Sabbath 18

Cristopher's post on this chapter gives a good summary, so I find I don't have to. Tripp's post shows a deeper, if more romanticized, message from the chapter than anything you'll read here today.

Much of "The Gospel of Consumption" is redundant information for me. But given:
a. my choice of career and its somewhat limited earning potential (a situation I believe my co-Sabbath-readers mostly share),
b. my location, where all living expenses are through the roof,
c. my single status, meaning that what I earn is what I got, no exceptions,
and finally
d. the financial challenges I've faced trying to keep the house I bought in Georgia while living in California,
... any tendencies towards gratuitous consumption would have been beaten out of me during the past year and a half.

As it is, my mother calls my decorating style "minimalistic," and I don't shop for fun, so I am not a particularly good match for Muller's description of the driven consumer who can never be satisfied.

However, the desire to consume and the ability to consume are two different problems. So even if I'm living in a way that prevents most unnecessary consumption, I can use this chapter to look at my desires and see where they may be holding me back from the happiness Muller posits as the goal he'd like to share with his readers.

For this purpose, I think the shop-but-don't-buy exercise would serve pretty well.

The practicalities of the exercise are aimed towards bricks and mortar, and for that reason at first I thought I might not do it. I truly hate to shop in clothing stores, bookstores, etc. I get "merchandise overwhelm" very quickly and wind up not buying anything and having a terrible time. I do most of my shopping online for gifts, clothing when I buy it, and so on. I use the library for books, reserving for later the decision to buy a copy of a book I really enjoyed or found useful when I read the library's copy. I use Netflix for DVDs because I don't want to own DVDs.

But then I thought, "Aha! I could do the exercise in the drugstore." Every month I make a trip to the drugstore, and picking up small odds and ends I find it easy to drop $40-50 even using coupons and special prices. So perhaps this month I'll try Muller's exercise and see how it goes. Or perhaps I'll try an online version, using one of the sites where I could easily spend hundreds of dollars if I had them and chose to use them that way.