“We don’t buy things with money. We buy them with hours from our lives.” – Joshua Becker
Did you know there is something known as Buy Nothing Day? I didn’t, until about two minutes ago when I was looking for a quote for today’s post. BND is (basically) an international consumerism rebellion that occurs every year on Black Friday. I like the idea of it {obviously} since today’s challenge is all about not shopping for a day.
The true intent of this post is awareness…of how much time we spend actively, and more importantly, inactively shopping. Active shopping, by my own (made-up) definition, is going into a physical store and browsing, whether you ultimately purchase something or not. This is an American past-time that has largely been replaced by what I call inactive shopping. Inactive shopping is a tricky thing. We aren’t even aware of how many hours we are spending doing it. (Hours of our life we will never get back, btw).
The quote above is referencing to the fact that items we purchase don’t just cost us their purchase price, they cost us hours of our lives…hours spent maintaining, cleaning, storing and moving (potentially multiple times) the items we purchase. This is VERY true but it isn’t what I’m talking about today. The problem is bigger. We are now shopping online. A lot. And not just purchasing (although there’s definitely a lot of that going on). {Thanks Amazon Prime}. We are clicking and reading and debating and looking for the best price and placing things in our carts and saving them for later and signing up for newsletters so we can know about the latest deals and scrolling and clicking and grocery shopping and perusing Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist and going WAY down the Internet rabbit hole and oh my gosh what time is it? I need to make dinner and let me go online to look for a Chinese restaurant that delivers and oh I love those chairs in the pics on their website and I bet I can find some on Wayfair and oh look at those cute ones on Pinterest and it goes on and on and on. Hours lost. All for what!? I can’t even remember what I first started looking for…my brain is exhausted. {Shew}
So what I’m asking is that you take a day. One day. Each week. And shut this insanity down. Don’t shop. Not in a store. Not with your mouse. (I realize this weekend may not be a good choice for you, because a lot of you are doing Back to School shopping, so pick another day and make it happen). And stay aware of how many times you are tempted to click on something you might potentially purchase. I think we’ll all be surprised how often it happens.
Light and Love,
♥k