Why You Should Give Up Window Shopping

A man with a wife and children is going through bankruptcy. During this tough time, he gets lunch with a friend (who generously picks up the tab). After lunch, the man says “hey, let’s drive through the Corvette lot.”

After a few minutes of driving around and talking about how cool this year’s Stingray looks, the friend says “Wait a moment, why are you shopping for cars? You’re filing for bankruptcy.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” the man replies. “I’m just window shopping.”

Window shopping is a pretty common thing people do in western cultures. Shopping is one of the primary and most culturally visible things people do for fun in America, but most people can’t afford to actually buy much more than a few trinkets — so to continue participating in the fun, we do what’s called window shopping.

As far as I can tell, window-shopping has three primary purposes:

1. Window-shopping with friends allows us to enjoy spending time with friends who like shopping without having to lay our own money on the table.
2. Window-shopping alone can give window-shoppers a valuable opportunity to introspect on what kind of things they would buy if they had the money, or what kind of life they would lead if they had the resources.
3. Window-shopping for specific products gives the window-shopper a sense of the market, a sense of what kind of features in a product the window shopper would or would not want.

The problem with all these purposes of window-shopping is that they’re totally bullshit.

Window-Shopping is like Watching Others Do Drugs and Claiming You’re Drug-Free

Imagine you’re the parent of a teenage child. Their curfew is 11 o'clock, but it’s now past 1 AM and they still aren’t home. You’re equal parts fuming and terrified. What happened to them? What if they fell in with the wrong crowd? What if they can’t make it home because they’re drunk or high?

Finally, your teenager comes rolling in at 1:24 in the morning. They’re tired but totally sober. Furious, you demand to know where they’ve been.

“It’s okay, dad!” they exclaim. “I’m fine! I was hanging out with Billy, but then Billy shot up some heroin and he couldn’t drive me home. I had to call someone else and get them to drop me off.”

Would you be relieved? Would you think oh, it’s okay, they just couldn’t find a ride? Or would you think oh shit, my child just spend the night hanging out with someone who uses heroin?

You would think oh shit, because you understand that if you hang out with people who do heroin, you’re more likely to do heroin. Even if you don’t do heroin, hanging out with people who do heroin is going to expose you to drug culture, which comes with a cornucopia of dangerous situations and substances, any one of which can ruin a life.

Shopping isn’t quite as pernicious as heroin, but the same principles apply. If you hang around where shopping happens, you’re more likely to shop. If you hang out with people who shop, you’re more likely to end up in situations that regular shoppers end up in, situations involving financial constraints and chronic stress.

Put another way, imagine one person makes two different decisions, creating two different timelines:

1. In timeline A, our subject decides to hang out with a friend who loves to shop 3x a week for the next year. When they start to hang out with this friend, they tell themselves they are only going to window-shop.
2. In timeline B, our subject decides to hang out with the same friend 3x, but they insist that instead of shopping together, they go to the gym, visit parks, cook food, and do other activities.

12 months later, I guarantee you our subject in timeline B will have a healthy fulfilling lifestyle, while our subject in timeline A will have credit card debt and a shopping problem.

Window-shopping is a direct path to actual shopping. Don’t window-shop unless you’re okay with actually spending the money, sooner or later.

Window-Shopping Emphasizes What You Don’t Have

Psychological science has shown over and over in the last decade that practicing gratitude regularly increases your life satisfaction by a factor of roughly eleventy billion. This has been true in my own life; since starting a gratitude journal about eight months ago, I’ve experienced a substantial rise in my level of happiness, even in spite of several major negative changes to my actual life. My life got worse, but my life got better.

Window-shopping is the opposite of gratitude. Instead of being thankful for what you do have, you’re focusing on what you don’t have, or on how what you have is not good enough. Instead of using and appreciating what you do have, you’re making conniving plans to acquire what you don’t have. It’s no wonder window-shoppers feel like their life lacks so much; they are practiced experts in the art of anti-gratitude.

Even if you’re a superhero who routinely manages to resist the temptations of window-shopping, it’s still taking a toll on you. Window-shopping is teaching you to want things you don’t need. Heck, it’s teaching you to want things you shouldn’t want. It’s acclimating you to the prevailing culture of consumerism and superficiality, even if you never spend a dime.

Window-Shopping (Indeed, All Shopping) Sucks

Forget the arguments about anti-gratitude and caving in to consumerist pressure. Pretend that window-shopping was perfectly safe and reasonable. Shopping still sucks.

We’ve all heard of mindfulness by now. Take some of your newly-minted mindfulness skills to your local shopping mall and observe the interior.

• What are the floors, walls, and ceilings made out of? How is the building lit? What kind of materials are used inside the building? Oh yeah, it’s cheap linoleum, drywall, and those weird fabric ceiling tiles that every industrial building uses. It’s lit with harsh industrial lighting. You’ve never noticed it before, but it’s really kind of ugly.
• What do you experience with your other senses? What can you hear? What can you feel? What can you taste in the air? You can hear… the sounds of throngs of other people, feel the dead inside air and the sum of the body heat of the hundreds of people hear. As for the air, well, let’s not think about what that taste comes from.
• How does your body feel standing in this environment? Your feet kind of ache and your back hurts. It’s fun to be holding bags of stuff you just bought, but if you’re window-shopping, you don’t even have that pleasure.
• How did it feel to get here? How did it feel to sit in your car for twenty minutes and drive across the highway? Did you enjoy the sights and sounds of the interstate? Do you feel good about your car’s contribution to climate change? Well, it doesn’t feel good to sit in a car that long, the interstate is loud and ugly, and you almost certainly made the environment a little worse off for it.

Basically, shopping malls suck. They’re not beautiful or soothing, they’re ugly, and if you’re in one for too long, your body starts to protest the artificial environment itself.

Even if you’re not visiting a shopping mall, most stores suck. I’ve traveled all across the US in my camper van, and I can tell you from experience that 95% of all stores in America look the same. They’re all situated in either a shopping mall or a strip mall, with the same sprawling ugly parking lots, and the same industrial linoleum floors and plastic display racks. Occasionally I would come across a beautiful family-run independent shop, but for the most part, it was all the same consumerist prepackaged industrial trash.

This isn’t to say stores aren’t necessary. I’m eminently thankful for my grocery stores, all of which are situated in ugly strip malls. This is merely to say that we should not look to shopping for entertainment or meaning.

A hundred years ago, shopping was nothing but a necessary task, like changing the oil in your car or cleaning the gutters. When you needed a product, you went to the store, bought your product, and came home. But a hundred years of marketing psychology and capitalism has produced a society where consumers who part with their money are rewarded with a psychological high.

The only reason anyone finds shopping fun is the high of consumption, whether real or imagined.

Build a Life Where You Have Better Things to Do than Shop

Put shopping, window-shopping, and otherwise, in its place. Treat it as a necessary errand and strive to spend as little time as possible doing so.

We all have a little mental list of things we wish we had more time to do, like going fishing, hiking, painting, or learning Spanish. Next time you feel tempted to window shop, say “No” to the temptation and force yourself to do something off your list instead.¹

It’s likely that when the time comes, you won’t want to learn Spanish. All you’ll be thinking about is that new Instant Pot model you want. Make the decision to close the Amazon tab and open a Duolingo tab on your computer anyway.

Human brains are tricky; we feel like our desires lead to our actions, but really, it’s our actions that lead to our desires. Start acting in accordance with your higher desires, even if it’s not what you crave at the moment, and in a few short months you’ll find yourself joyfully living the life you always wanted.

A grandfather is talking with his grandson.

The grandfather says, “In life, there are two wolves inside of us which are always at battle.

One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love.

The other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed, hatred, and fear”.

The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?”

The grandfather replies, “The one you feed.”

Source

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1: To some readers, this may sound like I’m telling them to “do something productive” instead of “something unproductive” like window-shopping. Not so. I’m making a much simpler argument: window-shopping will never make you happy, but crossing something off your bucket list will, so do that instead. After an hour of toying around with Spanish, you’ll feel much more relaxed and happy than you would if you’d spent that hour looking wistfully at things you know you shouldn’t buy.