Not Buying It
Refugees from the consumer carnage of Black Friday might greatly appreciate Judith Levine’s Not Buying It: My Year without Shopping.
At the end of 2003, Levine took stock of her place on the endlessly spinning gerbil’s wheel of consumerism and decided, along with her somewhat reluctant husband, to jump off. After a mini-frenzy of December shopping, including an 11:00 p.m. New Year’s Eve online purchase of a random garden decoration, the Levines vowed to only buy the absolute necessities for the next twelve months.
Not Buying It chronicles the family’s month-by-month struggles to define “necessities” (her husband makes a fairly compelling argument for liquor and wine) and re-think their priorities in the immediate post-9/11 climate where consumption was often equated with patriotism.
Levine is partially motivated by the desire to leave a smaller environmental footprint by consuming less, and she includes some accompanying guilt-laden statistics to bolster her case. The idea of the average American family generating 4 pounds of garbage a day (that’s a cool billion pounds a day nationwide) was enough to bolster this reader’s committment to at least filling up the recycling bin as much as possible.
Ultimately, the book presents a valuable exercise in re-thinking the relative rewards and pleasures of shopping. Levine and her husband are forced to find creative ways to entertain themselves without spending money, and one unintended result found them reveling in the ordinary simplicity of their day-to-day lives. They read more books, had more conversations, and were forced to think more about the value of the things they already had.
Another happy result, as Levine’s December 25 journal entry finds her realizing, was “for the first time in our lives together, we have passed an entire year without a single worried discussion (okay, fight) about money.”
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Maybe I should have read this before I dragged myself out of bed at 4 a.m. this morning and joined the angry horde of shoppers at Kohls. They were sold out of the blanket with arms my grandma wanted by 4:30. Yeah.