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Ali's avatar

How to buy less? Hmmm… Here ya go:

Divorce a narcissist and go into hiding: great start! You’ll get nothing from their $100,000 income. Start over at 60. Lose 1/3 of stuff, especially art materials.

Get physically disabled by city negligence (can’t sue) and end a low-pay but essential career; hospice care. Try to live on lowest rung SS. 88% goes to skyrocketing rent.

Get displaced anyway by wealthy tech bros mobbing the city. Go from a house to an apartment to a crappy room @~$1000/mo: lose 75% of everything you treasured: kitchen kit/food pantry/library/art/family artifacts/vintage clothing. Try to shove everything you could salvage into one tiny bedroom and a public room where some cat pisses on it. What can’t fit in gets ruined in the rain (200 gorgeous books, pioneer furniture).

Spend hours going through fiercely saved family photos (sole survivor), feeling an obligation to 4th cousins to pass along unique family history. They ask for salable items not offered.

Go into a deep winter depression reliving an abusive childhood via those jumbled photos; works very well to keep one out of stores! There is literally not one cubic foot of space left for any new things anyway.

All the things you waited for and lovingly husband now can be ripped from you by developers’ demolition, fire or theft, despite how carefully you curated their acquisition. They’re unique and wonderful and meaningful and why wouldn’t you get attached? But a personal hurricane can arrive with little warning to anyone.

There are millions of American refugees all around us, many of us invisible because of age and/or gender, torn from a simple life of ‘enough’ to price-gouging precariousness in our senior years. Not to get too far off topic, but an old woman is treated like nothing but a resource by 99.9% of men. “Move yer shit”

Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t just throw a match at what’s left of it all. That’s the PTSD…

I’m so grateful I can still get my dopamine squirts from giving real compliments and writing thank you letters, instead of the triumphant thrifting treasure hunts of my travels. It’s FUN isn’t it? But then it follows us home and we keep it, internalize it until it’s part of our identity. Well, until it’s ripped away back into the rivers of stuff.

Maybe I should cash it in for my first tattoo?

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arielamanda's avatar

I’m amazed at how easily buying becomes a habit - and how hard it is to break? At a few points in my life (planning a wedding, having a baby), there’s a lot of purchasing going on. But then it’s hard to change that “habit” once the milestone has passed, in large part because of that “feel good boost” you get from thinking this “thing” is going to make it all better (or whatever). I find that I need those hard breaks to re-set (no-spend November, Frugal February, Miserly May, etc.).

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