I was doing a bit of research to prepare for this podcast about shirts and there were two things that really surprised me and depressed me.. I'm going to talk about the surprising thing first and the depressing thing second in the video. Introduction Welcome to the Les Perras podcast episode 307. This episode is all about shirts, or rather what surprised me about shirts and what depressed me about shirts. Stay tuned to the end of the lesson as we will have a list of all the major vocabulary that I used in this podcast. The surprising thing I know I shouldn't really be surprised but I went to look at shirts and I thought about how many kinds of shirts there are. I thought I was going to get a nice cultural representation of shirts around the world. You know, there might be shirts that Gauchos in South America wear. There might be shirts that monks in China wear. There might be shirts that labourers wear in Egypt. But I couldn't find any websites that talked about things like that at all. I found clothing stores selling fashion clothing and listing up all the shirt fashions that exist in basically English countries. I was surprised and shocked to see the vast number of different kinds of shirts that they had listed up. I was going down through the list and looking at the style and the photo of the shirt and honest to goodness I couldn't see the difference between many of them. Now I'm not very fashion conscious and I'm the last person who you would want to consult about fashion but some of these shirts looked the same to me. I think that the fashion companies are drumming up more business by giving things names that they don't deserve and convincing us that we need them. It's all a marketing gimmick to make somebody rich. So I was surprised at how many different kinds of shirts there are.
After looking at how many shirts there are I decided to take a different tack. I took a look at how many shirts people have considering there are so many different fashions. Depressing I was very very upset when I started to read that people had huge numbers of shirts in their wardrobes. I don't actually know how many shirts I have. I haven't counted them. But if I think about it I probably wear about 10 different shirts. And that's on the large side. You can imagine my shock and depressed feeling when I discovered there were people who had 200 or even 300 shirts in their wardrobes. If I wore one shirt a day I wouldn't get through the wardrobe until several months later. Who needs to have that many shirts? That was depressing because it is gross consumerism. I couldn't help but think of my years living in Africa. I wasn't in the poorest country but these people were not rich either. Having 20 shirts would have been extreme for some of them. And yet there are people with 200 shirts and they're lively when talking about how many shirts they have. It made me think of an experience in Canada when I went shopping for shampoo. I couldn't decide which shampoo to get because the selection was too vast and enormous for me to be able to make a rational decision. I wouldn't like to have that problem every morning as I tried to decide which shirt to wear. So that kind of life doesn't sound rich, doesn't sound nice, and doesn't sound like any life that I want. It made me feel sad that people put themselves in this position. By the way, How many shirts do you have?
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