Retail Therapy: The Desperation Behind the Statistics

After my divorce, I spent a lot of time in stores, looking, comparing, sometimes actually buying. It was mindless sport, a diversion that temporarily pushed brooding to the back burner of the brain. But it also repressed self-examination. Wherever I went, whatever I was shopping for — books, clothes, CDs, electronics — there was light, be it ever so garish and artificial; there were things to hold and value; something I might take home and keep. Sad, yes. Pitiful, perhaps. But psychologically, a very real, urgent, and quite common experience.

The phenomenon is known colloquially as retail therapy. Our media talking heads might not get it (though there’s no reason they shouldn’t), so we hear news today of a surge in consumer spending that’s good news for the American economy, another “green shoot” of hope for recovery. But statistical recovery rarely equates with human recovery.

Those of us familiar with retail therapy know better than our statistically-addicted media. Retail therapy is, like all the ephemeral balm that pervades our pill-sotted, number-drunk era, an addiction that reinforces itself with repetition. But it does not endure; there is no healing from retail therapy. That comes later, when you’re in a store digging through a pile of objects and suddenly realize that what you’re seeking can’t be found here.

No one can get you to that point; it is not something that one person may teach another. It simply must be experienced: the moment when the objects seem to surround and crush you with their weight of dark and misdirected desire; when the flimsy garment of accumulation falls and your naked body of loss is exposed before your inner sight. It is not a joyful recognition; it is not enlightenment. It is pain, but the kind of pain that is the messenger of recovery, the faint, dawning light of healing.

I cannot offer you data or solid evidence in support of my suspicion that this uptick in consumer sales is the accumulative phase of retail therapy. Since one essential aspect of the phenomenon is denial — denial of loss, denial of pain, denial of the deep and impalpable need that takes us into these stores — it is impossible to objectify except in retrospect.

Perhaps this is why our media themselves deny or ignore the reality of retail therapy: it is not something that can be dealt with through the collective and its alluring displays of healing: Dr. Phil cannot give you the answer, Oprah cannot offer you its Sedona cure between commercials for Hallmark cards and panty liners. The wealthy, in any event, can keep themselves strung out on retail therapy for a very long time, which helps to explain why they are so clueless about real life and typically carry such drugged-out facial expressions.

The rest of us are more fortunate: we will inevitably meet a time when straitened circumstances (such as those facing most of the shoppers fueling the current statistical uptick) will be our piper’s call back within, to a genuine encounter with the real source of our desperation. It is that moment of seeming emptiness where truth finds room to breath through us, and where the light of healing finds its first point of entry.
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I offer the following footnote as a sort of pre-emptive response to those who may feel the impulse to label me a holiday killjoy. It’s from a book I wrote a few years back.

The problem with Black Friday and all that it represents is that its attitude is out of place with the times we live in and the dangers our planet faces. So while I would discourage no one from shopping (I like it, too, sometimes); I would also like to offer a reminder for those of us who are willing to contemplate before rushing headlong into consumption.

When you go shopping, think small, and look for small. Shop enough to fill a knapsack, not the back of an SUV. When you buy something, you are helping someone to prosper. Do what you can, therefore, to ensure that each someone you help with your purchases is one whom you would invite to your home, into your life, in friendship and trust. To do so is to help capital flow as nature intends.

When you feel the surging voice of want, ask questions of it before you respond to it with action. Look past the object of your want, and ask: “What does Want…really want? What does it need?” Ask this of every advertisement you see, every display you pass, every pang of consumption that you feel.

Before you buy, look within and wait until you see clearly what you would have and what it would mean to have it. Be clear within, and you will always have everything you need without.