Why I Hate Shopping

I wanted to talk more about this. It’s not just that I hate malls or hate the crowds. It’s that I’ve come to hate the whole consumer culture. I hate that people—mostly women, sadly—talk about “retail therapy,” as if going out and finding something to buy and take home with you is going to make you feel better about your life.
I hate that we view acquiring more stuff we don’t need as a measure of how successful we are. We all do it:  you see someone with a BMW or a Mercedes, and you assume they’ve achieved a certain level of success.
You used to be able to do this with clothes. Maybe you still can. I cannot, since I have no idea what clothes cost a lot of money and what clothes did not. And jewelry.
Here’s the thing:  most of us have everything we’ll ever need, pretty much, except groceries and maybe underwear. We have closets full of clothes and dozens of pairs of shoes and electronics that are going to be obsolete by next year. We have so much stuff that most of us have either attics or basements or spare rooms or storage buildings to hold all the stuff we own that we don’t actually need.
Here’s an example:  my little CD player quit working. I’ve had it out here in the studio for years. It was small and cheap and played just one CD, but I really liked it because it had speakers that you could plug in, and so I added a splitter and long extension wires and set up my own cheapo version of surround sound, with a speaker in each corner of the room. The player quit working this week, and I have a dilemma. I can buy another CD player, but I don’t think I can find a small, cheap, single-CD player that will let me plug in my speakers. Or I can play the CD’s on the computer, using its speakers. Yesterday I went to Radio Shack and bought a jack that let me plug the fake surround sound speakers into my PC, but it doesn’t have an amplifier, and I can’t find a way to boost the volume through the PC—ergo, it didn’t work.
1) I’d like to have the surround sound, which is really nice. Plus I can set on of the speakers in the window if we’re out working in the yard.
2) I liked the little CD player, with its “repeat track” and “repeat all” and “program” buttons, so I could play what I wanted, quickly and easily (great for yoga).
But:
1) I do not want to spend money for electronics. Americans spend TONS on electronics, and they convince us that we must upgrade constantly. I HATE this.
2) I have no need for a 6-CD or 10-CD changer. That’s the not the way the OCD brain works: I pick a CD and listen to it over and over and over. I don’t like random selections. I like to have control over what I’m listening to. When I don’t want that control, I listen to Pandora radio.
3) I like not having those wires. Lord knows there are enough wires around these tables that I need to embrace EVERY chance to weed some out. It’s a nest back there, and I hate it every time I’m forced to deal with any of them.
4) Not having the CD player there gives me another square foot of clear space, which is nice.
See? There are things to think about, rather than just driving to Wal-Mart and buying a new cheap CD player. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do, but I love feeling that I have the option not to purchase something.
And don’t think I’m talking just about new stuff. No:  those collections of vintage (!) textiles and old hymnals and cigar boxes—all that stuff counts, too. You weren’t born with it, and you didn’t create it = you shopped for it. Or someone did on your behalf. Right?
What hole are we trying to fill up by buying more? Do we really believe that owning stuff will make us immortal, that if we have enough stuff, we won’t die until we use it all up? We act like it, like our stuff is protecting us from Something Out There. The thought of losing Our Stuff is really, truly frightening to us.
What is it about the hunting and gathering that appeals to us? Is there something back there in our lizard brain that needs to keep finding and bringing home more and more and more?
Remember Hannibal Lector’s line in Silence of the Lambs, where he tells Clarice, “We covet what we see?” It’s true:  we don’t covet things we don’t about. You aren’t coveting, right this minute, any of the totally cool thing sitting on this shelf above my monitor. You haven’t seen them; you know nothing about them. Therefore, you don’t want them. Same with shoes, or jewelry, or the raggedy old linens at an estate sale, or whatever your particular weakness happens to be. You don’t want that one specific thing until you see it.
I’ve talked to lots of people who swear that artists need a lot of stuff in order to make art. This may be true if the art you make consists of putting stuff together:  if you make collage art, you need a lot of collage fodder. If you make assemblage art, you need a lot of stuff.  If you string or wire-wrap beads, you need a lot of beads.
But if you paint, or draw, or embroider, or stitch—you don’t really need very much. If you’re making things from scratch, based on ideas in your head, you don’t need roomfuls of stuff.
And here’s the key:  if you’re spending more time hunting and gathering and hoarding and sorting your stuff than you are creating art with it, it’s time to step back and think about what you’re doing. Are you using art to justify shopping (never mind how you think of it:  if you’re going out and finding things to buy, whether it’s at flea markets or Neiman’s, you’re shopping), wherein the real purpose is acquiring more stuff? Be honest and break it down to the basics:  if you’re out buying, it’s shopping. If you’re bringing it home and adding it to a collection of stuff you already have, it’s about acquiring stuff. It’s not about making things, it’s not about creating art. It’s about some inner need to build up a wall of stuff between you and whatever’s out there:  if you have enough collage fodder, ideas won’t desert you. If you have enough beads, you won’t lack for inspiration.
Think about this for a moment:  how would it feel to live in your house, the one you have right now, with none of the collections of stuff you’ve gathered for Your Art? You know, the books and papers and old napkins and beads and buttons and scraps of wood and lace—all that stuff.
Then think about the stories you’ve heard of artists who’ve lost everything in some huge disaster—fire or flood or tornado. They most often talk about how, even though it was devastating to lose everything, it was also freeing, in a way, and it allowed them to have the space—both internal and external—to move on to something they wouldn’t have been able to do before, back when they were shackled to all their Stuff—the things too precious to let go of, the stuff too overwhelming to ignore.
I think of Lori Gordon, who started a whole new series of work—and world-wide travel—after losing everything in Katrina. I think of a doll artist who, in her 70’s, lost everything in a fire and started over, making terrific stuff. I think of Carter Smith, who lost everything in his family estate to fire—and look what he’s doing.
On the other hand, I’ve talked to people who admit that the art is just a justification for shopping. If you make something out of the old bottles you find at a flea market, then you get to 1) buy the bottles 2) have the bottles in your house 3) make something with the bottles 4) sell the bottles 5) use this as a tax-deductible expense. As well as deducting your trip to the flea market and your lunch with the seller of the bottles.
But is it about art—are you really all about making something fabulous with these bottles because it’s your passion and your joy? Or is it finding something to do with the bottles so you can justify going to another flea market and buying still more?
Be honest:  is it about art, or is it about shopping?
And then be honest about the shopping. Remember the day after Thanksgiving, when everyone shops? Except that tiny group who vows to spend no money that day? I was reading about this one year and thought about how many people never, ever go a day without buying something. Whether it’s buying their lunch at work or a newspaper in the morning, they’re buying something. It’s what started me on the path of Not Buying. I try to go most days without spending any money. Oh, sure, I’m consuming electricity, and I’m eating food that The EGE bought earlier. But I don’t buy anything—I don’t shop. I don’t browse the used books on amazon.com (I try to do that all at once, when there’s something I really want, rather than getting into the habit of doing it every day, no matter how much I love books).
It helps that I don’t go anywhere most days. I used to do errands pretty much every afternoon. Work on the morning, run errands in the afternoon. Then I noticed—I mean, really noticed—how that ate into the time I had when I could be stitching or writing. It’s not just a quick trip to the post office. It’s getting ready, finding the stuff you need to take, getting there, stopping by the bank, or the library, and, oh, while I’m out, I might as well go. . . .
That’s when I quit driving on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And then when I quit the gym and bought the resistance bands and started working out at home, I could quit driving at all and force myself to walk to the post office and bank and library:  since that eats an even larger chunk of the afternoon, I quickly managed to consolidate all the trips into one weekly trip.
I know, it sounds like I’m a weird hermit person. Not unlike my mother—aieeeeee! But no:  I take two walks a day, and often the woman down the street joins me for one of them. I talk to other people along the way—sometimes I hook up for the tail-end (snort) of the evening walk of the Dog-Walking Group. When I do walk downtown, I visit with Lisa at the post office while she’s doing my mail, and with Sandra at the library and with the tellers at the bank (whose names, I am sorry to say, are not coming to me right now. But I remembered Sandra’s and Lisa’s names! That’s huge!)
[And last night we went to another dance, which is a story unto itself. So I do Get Out.]
So. Here’s what I’d like for you to think about today: why do you shop (and, remember, any time you’re out buying things, you’re shopping)? What need does it fill for you?
How much time and money do you spend doing it?
What could you do with that time (and money) if you didn’t shop?
Keep a list in your journal for two weeks, and keep track of the time you spend shopping. Driving there counts. Putting up the stuff you bought also counts.
Think about what you could have done in those hours:  how much you could have stitched. The drawings you could have done. The photographic hikes you could have taken.
And this:  that stuff you bought? It’s not going to keep mortality at bay. It’s just going to keep forcing you to live as a Caretaker of Stuff.
And then think about this:  The top 1% of the population controls what? 90% of the wealth? 95%? Something like that. I could go look it up, but eh.
Anyway:  these people have the money. They can buy whatever they want to buy, and they do. For whatever internal reason, they buy and flaunt all kinds of outrageous stuff. And we, the lowly worker drones, want it. The wanting of stuff we can’t afford is what keeps us doing what we have to do for the economy to survive:  working and earning, buying and spending. It is our job to work 8-10 hours a day and then go home and sit in front of the television and be bombarded with images of things we think we want and need: cars and clothes and trips to Cancun and the newest electronic music-playing machine. A phone that lets you surf the web while you’re driving your car. Or, in magazines, the piles of ephemera and textiles and ribbons.
It’s the way the world works:  you have to want things you don’t have and be willing to work at your less-than-perfect job for more hours than you’d like in order to get them. They say that, when asked, almost all of us think that, someday, we’ll be Rich. We won’t, but we have to keep believing that in order to go on doing what the economy—what that 1%—needs us to do in order for those people to keep living the life they live.
See what happens to the economy when we slow down with the spending?  Here’s your economic stimulus check:  quick!  Go buy something!
OK. This is beginning to make me feel nuts. It’s all so clear to me, and yet I don’t think other people see it at all the way I do. Huh. And isn’t that a bafflement? So I’ll let you go. Thanks for reading. Let me leave you with a concrete tip:
What I do when I’m in the store and see something I like and think I want:
I could afford it if I wanted it. So I pick it up and carry it around the store with me for 15-2o minutes. I look at it as I walk around, thinking about what I’ll do with it, and about where I’ll put it and how often I’ll use it and what I would do with it if it turned out I didn’t like it after all. About 90% of the time, these days, I’ll go put it back. It’s usually, for me, the “Where will I put it?” part, and the “What will I do with it if I don’t like it?” because I HATE standing in line to return things.  This technique works best if you’re actually carrying the item, rather than pushing it in a cart. Hold it, carry it around, imagine yourself using it. You may find that’s enough:  you’ve owned it for 15 minutes, and you no longer feel the need to take it home with you. I’ve done this with scraps of fabulous leather (walking around thinking about how I feel, morally, about leather), and clothes at Goodwill (do I really want to dye another white shirt?) and books at the bookstore (why not check it out of the library so I won’t have to make room for it on the bookshelf?).
The less you want, the freer you are. More stuff? Or Freedom from Stuff?