I Shop; Therefore I Am Happy
By Padma Shandas
“What goes up will eventually come down!” I heard this philosophy many times while growing up. Grandparents routinely taught us children to anticipate the ups and downs of life.
“Today you may be rich, but tomorrow may arrive and make you a pauper,” we were warned.The same rule applied to happiness and sorrow, success and failure, good fortune and bad fortune, and so on. The pairs of opposites were all too familiar to us, five-year-olds. We tried to be somewhat even-tempered when things happened, although that was not as easy as the elders preached us to be. But we learned, at least in theory, about the unevenness of life experiences. Nothing lasted forever. “That is the nature of life,” they assured us. “There will be good times and bad times.”
Even with such ancestral wisdom, I have been easily brain-washed in America to think that we can be perpetually happy, pain-free, and young. All you need to do is, go shopping. If we can divide Americans into two groups—say, shoppers and non-shoppers—I know which one would be the larger group. I bet, the shoppers would outweigh the non-shoppers. The businesses are so persistent in showing us pictures of a perfect world waiting around the corner, if only we would purchase their products, that we begin to believe so ourselves. Thin hair? There is an easy solution— use this “voluminizing” shampoo; soon we begin to believe voluminizing is a real word. So we go shopping. Fat bust? Yes, the remedy is a click away; this minimizing bra. Irregular bowels? Don’t despair, call the pharmacy. Worries about those monthly cycles? Here is how you can stop them. Restlessness and leg-shake? Not a problem. Wrinkles? Depression? Just relax and call the number… so we shop again.
There is not a malady that doesn’t have a cure; not a disappointment we can’t overcome in an instant. Our belief system changes dramatically—we indeed can be forever happy, pain-free, and young.This becomes our rational approach to shopping.
But not everything about shopping is rational. I have read that there are millions of people in America, who are addicted to shopping. They are called shopaholics, just as there are people who are alcoholics. I am not surprised that we can easily become compulsive shoppers. Some go to shop when depressed, or elated, or when feeling overweight, or famished, or had a trying time at work, or after being fired, or on being hired into a new job, or before going on vacation, or after returning from vacation. We can shop non-stop, because there are 24-hour stores for our convenience.
Shopaholics use any excuse to indulge in their compulsive behavior, I learn. They defend their habit, and they rationalize their addiction to credit cards. They amass debts. Worst of all, they regret their shopping spree later.
For no fault of mine, I belong to the minority group– I am a non-shopper. Shopping is an ordeal for me. I go shopping when I must; if I can survive the morning without milk, I postpone my grocery store visit till the afternoon; if there is enough moisturizer in the bottle for one application, I wait; I convince myself that I have sufficient clothing in the closet to last one-hundred-fifty years.
Now I am in a quandary, though. I may have to join the shoppers’ group for the sake of American economy. Uncle Sam is paying me to shop! The new economic stimulus plan requires me to go shopping. I can’t believe this is happening to me. I am on the verge of falling into depression, just thinking about it.
But there is hope. “What goes down will eventually come back up!” says my age-old philosophy. It works both ways, you see: to cheer you up, or to sober you down.
But if that doesn’t happen, I’ll go shopping, happily.
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Padma Shandas is the author of Spices in the Melting Pot: Life Stories of Exceptional South Asian Immigrant Women.