#10: On Why I (Shouldn't) Hate Shopping
March 19, 2024
Cambridge
Lava La Rue – Push N Shuv
I hate shopping. Even if I’m shopping with someone else and shopping only for them, being in a clothing store puts me into fight-or-flight mode. I watch the clock, grit my teeth, and hope for it to end. I mostly shop for myself online, but when I do try clothes on, I never find a desire to buy them. I mostly just stare at the mirror with confusion. The more I thought about it—and talked about it with a few dear people, one in particular—the more I realized how much real stuff is bound up in that hatred.
First: I am ashamed to desire things. Not afraid. Ashamed. The logic is something like this: we can’t all get what we want, and to want something is to believe that I could have it. So desiring something means thinking that I’m special, that unlike all the other sad people in the world, I deserve the luxury of what I want. A lot of people have taught me this. Some of them point to the environment, the way that gratifying our desires entails extraction and destruction. Others point to the inhumanely unequal distribution of wealth and access, the fact that it’s true that most people can’t really have what they want. But desiring something isn’t the same as actually receiving it. A healthy relationship to desire might place more emphasis on the gap, on the fact that we can experience our desires without gratifying them—for example, by trying clothes on.
Second: I am afraid to gratify my desires. Sometimes, what I want is out of my control. A date, a job, some good news. The possibility of disappointment is an undeniable consequence of wanting something. But I don’t think you can reverse-engineer your way out of wanting something because you're afraid of the disappointment. If you try, you'll end up ignoring the possibility of disappointment until it happens, leaving yourself unprepared to process it. Other times, though, what I want is in my control—but there are costs to getting it. The shoes I love cost $500; the shirt I’m not so sure about costs $100. There’s a risk that if I gratify my desires too often, I’ll end up without money, time, or something else, in a moment when I need it.
But I’ve quoted Seamus Heaney before: walk on air against your better judgment. There’s something so lovely, so powerful, about taking a chance on something. Sure, maybe it all goes wrong. Would that mean it wasn’t worth it in the first place? Many of us have this complicated relationship with desire, so there will always be people who are a little too ready to celebrate our downfall. She should have spent less; he should have prepared more; you should have been more careful. The refrains are part of our cultural canon. That doesn’t mean they’re right. We could all be a little more understanding, forgiving, and admiring of those who try and fail, even in matters as mundane as shopping.
Third: Speaking of trying, I’m afraid to say I look good in this. There’s something in there about masculinity, probably, but I imagine plenty of women can relate in a similar-but-different way. To say that I look good in something is to love my body, at least for a moment. Pretty much every message we receive is the opposite: society teaches us to that to love your body is to hate it first. When I buy a shirt, I’m already steeling myself for the first day I wear it out and the possibility—however remote, now that we’re no longer on a middle school playground—that someone will tell me how weird it looks or whisper about it to a friend or colleague. Shopping is loving your body by loving it: loving how it looks in this fabric or that one, this cut or that one. And even more radical, it’s a self-contained power, because it inheres in your own judgment. By choosing to love a shirt, you claim agency over the value of your own appearance. That’s radical, and so it’s risky.
All of this amounts to the following: shopping is hard for a reason. It involves navigating a relationship with your own self-worth, the risk of disappointment, and your body—and doing so in public, at the utter mercy of whoever happens to be working or passing by. But the same thing that makes it hard might make it worth it, especially for those of us who avoid it like the plague.