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Clothing is important to a lot of people. Unfortunately, it can become important for the wrong reasons when a person becomes obsessed with one component of the buying and owning process. If buying clothes becomes a social event or a compulsion, that’s a problem. As well, when image becomes more important to a person than the substance of their personality, this is an even larger problem to deal with. This problem is far more pervasive than buying clothing to the point of going into debt.
For one thing, consumerism is a fairly hollow pursuit. You can never have enough objects, and clothing is just stuff. Naturally, you need clothes because of social mores and the law. But like anything else in life, it’s possible to overdo clothing. Your clothes are just symbols of your mindset, and how self-actualizing you are. Anything you can imagine, you can manifest, and this will affect your real surroundings rather quickly. However, the drive to have things such as clothing just for their own sake is ultimately self-destructive.
In the end, a lot of suffering can come about when a person begins to see their clothing as a central component of their personality. Your clothes are just pieces of fabric that you drape and wrap around your body. They aren’t who you are. While they are a part of how you are judged, they are not the most important components of your overall style. How you think will still beat how you dress in the end, no matter what the shallow people say. Once you’re past the early stages, clothes don’t really matter.