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.
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.
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?
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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