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By Root 1167 0

wound their thread, and they were always at it. Fairy tales are full of references to spinning, weaving, and sewing. Even the shepherdess was involved in making cloth, herding her woolen charges around the grazing fields. Women socialized at the quilting bee, where salvaged scraps of cloth were made useful again. During the endless hours that they spun masses of wool, they told each other stories, spinning yarns. They could make something of very low value into something of great value; in metaphor, spinning straw into gold. This was hard work. Painful work. One’s fingers grew callused from needle and pin pricks, one’s hands grew gnarled from the constant stress, one’s back ached from the heavy work, one’s eyes dimmed from the finer work. In common parlance, when a man came into money he would use it to save his old mother from the spinning wheel. Fairy tales show women using their cloth work to save themselves, and happily ever after was in part defined by no longer having to do the cloth work.

We work hard today, too; there is the stress of deadlines, the tedious commute, and the fact that many of us move paper for a living—that is, we do not personally make something lovely and needed, or provide a service that seems genuinely valued and valuable. (Such jobs are often so widely desired that for all but the elite practitioners, the pay can be low.) Most of us could not do our job outside the company for which we work, so we are also plagued by the worries of dependence. Nevertheless, the vast American middle class has it good. It is important to remember just how good it has it. What we have escaped was vicious. Happily ever after came into our modern world as a direct descendent of the fairy-tale ending. We have lost awareness of most of that context, but in the next chapter, “Shopping in Abundance,” I will show how the largest modern public pleasure, shopping, carries the marks of fairy-tale happiness. We have seen that the abundance inference is based on a mistake in logic: the fact that the jump out of poverty gives us a true “happily ever after” does not mean that further leaps in food, stuff, and status will do anything like that for us. So we know the shopping game is flawed. We are not surprised, since the ancient sages told us that money can’t buy happiness, and modern statistical studies show us that we cannot chart increasing happiness as more than a very weak correlate of increasing wealth. But there is other evidence to consider, evidence that argues quite to the contrary: our behavior. Our behavior argues that something about shopping works for us. All caveats accepted, what is successful about money’s central game?

10

Shopping in Abundance

Money, economists like to say, is a fungible good; it is interchangeable with any other like amount of the same thing. As such it is very powerful, because it seems to stand in for all other goods. It doesn’t, because money cannot be supper if there is no food at the market, and, of course, some good things are not for sale. That does not mean money cannot do anything real for us; it does, however, mean you have to trade it away to get the good out of it. Note that unlike the French, who have les misérables, we do not usually speak of poor people as miserables; yet people who have money but will not spend it we call misers. The word’s first meaning was “sad,” not “stingy.” Those who hoard money, the fungible thing itself, were so well-known as miserable that they got the noun form in English: misers. There is a long history of feeling that spending is good. Note also that “spending” was the nineteenth-century euphemism for orgasm. Shopping for luxuries with money you don’t have is as wrong for happiness as can be: it is taking what is not yours, it is failing to control your desires, and it will make you sick with worry. And relying on shopping for the greater portion of your identity—this, too, is too wrong to even bother discussing. However, for the person who has some discretionary funds, and who has an inner life, there is no reason to see shopping as a bad,