belonged to our own home country either.

A large part of this goes to the fact that we had all spent our adult years abroad; hading departed the country at the age of 17 or 18. This had created an expected disagreement for instance with our parents, our society and our former friends and peers.

But this was not what had bothered us. What had bothered us was the pressurizing vibe we had all been observing but not joining, the extravaganza of expensive cars, designer bags, oversized jewels, fake tans, cosmetic surgery, painless shallowness and endless materialism.

One obvious aspect of this of course was money. All those dinars spent on bling was not the issue. We all went into an expensive designer store at some point and bought an expensive wallet convincing ourselves that it was OK because we will use it every single day for the rest of our lives.

The issue was that most people could not keep up with this game. Many girls I knew waited for paychecks to buy a new designer bag or more diamonds. This have created an uncomfortable kind of pressure of many people I know.

The other issue is that all that time and money could be put into better use. It could be put towards building a beautiful home, helping thousands of children in poorer countries, enjoying your hobbies or even traveling and discovering untouched worlds.

This obsession with materialism, this fake joy of shallowness is not what those people are about. Deep inside are deep, thoughtful, complex personalities that hide behind masks of shallowness simply because this is the trend.

So what is it that drives people to put so much time, energy and hard earned money into ‘nice things’ that are mostly meaningless. Do those things make them happy or is it just so people will think that they are? Do those people really want these things or is it that they just think they do because everybody else does? Is it about what you personally want or has it just turned into having what everybody else wants, or even just think they want?