Can you guess what is number one question everyone is asking me ever since I have gone off consumption?
No, it’s not “but why have you gone off consumption?”, or “but how will you live/ work/ date/ network if you go off consumption?”, or “but how will you survive without eating out/ going out?”, or even “but why should we care if you have gone off consumption?”.
The number one question everyone is asking me ever since I have gone off consumption is: “when you say ‘no shopping except for necessities’, how do you decide what’s a necessity?”
Clearly, for readers of this blog, scientific curiosity is much more important than concern for my sanity!
So, how will I decide what’s a necessity and what isn’t? Honestly, I don’t know. I know that it sounds evasive to say that “it depends”, but it really does, on time, place, person and context.
In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of the experiment for me is to “discover” what I think of as a necessity and how it changes with context. That, more than anything else, is the one big insight I’ll look out for.