The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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Perhaps the biggest challenge of being off consumption is the difficulty of maintaining an active social life.

When you take away the context in which social interactions happen — eating or drinking out, or going out for a movie or a play — you basically make it really difficult for people to spend time with you.

A home-cooked meal, or a walk along the sea, works well once or twice, but, eventually, your friends are likely to tire of such simple pursuits, even if you don’t.

So, unless you invent new social contexts, not only dating, even meeting friends may become a problem.

It’s less difficult for me, because blogging provides me a context in which I can make new friends and keep up with my old friends. If you read my blog, you already know me, so meeting up for a walk or a home-cooked meal (or even my sleeping on your couch) will probably feel natural.

I’m hoping that Saturday Night Movie Marathons will become another such social context.

The idea is simple. We meet up on a Saturday night at someone’s place and watch four back-to-back movies, from dinner to brunch.

The problem with being off consumption is that you can no longer buy a ‘treat’ for yourself in order to snap out of a bad mood. Being off consumption means no comfort food, no self-gifting, no temporary postponement of pain by the rush of adrenalin triggered off by that perfect purchase.

But I knew that when I went off consumption. I knew that, to resist the temptation to buy, I’ll basically need to be happy all the time. I also knew that I’ll face my first big test as soon as I hit a bad day.

Today has been a particularly bad day.

I took three weeks off from work (out of my accumulated leave totaling up to more than hundred days), starting last week, in order to write more, put a little traction behind the book. I did write a little, but I have twenty unwritten posts queued in my mind, fading away with every passing minute.

As it turned out, my three weeks of leave has shrunk to three days, and I even spent a substantial part of those three days working from home.