The Danger of Retail Therapy

There’s no denying that the world we live in is, for the most part, a complete and unmitigated dumpster fire. Coping skills are a prerequisite. And aside from the general existential dread of being a sentient life-form on a dying planet that’s being actively destroyed by your own species, we all have our individual struggles to contend with. I have an extremely nice life and innumerable unearned privileges for which I’m incredibly grateful, but still, stress is relative. And when I’m stressed, what do I do to cope?

I shop. Mindlessly and thoughtlessly.

I’ve written about my dependence on shopping elsewhere. While I’m actively working on reducing my shopping, I still find myself guiltily scrolling through Farfetch to self-soothe after a long, exhausting, challenging day at work. My impulse when faced with a stressor is to revert to a familiar, tried-and-true coping mechanism: shopping. World Mental Health Day has come and gone, and I still haven’t figured out a way to liberate myself from the unnecessary and harmful allure of retail therapy.

Pop culture has normalized and even encouraged psychological dependence on shopping. It behooves the free market to have people rely on purchasing for serotonin boosts. Even the colloquialism “retail therapy” is so pervasive that it’s easy to forget that it’s a euphemism for literally buying things purely for the sake of buying things as a way to cope with the realities of our existence. You know what’s not normal? That.

So how are we supposed to cope with the realities of our existence? I’m not sure, but cluttering our lives with more clothes, shoes, bags, and jewelry that we don’t actually need can’t be the answer. Acquisition of these things is a temporary balm that doesn’t even come close to addressing the underlying problem, which is that we’re all sad, stressed, afraid, and actively engineering our own destruction. Instead of retail therapy, how about we normalize and destigmatize going to actual therapy? And/or work on building lives and relationships that are meaningful and purposeful, instead of fixated solely on material gain?

I’m still striving to shed my dependence on shopping, but it’s obviously MUCH easier said than done. If I had my druthers, I prefer to process stressful experiences through creativity, but my job doesn’t leave much space for any of the creative outlets I used to enjoy. Shopping is easier than trying to re-engage my past hobbies, like playing/writing music or drawing, which I’ve allowed to fall by the wayside in favor of my professional pursuits. So instead, I create new outfits that I don’t need. What if I instead went back to the stressed out kid I once was, before I had a credit card and a Poshmark account, who painted pictures of horses and played “Flight of the Bumblebee” on my flute, Lizzo style?

If you’re a frequent seeker of retail therapy, what can you do to cope sustainably instead?

Vegan leather jacket: Straight To Hell ($156) / Vegan nameplate necklace: LookVegan ($29.99, use code VEGAN25 if you’re not ready to quit retail therapy cold turkey)