Discardia_ More Life, Less Stuff - Dinah Sanders [84]
Do you like shopping too much? Tune in to the pattern behind your pleasure. Maybe it’s just that moment of acquisition or the quick hit of happiness, which is no different than the one our deepest ancestors felt when their fingers curled around a ripe berry half-hidden under a leaf. However, for most people, there’s more to it than that.
Gretchen Rubin, in studying pleasure for her book The Happiness Project, came up with a good list of the reasons we make purchases. See if any of these match you: “enjoying keeping your home stocked with good things or making life more convenient, providing for other people, mastering something (e.g., the latest tech gadget), possessing an admired object or maintaining a collection, creating opportunities to teach your children or to expand your expertise, living as your peers do or keeping up with fashion or maintaining traditions, distinguishing yourself from your peers or defying fashion or breaking traditions, beautifying yourself, offering and returning hospitality and support, winning and maintaining status and power, expressing your personality, celebrating, or making life more exciting.”
Like Gretchen, I rarely feel “cash register happiness” and, like her, tend to feel buyer's remorse (or as she puts it, “shop shock”). Looking at the list above, it's interesting how many of these potential forms of gratification I get from writing and participating online. If too much stuff or too many bills is a feature of your life that you want to change, figure out the pattern behind your pleasure and start filling in other ways to gratify it that don’t add to your load.
Opt out of feeling annoyed
What is far more likely to be irritating to someone than clothes? Computers. Fortunately, unlike physical machines, software is easier to adapt. When you catch yourself swearing at your monitor, see if you can identify a pattern or problem to solve. Perhaps you need to find software that is a better fit for the way you think about this task; maybe you only need to adjust a setting to get the behavior in line with your instincts.
This happened to me with iTunes on the Mac. I spend a great deal of my day in the Firefox web browser, and have reached the point where Command-T—the control to open a new tab—means “jump to where I can do the next thing I want to do.” In iTunes I was incessantly hitting that command when I wanted to jump to the currently playing song—to rate it differently or add a comment, for example. Unfortunately, that combination of keystrokes would launch a lovely, full-screen Visualizer lightshow in sync with my music, and I would swear first and then have to escape from it.
To my great relief, when I at last took a couple moments to search online for “changing iTunes shortcut keys,” I found that the shortcut key choices for many programs—not just iTunes—are completely configurable from the System Preferences “Keyboard” pane. Astonishing! Now my instinctive action corresponds to my desired result. Once again, grease the slope toward where you want to be so that your easiest, most automatic behavior takes you there instead of hitting a wall.
Got an annoying commute? Upgrade it by carrying music, earphones, reading material, and the means to jot down notes about ideas. (A smartphone, index cards, and a pen will give you all this functionality.) Peppermints or other flavorful scented candy can also reduce the impact of an unpleasant situation. Maybe that sweaty guy fresh from his gym has nowhere else to sit on the train than beside you, but at least you don’t have to spend the whole ride smelling him. Your journey will be happier if you don’t have any reason to get worked up about something that’s less than optimal. Make it so simple to avoid annoyances that you opt out of feeling annoyed.
When the excellence or stress reduction is a great return compared to the cost, find a