Everything I need to know I learned from the movies: 1) Fight Club

- shops and advertising are trying (very hard) to sell you products, by selling you a lifestyle
 "That wasn't just my stuff, that apartment was *me*, ok?" "A fridge full of condiments and no food, how embarrassing" "You are not your job, you are not your couch" "Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha's polishing the brass on the titanic, it's all going down, man" "Some other man's name on your underwear"
The movie brings it up again and again -- they're using the lifestyle to sell you products, as if having the product will give you the lifestyle. It won't. With some things, I find it pretty easy to accept this - housing developments, for example, make me incredibly squeamish, with their pictures of happy families, kids riding bikes, dogs, sunshine and flowers and golf clubs etc. You're buying a house, people! A house with lots and lots of constraints and conditions to make sure that your home fits in to some designer/advertising/marketer person's idea of what a house is like, what a community is like. Nothing seems organic in those pictures, it's all stylised and perfect and 'ready to go', nothing grows. Nothing starts small and gets big, it's all ready made, already cut in to pieces so you can only build it one way, make it all look the same... Gag. Same with commercial clothes, commercial environments, commercial life. All constructed, all artificial, all inauthentic. I buy things, I like things. But I'm buying objects, items. I'm not buying ideas, feelings, lifestyles. Those things aren't for sale, no matter what the ad looks like.
- organisational tips: staple one side of filing cabinet folders to the wall and use binder clips to hold them shut. Find unconventional sources of raw material and use it to produce things through your own craftsmanship. "Two black shirts, two pair black pants, two pair black socks, pair of black boots, $300 personal burial money" - consider what's really necessary. The rest is luxuries, have them and enjoy them, but admit they're not necessary.
- be discreet. "The first rule of Fight Club is that you don't talk about Fight Club, the second rule of fight club is that you do not talk about Fight Club". "Except when they were fucking, Tyler and Marla were never in the same room. My parents pulled this exact same trick for years" "You broke your promise *slap*. You talked to her about me!" Knowledge is power, be careful who you share it with. Or share it with everyone, but accept the consequences. Sometimes things can be said with a wink (and a coffee gargle) far more emphatically than with words, but still, people are still gonna miss the point.