The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [91]
It is harder to say what exactly feels good about the hunting, finding, and purchasing. That is, many people who love to shop concentrate on one “obsession”—shoes, for instance, or model trains, innovative gadgets, lawn products, or computer equipment. The happiness they feel when they see something they want may have to do with anticipation of any number of conversations—spoken and implied. The new item poses opportunities to talk to people, and show off, and demonstrate your carefully honed preferences, your identifications. Shopping can also be an empowering experience: if you have some money, you can walk into a store and make a choice, and make something significant happen. Spending money is one of the two most adult gestures in our society, right up there with making money, and when you shop you get to demonstrate to yourself, the clerk, the shoppers, your friends, and your spouse (who may find out about it only later) that you claim the right to make these purchases.
Even those people who don’t regularly shop as entertainment are still involved almost constantly in the cultural conversation about what new products are out there, and what you might want to buy. If you really don’t like shopping, if you are as a vegetarian among meat eaters, you still give a certain amount of mental energy to what you reject. You may find that your refusal to wear logos, your shunning of technology, or your discomfort at department stores each offer opportunities to talk to people, and show off, and demonstrate your carefully honed preferences, your identifications. Just as we say we “love” shopping but not owning, it is rare to hear someone say, “I hate owning.” By contrast, someone somewhere is probably saying “I hate shopping” right now. I think the abhorance some people have for shopping is important, in part because it helps us zero in on the salient features of the activity.
Not liking to shop could be about all sorts of things. The best reason to not like shopping is that you simply prefer doing something else. Shopping can be an activity without much creative play, intellectual stimulation, or social intimacy. There are many things to do that almost guarantee at least one of those three, so some people will always see shopping as likely to have a low happiness return. But that all depends on how you shop. A lot of what family and friends do together is shop. Many people remember back-to-school shopping trips with Mom as an event where they received an unusual amount of maternal attention: wonderful or dreaded, these experiences were intimate and foundational. Girlfriends flip through racks of clothes together and help each other choose items of appropriate social meaning. Couples shop to choose things for their home, for their kids, and for friends. There are also entirely different worlds of shopping: garage-saling, online bidding, antiquing in the country, combing through old musical recordings at estate sales and thrift shops. All of it affords the opportunity to observe people, to interact, make jokes, invent choices and combinations, learn about what people are doing, and be with someone you love. There are other ways to do all this, and some of them seem like a better bet some of the time, but that does not mean shopping doesn’t work for a lot of people.
A popular reason for hating clothes shopping is that you do not want to see yourself in the mature costume of the culture. If you do not want to fit in, what’s the best that can happen when you are trying things on? Either things won’t fit, or they will fit and you’ll feel unsettled about it. Who wants to be off the rack? Who wants to beg other people for their respect by wearing clothes with fancy labels? Valuing yourself (in the marketplace sense of choosing things that reflect your idea of your value) is not necessarily a process that equates to the