Will Rogers captures something subtler than mere financial irresponsibility—he's describing a collapse of authentic preference itself. We don't simply overspend; we've stopped knowing what we actually want, replacing genuine desire with a phantom image of how others might judge us. The insight stings because it reveals that the spending is almost incidental to the real problem: we've outsourced our tastes to strangers. Watch someone scroll through social media before making a purchase, and you'll see this exact mechanism at work—the product matters far less than the story it tells about who they're pretending to be.