It has been awhile since I've been on the forum. I thought I'd share a thought I heard recently:

I met a young Milanese man who was living in the U.S. I asked him:

It really does seem like Italians are always wearing designer clothes. That can't be. It's too expensive! How do you do it?

Well, he said, we don't eat. And we buy phones, but we just pretend we're looking at them, because we don't buy a data plan. Sometimes they are broken. We just want to look like we are doing something.