Resist mindless buying: Reverse shop instead

A couple of weeks ago I e-mailed my friend Sue to tell her about my achievements and challenges of the fall semester. Really, I wanted to hear a reassuring voice tell me that my feelings of ill health and inability to keep up don’t mean I am not ok.

Part of getting back to equilibrium was in the very listing of all the things I’m doing and am supposed to be doing, want to be doing, am putting off doing, wouldn’t be doing at all if someone else didn’t tell me I had to, think I should be doing.

Instead of writing back to tell me how impressed she was about all I am able to accomplish in spite of not feeling well, she seemed even more concerned about how much I do than she was about the health issue I had told her about. She wrote back suggestions about what to look for in a doctor (she’s had her own bout with serious illness recently) and added the following:

I wish I knew some magic for what ails you (and all of us). It's some kind of weird late-modern high-urban hyper-productive neurosis, where life lacks significant seasonal variation and down-time, and we have somehow internalized all kinds of nonsense about what the hell we are doing here.

I think that's what Foucault was talking about, but since I gave up super-productivity before he came along, I haven't read enough to be sure.

All I have learned about how to live in the 1.5 million years I have been on this earth is that what makes a good thing good is the empty space around it.

Here's to empty space (I talk a much better game than I play).

I have thought of these few short paragraphs (with lots of white space around them) every day since I received them.

For those who haven’t read much of Michel Foucault’s work, here ‘s the gist of what Sue calls to mind by invoking this French philosopher to comment on my predicament. Foucault focused his writing largely on the workings of power in human society. One of his books that I read closely traces the evolution of punishment from medieval and early modern Europe when punishment was heavy handed and publicly theatrical through the development of the modern idea that places punishment in the hands of specialists who conduct punishment (sometimes known as rehabilitation or therapy) inside the walls of institutions. On the outside of the walls, citizens of modern societies have learned to police their own behavior. In doing this, we have taken for ourselves the function public and awful punishment served in society in earlier times. The locus of social control is within each of us, implanted by social processes that involve broader and deeper observation of our lives on the part of social institutions.

For me, this means that I don’t have to be made to work because I believe that I am not ok unless I am constantly engaged in productive activity. I have internalized the idea that my life is not worthwhile unless I serve the machine of society.

Before I ever read Foucault, actually before he had written some of his most influential work, when I was living in Tallahassee, Fla., I was conscious that I felt ok only when I went to Governor’s Square Mall, bought things and ate at the Chinese fast-food Chinese place there. Call me precocious. Prescient, even.

I had internalized the need to act as a cog in the capitalist economy that was rarely satisfied during my student years. But I took the deep relief I felt when I went to the mall as a red flag. I read critiques of capitalism and developed a fair amount of independence in the face of its voracious appetite. Now, malls provoke in me discomfort at the excesses of 21st-century consumption rather than inner peace.
While many of my fellow Americans have embarked on the mindless shopping that has become Christmas, I am at home creating empty space around my productivity, and in my closet.

Reverse shopping.

I have packed up six shopping bags to take to the local thrift store. I even tried to deliver them this afternoon, but the thrift shop is closed today. Reverse shopping seems like evidence that I did a pretty good job expunging the internalized need to participate unthinkingly in the mechanisms of economic power that control us.

As part of the closet cleaning, I also un-piled my bedroom chair. Three months of clothes and papers had gathered there in the corner of my bedroom while I pushed and pulled myself from class to interviews to conferences to election work to meetings to...

I sat in the chair all morning, grading papers, surrounded by relatively uncluttered space. Here’s hoping I’ll be able to reorient my relationship to productivity as well, before my own drive for super productivity knocks me off.

Gym Source