Thinking about Buying

I bought one new thing today: an arm for my broken glasses. Technically, I think this should fall into the medicine category (I need my glasses) and I could have--and was tempted to!--buy new glasses but instead restrained myself and fixed my old ones. It is another great example though of how I gravitate toward buying something instead of thinking about how I could do things otherwise. While buying no new things has so far been relatively easy, it has made me think a lot more about this reflex to buy and how often I used to indulge it.

Michal, for example, decided not to give her friend the movie and dinner for her birthday but instead spent yesterday evening making her a necklace and earrings from a shrink art kit she has. She had much more fun doing this than she would have going out to buy the same things. (I must admit that I still felt she should give her friend a movie and/or dinner as well but Michal wanted to stick with the jewellery; I do have an ingrained feeling that one should spend money on someone else's birthday and I felt bad that we didn't but I also didn't want to interfere with what M wanted to do.)

Our lamps were another great case in point. Normally, I would have thought I couldn't find adequate used lamps and would have bought new ones. Instead we massively reduced our looking time by limiting ourselves to used lamps and worked with what was available. I liked that the look of our rooms was no longer a free-ranging, it-can-be-whatever-you-want, but rather was restricted by the used lights that we could find. And the lights we found were great.

I've been reading through Not Buying It, the book by Judith Levine that Ted recommended. It's full of fascinating facts. For example, in 2004 the average new American house was 2,400 square feet (bigger than our current house!). I was shocked by that. One of the reasons I don't agree with the comment quoted in my first (or second) blog entry that "not buying things" is radical, is that it is very different for us not to buy things than for many others. That is, it places an unequal burden on one based on what one has already. Because we have pretty much everything one could want (and more), it is easy for us to choose not to buy new things. But for so many people who don't have a television (how many families I wonder? what percentage?) or a good coffee maker or a microwave or a music system or whatever, it's not nearly so viable. Also, I rely on people buying new things so that I can so easily not. Someone, after all, bought the used books I'm now reading, someone bought those lamps, someone bought the car (that we have always bought used). I also like things. I wouldn't want there to be a world without things. But it does make sense to recognize to what extent we (at least our family!) buy things without really thinking about it.