JetUNsetter

I admit I like shopping. A lot. And I totally get it why it’s called “therapy”. My personal experience is that I feel good indeed. I feel fresh, beautiful, rich (I guess this my brain denying the fact I am getting older, poorer and wilted instead). I then put on my new buy, look myself in the mirror feel good. Put on my new buy in the next event and my friends will go all compliments and admiration. Feel good. I do the same for them. Feel good.

I write this and I realise how foolish it sounds. Yet I will do it again. And again. I crave for the shopping date with a close friend and the cuppa that comes after it surrounded by the bags – This at least has a human aspect to it and is an excuse to connect, so fine. Even when I shop alone at least I talk to those who wait on me, exchange words and perspectives with another human. So even if I impoverished myself at least I got enriched by the albeit shallow, incidental human connection. Right?

Online shopping?? No excuse. I just do it for the narcissistic aspect of it. To cure myself through the “shopping therapy”. I know it feels good. No doubt. But what I am curing from? It’s a “therapy” to what? Why is it so important that I invest time and money on it? (I might find the fee to an actual therapist, a human, a scientist high and negotiate it! But for those leather boots? No questions asked…)

Wikipedia says it’s a stress relief and I am sure those expensive scientists have done a lot of research on the subject (and so have the marketing executives no doubt…). I can’t stop it. Or if I am honest I do not want to. Sure better than real drugs but still, why won’t an hour in the gym cure me from a stress and I still go for that dress?

By the way, I wish we go back to the real shopping and cut on the online shopping. Window shopping can have some therapeutic aspect too. You own the piece for a couple of minutes. You look yourself in the mirror. Fantasise about buying it. Feel good. Then you don’t buy it. Still feel good! I know you can return items shopped online but there is no human aspect to it. No one witnesses the moment of wearing that beauty (unless you invite the besties over for a glass of something when the delivery arrives I guess and then you send it all back).

So a stress relief. Shopping as a stress alleviator. An excuse for human connection.

The real question behind this is what is it about us humans that we love fooling ourselves so much? Why go for a short cut and not the real therapy? Is it just one of those instances where the poet is right? “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution” (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51294/waiting-for-the-barbarians).

Please help me make sense of this one too…