The Price Of Quitting The Game

[LelandJ]

Yoox has free returns even if ground and processing takes two weeks to refund. Easier to be picky anyways after learning the junk brands or which ones have designs that don't complement one's body.

200 pages of fromjapan results for a brand drives me nuts though. I just bookmark after I get through 50 and work on another time.

[maj]

Some guy on fuk got banned from yoox for returning more than he bought, was bare jokes.

Irl shopping tho

Irl shopping sux, trapes around entire cities as stockists all have independent buys of the same brand so you can find the one thing you want or to see what's "hot this season!" Is so tiring. Even worse when every store turns out to have the same buy of the brand, or overall feel in general (where u at exciting buys). I think I manage to do it maybe once a season and by that time exhausted and wishing for the sweet embrace of bed.

Then you have a problem when no one stocks the shit you want at all, if I want to buy this seasons latest "hot looks!" And I'm like oh you don't sell them? In this entire city????? !!!!!!??????

Maybe you could ring the stores in advance

Avoid the disappointment

Maybe you could just browse from your bed and use the travel money to order yourself take out

Maybe u could just quit entirely tho

[LelandJ]

I've been returning more than I keep from yoox for years (probably around 75% rate) as I assume most people do. You have to really abuse it to get banned.

In the states at least NYC's the only city worth shopping in.

[bels]

Online shopping as an ambient activity is a tragedy and must be stamped out (see the fourth wave no cop manifesto)

Replacing it with in store shopping is probably not going to work out well for most people. Especially those outside of the five global cities that have decent in store shoppig.

[schiaparelli]

decided I'm going to go on a no-shop. this is distinct from a no-cop because my anxieties are not with

• the financial materiality of a depleting bank account ("I've spent too much lately" — it is what it is and I don't have credit card debt)
• the anxiety of treating consuming and purchasing as an inherent sin ("I bought too much" — I like everything I've bought recently and have no regrets)
• the need to have money for other things that are a greater priority or imperative ("I need money for x" — my other expenses are minimal and easily covered)

my concern is that every day when I have some time to myself I open up a tab to some therapeutic online shopping. my concern is that this desire to consume has become an ambient activity that requires me to spend hours a day/week/month/year looking for things, whatever things are out there, trying to understand what things I want or don't want, navelgazing about what my "next cop" is and what I "need" to "round out" my "wardrobe" or progress my "personal style". my concern is that it is psychologically destructive to constantly search for things to want and generate the Need For Things which has become the general tenor of my Online Fashion Involvement —

• what do I need for S/S?
• what do I need for F/W?
• what do I want?
• what do I want to tell people I want?
• what do I think I should want?
• what do I need to do to figure out what I want?

so I'm not going to stop buying but I'll stop looking. in the past few months the hours I spend "doing fashion" have felt singularly uncritical and unsatisfying and I've been thinking quite a bit lately about what it was like when I didn't constantly generate desire in my heart. I think I would like to be more focused on an investment in myself instead of an investment in my material goods—so, practicing drawing, calligraphy, coding, designing, writing. in a way no-cop feels like avoiding the issue because the money I spend or the things I buy are only side effects of the problem. the mental state of desire is the enemy, not the things that desire brings into my life.

—

no-cop is to reduce purchasing
no-shop is to reduce addiction

no-cop is abstinence
no-shop is recovery

no-cop asks you to consume less of this
no-shop asks you to consume more of everything else

—

deleted my items wishlist, all shopping apps from my phone, and set up a chrome browser extension to redirect "totokaelo.com" to this image



(other shopping sites will be slowly redirected to my favorite @bels quotes from this thread)

[Cowboy]

Bela perhaps you should go on no-shop? Seems down your road more than 4th wave no-cop. (Is "than" correct?)

The discourse and all.

[parastexis]

[bels]

I'm doing a new therapy where every time I want to buy something, I imagine I've bought at and am wearing it whilst something bad happens to me (seagull shits on my hair, punched by a racist, boss shows everyone how much time I spend on the internet instead of working etc etc)

[schiaparelli]

Most new clothing shouldn’t exist. It comes into the world promising something that everything you own already covers. Look through your closet and be reminded how little else you need. The sooner you extricate yourself from seasonal marketing games the happier you’ll be.

—David Coggins, A Continuous Lean

[bels]

I'm doing a new therapy where every time I want to buy something, I make sure that I never ever say I "need" it and only instead say I "want" it and then I ask myself if I "want" it more than I "want" to "quit the game"

[thecanadiancook]

I cleared out my Grailed fitting room so I stop getting all these emails of price drops or if something has been reposted. One step closer to quitting the game.

Edit: I should clarify when I say cleared I mean emptied it all

[bels]

http://www.psypost.org/2075/12/study-fi ... ness-39912

With holiday shopping season in full swing, everyone’s looking for the perfect gift. For those who like to shop, there’s great news: Material things can bring happiness. In a recent study from the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers have shown that material purchases, from sweaters to skateboards, provide more frequent happiness over time, whereas experiential purchases, like a trip to the zoo, provide more intense happiness on individual occasions.

Disgusting hedonist propaganda.

[hig]

after buying a UC hoodie and a geller sweatshirt the other day on a decent sale I've decided to commence the new year with a no cop period. have done it sporadically in the past but think I'm going to try going a month at a time to see how things go. have spent too much money on clothes this fall with no real purpose other than to spend and expand a wardrobe that doesn't really need expanding. looking at sales and everything gives me the illusion that there's a place for everything in my wardrobe - looking to break this notion. here's to a new year and saving money!

[vgtbls]

I made it through 75 pages of Marie Kondo's "Spark Joy" at work today. Let's see if I can avoid copping the book itself (HIGHLY SUBVERSIVE ACT)

[schiaparelli]

a fashion friend turned me onto a beauty blogger—auxiliary beauty—who went on a no-cop (she calls it a no-buy, which is common terminology in the beauty community) for two months. I thought her take on it was super refreshing because it's more in line with no-shop/fourth-wave no-cop ideology, which focuses more on the actions and mentality of shopping rather than the fiscal consumption.

two of her most relevant lessons learned:

It's easy to change my actions but hard to change my mentality.

I've always had decent impulse control, at least where money is concerned (food is another matter). If there's a good reason why I shouldn't buy something, I'll almost never buy it. So it wasn't difficult for me to stop buying makeup and nail polish for two months. What was much harder, I soon discovered, was breaking the habit of wanting makeup and nail polish. Though the wants didn't translate into actions, they were still occupying mental space. I kept a wishlist, I checked Temptalia and Makeup and Beauty Blog daily, I looked up swatches of new releases. Since my daily work involves a good deal of mental heavy lifting, I gravitate toward brainless pursuits during my free hours, and what could be more blissfully brainless than comparing the undertones of five different matte brown lipsticks?

this goes back to what @bels means about the "ambient activity of online shopping" and the mental load of constantly engaging with products, constantly trying to justify what is worth buying or not worth buying, what "counts" and what doesn't count under one's no-cop/no-shop rules…

Minimalism can still be a form of consumerism.

In the past month, I've spent quite a lot of time on the MakeupRehab subreddit…It's great that such a resource exists for people who feel that their beauty spending is out of control, but it seems to me that some of the users have merely replaced one compulsion with another. Endlessly brooding over how much of a lipstick you've used, how long it will be until you hit pan on an eyeshadow, how many products you're not allowed to buy—what does that really accomplish? I think it's telling that I found myself reading MakeupRehab as obsessively as I once read [a blog focusing on makeup reviews]. Both sites focus on products themselves, not on what those products can actually do. And on MakeupRehab, there's also a lot of guilt and self-recrimination involved. Many people there seem to buy makeup during emotional low points and then castigate themselves for it later (hey, that sounds familiar). And if there's one thing I've learned during my no-buy, it's that it's unhealthy to attach emotions to beauty products, or indeed any products. I'd rather buy a lipstick I want and move on than spend a year longing for it—which I have in fact been known to do, and look how well that turned out.

I don't remember if I've posted about this on care-tags, but I take severe issue with the kind of self-flagellating austerity of old-school no-cop where people initiate it by going "I spend so much money omg I can't buy anything for the next few months until I have money again" or "I hate myself for caring about fashion so much I'm going to stop myself from buying anything until my self-hatred lessens a bit" and then people continue to stare at products, lust after products, daydream about breaking no-cop or ending no-cop with a bang by doing one huge purchase to make up for the months of self-imposed deprivation…

the dynamic she talks about with makeuprehab is quite similar—treating the symptoms of conflicted consumption (stopping oneself from buying things) but not perhaps the root cause (an internal fixation with products and purchasing).

big fan of this thread (despite my early criticisms of it) bc I think it's quite necessary for us to interrogate the purpose of fashion in our lives and the purpose of our spending all this time on it in some meaningful way, and consumption is a not-insignificant dimension of our commitment.

[titkitten]

@schiaparelli:

this goes back to what @bels means about the "ambient activity of online shopping" and the mental load of constantly engaging with products, constantly trying to justify what is worth buying or not worth buying, what "counts" and what doesn't count under one's no-cop/no-shop rules…

this sentence veers dangerously close to cognitive load theory (i'm sure you know about it, given the vocabulary you've chosen!) which i think is very important to understand not just for no-cop related to clothing, but also just self-regulation in all aspects of life. there's a huge (burgeoning) literature on cognitive load theory and i'm sure there are some cognitive scientists around here that know the field much better than i do, but as a quick summary, cognitive load is how much your brain is "keeping track of", including processes running in the background of your mind (spoiler: resisting temptation (even passively, i.e. in the background) adds to your cognitive load).

Studies find resisting one impulse diminishes our ability to resist the next; that is, self-control is a limited resource (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998; reviewed in Baumeister & Tierney, 2011). After a series of choices resulting in pain or self-denial, willpower reserves become depleted.

from Behavioral Economics and Public Health

Cognitive load can influence performance on other important behaviors, as well, such as self-control. [...] Self-control is weakened to the extent that resources devoted to resisting temptation are exhausted, and research suggests that cognitive load is one such weakening. In one set of studies, for example, it was shown that cognitive load disinhibits eating by restrained eaters (Shiv and Fedorikhin, 1999; Ward and Mann, 2000). In another study, load was manipulated by having participants maintain in short-term memory either a two-digit or seven-digit number. Participants were then invited to choose between cake and a fruit salad. As predicted, a significantly greater proprotion of those experiencing the greater load opted for the cake (63% vs. 41%), suggesting that cognitive load interferes with people's otherwise regular monitoring of their eating behavior. [...] Continuously exerting self-control, resisting temptation, and delaying gratification can be depleting, with deleterious consequences for attention and performance.

from The Behavioral Foundations of Public Policy

both of these textbooks are geared towards public health policy (because they're talking about how poor people, who are constantly worrying about making rent/etc, make "unhealthier" food choices because they are cognitively depleted due to other worries/concerns that come with being poor) but they're relevant for this topic too. the main punchline: your brain has a finite capacity for high-cognition activities (resisting temptation being one of them) that gets used up. i used to be a firm believer in just "TRYING HARDER" when i wanted to change my behaviour: like a masochist, really. don't change any overarching systems, just BY SHEER FORCE OF WILLPOWER ALONE change your habits, as a way of PROVING YOUR COMMITMENT TO A NEW LIFESTYLE CHOICE by looking the old one in the eye time and time again and REJECTING IT DUE TO YOUR MODIFIED PARADIGM. this task is a hard one, and while ~*ideologically sound*~, it is an unnecessarily difficult way of going about it.

somebody on a podcast i listen to said that "your current system is perfectly designed to generate the outcome it already creates" (bonus points to you if you know what podcast i'm talking about) which may seem tautological but it is a pretty deep truth i think. the way your life is structured/set up is basically going to output what you're doing now. you want to change outcomes? adding in resistance powered by PERSONAL SHEER WILLPOWER is an exhausting and inefficient way to do so. every step of the way requires you pushing against what the system naturally wants to create. generate change by attacking systemic causes versus individually addressing each of the surface symptoms... change your system.

no-cop for example: cognitive load theory says that if you expend energy resisting purchasing item #1, your willpower is depleted by the time you encounter tempting item #2. the ideological way to go about addressing this problem is to POWER THRU and to continue resisting every single item that comes your way. it is hard and you will inevitably fail. and then it's discouraging because you couldn't stick to your ideological guns, and you can beat yourself up on ideological grounds: "why did i buy that thing??? don't i KNOW and BELIEVE in the no-cop paradigm? why am i so weak/why can't i control myself???" and that leads to self-judgement of your character, etc.

the way i've dealt with this problem is the modify the system. i stopped casually browsing online stores. remove the sources of temptation: remove the stress and anxiety. my cognitive load is immediately decreased, and i don't have to spend mental energy trying to resist buying all these things that i know about. i just don't know about them any more. (bonus: direct that cognitive energy towards something else!)

i think that's step 1, not the end of the road. pretty sure everyone will move on from this step in their own way. for me, eventually i went without buying things long enough and wearing my current clothing enough that i became very happy and content with what i already had, and then i basically didn't feel the need to buy much any more anyway. so i can enjoyably look at clothing now... maybe think about how it looks, and what it might go well with, and what it might say about the designer, etc etc, but i can abstractly appreciate these things without wanting them myself. i know i sound extremely insufferable and pious right now, but i'm just trying to tell my personal story here, ok???

anyway.

[dbcooper]

.

[bels]

After one month of noco it feels like I've been noco for years and years.

(I didn't actually buy those swebay trousers. Waiting for the groucho review before I move)

[khayandhi]

Having bought the last and only thing I wanted in the winter sales, it is time for NO COP NO SHOP NO COP NO SHOP

I'm not worried about my finances (I have more put away than most people my age because I've been very lucky in life and I don't have student or credit card debt) and I'm not worried about buying too much (I like the things I have bought) and I'm not worried about spending too much energy on the ridiculous nerd hobby that is INTERNET FASHION (it is worth it) but I want to achieve a state of peace and calm and dreamlike CONTENTMENT and I don't want to WANT THINGS

• I have enough stuff, I have more than enough stuff, I do not need any more stuff to lead my glamorous lifestyle of living in shitty student apartments + taking budget airlines + speaking at conferences full of people wearing 30 year old jumpers + teaching the disaffected youth of Britain about obscure little social sciences, I have enough stuff
  
• I want to spend less time thinking about stuff to buy, stuff to plan to buy, stuff to track in a patient and hawklike fashion across every obscure little retailer I can think of, stuff to bookmark and forget about and then revisit months or years later only to be stricken with an inchoate sense of longing and regret, stuff to identify at a hundred paces on someone else and instantly use as the vertex of a branching tree of appearance anxieties, stuff that I would wear if I wore DIFFERENT STUFF EVERY DAY and also if my DAYS were not NUMBERED
  
• the STUFF that I HAVE is good and it is worth wearing and is worth exploring and reexamining and generally familiarizing myself w/ enough that it becomes central to my existence and I stop needing other stuff because this is enough stuff and I attain MOKSHA
  
• stuff
  
• down with stuff

edit @pirxthepilot yes I bought the shoes and I look forward to wearing them everywhere and not needing to have 1000 other things to be happy

[mike868y]

have about 6 months or so of work before school starts. in other words, time to stop spending and start saving.

[schiaparelli]

january no-shop update !!!

bought one thing (a winter hat, for $7.98 USD, bc i didn't have one and it was snowing and below freezing)
(wo)manfully restrained myself from overbuying beauty/skincare goods and stayed within in my budget for both as well

drastically cutting down on the time i spend idly looking at Buyable Goods has honestly been tremendously satisfying. i am EXCITED by fashion again! i am IN LOVE with my clothes and can more materially treasure what i do own and adore and love. i realized i own many things that satisfy me so intensely and completely that i want to wear them every day in a row which is gross and i haven't been doing that (much) also it's hard to wear a dress and jeans and sweater and two different shirts all at the same time so i have the distinct delightful terror of having to choose which favorite thing is my MOST favorite thing of the day—but all this to say that no-shop has made me realize that i have ENOUGH STUFF if i can have these few things to love and enjoy wearing

i'm wearing my four favorite things today and feeling good.

i think it helps to think of no-shop no-cop as not about "having less" but "appreciating more" ~

Active ownership, which differs from minimalism, is about investing your limited attention, money, space, and time to what you value so that those things will thrive. Being vested in something makes you care more about it. You can’t do or have everything, so when you choose to take active ownership, it becomes a commitment to it and decisions and compromise have to be made about what commands your limited attention. As a result of the explicit choice you make in how you spend your attention, you reduce the things around you to what’s most valuable. What’s not valuable gets cut from your attention budget. You end up with less around you and are more focused on the basic forms of things, like with minimalism.

Active ownership and minimalism share values but are rooted in different theories. In minimalism, the focus is on removal, where having less leads to gaining more. Active ownership is about having the things that matter most to you and leaving behind everything that doesn’t. It’s not about having less because less stuff will simplify your path to enlightenment, but about taking an active role in what is around you, what you take in, what you believe and say, what you do and who you are. Active ownership assumes active responsibility where minimalism is dependent on the absence of everything extra—even what’s out of your control—to be effective. Having less of something doesn’t automatically mean that you’ll appreciate and value what remains but when you are making active decisions about where you invest your limited attention, you choose what to love rather than being forced to love only what you have left.

This process of actively owning, continuously editing what you do, and explicitly choosing what’s around you results in a deeper passion for those things and is worth investing in.

—hack/make on "active ownership vs minimalism"

[bels]

This process of actively owning, continuously editing what you do, and explicitly choosing what’s around you results in a deeper passion for those things and is worth investing in.

:puke-emoji:

"active ownership" going up there with "stealth wealth" as the worst phrases of all time.

[JonjoShelvey]

i havent bought anything since last april. i plan i buying one pair of sneakers soon because i only have wallabees and nike sfbs right now, and that will proly be my only clothing purchase this year unless my clothes break.

the best way to stay in the game is to talk about quitting the game

edit: i lied i bought a 7 dollar fake adidas hat at the gas station last week

[MxmHrpr]

Half a year noco though not out of discipline, but my fussiness.

I've tasted blood with a MTM experience and now the RTW world seems brutish (sales, limited runs and things not being quite right).

Unfortunately in-person quality MTM is expensive, broken my noco just now with a Luxire order to see if it scratches that itch.

God help me if it does, as if so it there's no promises I won't go full shock-and-awe Bels tactic to noco.

God help me if it doesn't as the only option I see satisfying my taste is starting my own line of clothes...

[bels]

One Hadith says that, after possessing one valley full of wealth, the man begins a search for the second and , when he has two, he will look for a third one; nothing can end his appetite except the earth of the grave. Another Hadith says that a man may have a whole forest of date-palms, but he will wish to have one more and, when he has that, he will desire to have a third one. Thus he will never be content til his death, when his stomach will be filled with the earth of the grave. Another Hadith says, "If a man is given a valley full of gold, he will seek another, if he gets two, he will crave for a third; nothing can satisfy a man's appetite but the earth of the grave".(Bukhari). It shows that man's greed for having more and more has no end as long as he lives in this world.

"Earth of the grave" would be a great name for my quitting the game book or else a spooky perfume from a spooky perfumier.

[pirxthepilot]

the only perfume 'concept' i ever liked is Fat Electrician : jon voight's character in midnight cowboy settled down, got a 'proper job' and ate loads of pizza- but still retains a melancholic residue of his former beauty. ( i wonder if in this constructed then-future his daughter would still be angelina)

[tomsfood]

hey bela i think i quit the game

[rjbman]

Guess Tom hopped over the GAP between nocop and quitting the game

[bels]

What's it like on the other side tomsfood. What do you spend your time on.

[tomsfood]

algorithms homework and neural networks, mostly