The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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Some books force you to drop whatever you are doing, find the nearest mirror, look yourself in the eye and ask difficult questions of yourself. ‘What Should I Do with My Life?’ by Po Bronson is one such book.

The first time I read it, more than a year back, I ended up weeping in public at Istanbul airport.

The second time I read it, almost six months back, I decided to start searching for something I could devote my life to.

When I moved into my new house last December, I thought of an excerpt from the book and promised myself that I won’t let my lovely house trap me into a life of complacent comfort.

When I spent a weekend, three months back, reading Judith Levine’s ‘Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping’ and decided to go off consumption for a year, it was another excerpt from ‘What Should I Do with My Life?’ that helped me make the decision –

Shouldn’t I make money first — to fund my dream? The notion that there’s an order to your working life is an almost classic assumption: Pay your dues, and then tend to your dream. I expected to find numerous examples of the truth of this path. But I didn’t find any.

When I moved into my new house last December, I was delighted. It’s a beautiful house overlooking the sea, walking distance away from office, in the costliest residential address in India. In fact, it’s such a lovely house that it was featured in a Mid-Day story on cool bachelor pads.

It would have been easy for me to look at the house as a symbol of how far I had come in life, especially in the context of where I had started from.

Instead, I remembered this paragraph from page 186 of Po Bronson’s life-changing book What Should I Do with My Life?, in which “boom wrangler” Heidi Olson explains her wanderlust —

I decided to go to Oxford for a year, because, well, it was Oxford. I told the other women at work, and one said, ‘I wish I could just up and go to Oxford.’ So I asked, ‘Why don’t you?’ She said, ‘I would, but I bought a couch.’ I always remembered that moment, and I never wanted to be that woman. I never wanted to be trapped by my past, my belongings, my commitments.