Up in Ontario

Living Without Shopping, the book

Judith Levine lived for a year in New York City buying only what she needed to survive. Then she wrote a book about it, Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping.

In an interview with Newsweek magazine, Levine lays out some of the details of living without our continental passtime:

NEWSWEEK: I can't believe you only bought the bare necessities for an entire year. What made you do it?

Judith Levine: It was a combination of personal worry and environmental and social concern.

NW: Do you generally consider yourself more environmentally aware than your average consumer?
JL: Yes, and yet I buy just as much crap as other people.

NW: What made you get serious about really taking this on?
JL: I was interested in investigating what role consuming has in my life. That was really my motivation, and I thought it'd be easy to go for a week or a month, even three months, so I thought, "Let's try to do a really extreme experiment and go for a whole year" ... Shopping is an emotional thing, and overconsumption is a kind of social, political problem. So how do these two things connect to each other?

NW: How did you decide on rules for what you could and couldn't buy?
JL: Those kept on changing and being discussed all year long, which was part of the lesson of the project. The line between need and desire is very fluid and very personal and also very cultural. It'd be quite different for me if I were a farmer in Bangladesh, or, you know, a television producer in Los Angeles.

Doing a little more reading about the book, I discovered that Levine and her partner are about average income, middle-class, urban Americans. She carried an $8,000 (!) balance on her credit card, which seems unbelievable to me until I consider it further and recognize that many people carry large balances on their credit cards. So for the most part, Levine's situation is fairly common for North Americans.

So I read the excerpt of Not Buying It and I don't think I'm going to be buying it. The book, that is. Not that I think Levine's year of living without shopping was a waste, or not worthwhile, or that she's not a very fine writer. No, none of these things will keep me from buying Not Buying It.

Rather, I don't think I can stand reading a whole book about the crappy trinkets that she's given up for a year. I can't stand reading about the shopping that's so purposefully being avoided. Witness:

The symptoms of my materialism start to show two weeks before D (for Deprivation) Day: panic attacks, anxiety, depression. That DVD player we've been thinking about? We decide to buy it quick. What about the magazine subscriptions? Better renew in advance so we don't run out. My niece is graduating college in May. Would it be cheating to look for a gift now? I worry, I grieve. My appetite for things gnaws relentlessly. I pass a Korean grocer with a bank of cut flowers outside. My heart is pulled toward the mini-sunflowers. They're so brilliant, so perfectly formed, so convenient for apartment use! I want them! Upstairs at Zabar's, buying Paul a new coffee grinder for Christmas (the one he's got chews the beans only slightly more efficiently than I would), I am distracted -- no, deranged -- by the hundred-thousand housewares on display. My own kitchen and everything in it suddenly appear hopelessly shabby. Our cloth napkins are soiled. Shouldn't I pick up a half dozen? Or that nasty old teakettle with rust spots inside. Here's a Calphalon on sale for only $49.99! And isn't this a cunning and useful gadget? It's a...a...gilhooly!

I just don't care. Give crap up. Make smart decisions. Don't get suckered and don't romanticize shopping. It's shopping! Beyond buying the things you need to live and work, don't buy things. Unless you're able to, unless you want the responsibility of owning them along with the thrill of purchasing them. It just about drives me nuts.

Maybe I'm just not the audience for this book.

As a sidenote: despite the excellent advice (thank you, all), still no cell phone for this boy. But that's another topic for another day.