Consumerist withdrawal

[featherynscale]

I'm at an odd phase in the whole consumerist/anti-materialist tug-of-war.

I need a pair of tennis shoes. This is a legitimate need if I'm going to do this fencing thing, since my boots don't so much have traction on the bottom (which encourages me to slide rather than pick up my feet -- my first Bad Habit! -- and will no doubt one day trip me up, causing me to collapse in a heap with my foil up my nose). So I think I'll go pick some up today. No problem - legitimate need, legitimate purpose. The problem is that I think if I'm going shopping, I should hit a few more places. Now, I don't need anything else, and in all likelihood I won't buy anything else, but I can't resist the temptation of going to look, even though I know I'm not going to buy.

I guess this is a form of cheap entertainment, so on the scale of the world's evils, pretty minor, but still. What a waste of an afternoon.

Comments

Re: You are not your sneakers.

[saffronhare.livejournal.com]

You could always just give it all away, and write it off on your taxes. Me, I have hated yard sales since at least two lifetimes ago and thus have never had one in this incarnation. I consider my donations to places like Goodwill to be part of the rent I pay for being in the world. As we de-clutter the house/our lives, it gives us great pleasure to donate an equal or greater volume of stuff than we trash.

Plus, it enables me to get rid of stuff before I'm so frustrated I want to set it on fire...rather than hanging on to it until yard sale season.

Re: You are not your sneakers.

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

At this point, "yard sale" is sort of shorthand for "an event in which stuff will be transferred from us to other people at little or no cost, preferably to people we know and like, before we give it to people we don't know."

My general nature is to give things away, freecycle-style. The fact that I'm unemployed and the household feels a little financially shaky right now makes the prospect of getting at least a bit of monetary return on things more attractive than it usually would be.

We will have to hold further household (and cross-household, as chaosdruid is in on this) discussions.

Re: You are not your sneakers.

[capriciouslass.livejournal.com]

My typical response is to give stuff to family (chosen or biological) then to Disabled Vets or other such worthwhile charity before selling. I figure it's easier to just take the deduction also.
However, the chaos producers and I are going to go through many years of toys and such in the next several months. I would be tempted to just donate the whole boxes to charity, but then there would be something that should be retained for the memory value that would be gone. Since we have to go through it anyway, there's a mercenary streak in me that would like to get a little something back out of that stuff.