Nineteen years ago

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 30 August 2006 15:22:35

I learnt I was a shopaholic.

I think retail therapy is reasonably well understood and accepted. And although it's obviously dangerous to get into the habit of spending money as a way of making yourself feel better, there seems to be a consensus that a lot of people (though not all) do feel better as a result of spending money. But lately I've been scrutinizing more carefully the thoughts going through my head as I shop and I've found some weird thoughts lurking around in there. Perhaps I should say here that my mental image is of my mind as a dark alley where, now and again, I am able to shine a torch and catch sight of some subconscious thought scuttling quickly back into the darkness like a rat running for cover. It's quite disturbing that my own mind should feel like that, and even more disturbing when I get to know some of those thoughts. Here are some that I've managed to catch lately.

Browsing through a CD shop I realized that I had an impulse to spend money to buy an album that I already had. My mind tried to persuade me that it was worth buying because it was a new edition, but I realized that what I was really attracted to was the music that I knew and already owned. Stupid, eh? It's as if I simply want to give away my money, but need to trick myself into doing it.

In bookshops I often look at the non-fiction section, and particularly at the books in subjects that I already know something about. Knowing something is a long way short of knowing everything and these are generally areas that I want to know more about, and what I realized is that I'm tempted to buy books because I want the knowledge and I subconsciously believe that buying the book will automatically give me knowledge. And this is despite my experience of having hundreds of books which I either haven't read or have read and not understood. In either case little or no knowledge has been acquired.

I realized that I was prone to a more extreme version of this the last time I looked in the window of a guitar shop. I saw a guitar and felt a slight temptation to buy it, but as I felt this I realized that what was tempting me was unbelievably spurious. As I looked at the guitar I conjured up a mental image of someone playing it and creating some fantastic music on it, and I was subconsciously thinking that by paying the money and buying the guitar I would become able to make that music. My subconscious seemed to think that simply by paying the price of that guitar my musical abilities would magically increase. Incredible!