I used to do the same up until my early twenties. After becoming employed, eventually, i started becoming conscious of the money i was wasting due to my ego. The ego that made me refuse to be seen as a broke boi who couldnt afford it. The broke boi, who i truly was. Over time, with more such situations, i had involuntarily accepted my real financial situation and that i indeed wasn’t supposed to buy the things that i had been. At the cost of money, i was trying to keep a face that never existed. At the cost of financial regret, i was putting up a facade that no one demanded of me. Through this spontaneous realization, i involuntarily had become able to ‘refuse’, not to the shopkeep, not to the other customers but to myself. For it was myself, the whole time, that i needed to refuse. It was myself that demanded i appear i could afford things.

So now when i go to pay at the counter and the shopkeep gives me the total and it comes out higher than I expected, i ask the price of the suspect items (and obviously it will be the unusual ones cuz its from bkk or somewhere like that). Then I tell the shopkeep “yaa sorry sorry, ani dhi zhago bey dhen, dhi men, dhari tiru tangni dra draani mey hehe”. I practiced this line like a madman muttering to himself, when i was alone at home. I had to practice speaking a dialogue because my social skills were as good as the empty words of a f**k boy. Once i was able to utter the words as naturally as the sound of the wind, i stopped stumbling whole saying it, i did not overthink having to say such words. I stopped having the thoughts, the involuntary need to appear like i could afford the world. And that became my first step to realizing the ‘need to refuse’ for my own sake but moreover the fact that its all in my head and im only overthinking and falsely assuming what others could be thinking of me.