Welcome to The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption! Subscribe to my RSS feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you'll never miss any chapters from my year-long blog-as-a-book experiment on why we choose to consume, or not.
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.
Today, I was back in office, copying table after table of numbers from excel sheets to a power point presentation. I’ll not be able to take time off this week because I have to do more of the same tomorrow and the day after that.
Part of the reason I haven’t written much is because I have been writing and deleting posts responding to comments (from friends and strangers) about how “crass and classless” I am, apart from being “pompous, self-centered and self-obsessed”, and how my experiment is a “gimmick”, a “self-publicity stunt” to get “vanity coverage” in media.
Part of the reason why I haven’t written much is because I have been spending far too much time cooking my food, cleaning my house, fixing things at home, and walking to wherever I want to go.
I don’t want to go back to my house tonight because I don’t want to be alone when I’m feeling blue. I also don’t want to go back to my house tonight because it’s still dirty after the ‘let’s watch four Hitchcock movies in a night’ get together on Saturday night. You haven’t read about it yet because it’s post #13 in the queue of unwritten posts in my mind.
So, here I am, sitting on Marine Drive, hunched over my laptop, hoping that the sea breeze will clear my head and brush away my blues.
Except that I’m pissed off that people in Mumbai have no sense of public space. I had to move twice because someone would sit next to me on my hitherto quiet stretch of the promenade and start playing a Himesh Reshammiya song on his mobile phone’s loudspeaker.
So, as I try to finish this post before my laptop battery runs down, I wish I was not off consumption so that I could eat a one liter brick of Amul Kulfi ice cream at one go, knowing fully well that I’ll feel terrible about it tomorrow.
Comments (9)
oh dear. but as they say, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. this is your chance to prove to them that this isn’t a media stunt.
The best way for catharsis is to get a “hit me” beat the hell out of it, till your emotion build-up breaks. If you want more impact then you can place the name of the person you are pissed at and put it on the nose of “hit me” and jab it hard. Works for me..!
Even I am off consumption these days. But mine is much more focused. To eating…! I am off fatty food as I have gained lot of weight.
HI Gaurav,
I have done that as well..spend time along on the Bandra seaface ..worked for me in terms of clearing my head.The blues are a more long term problem for me…..
Will follow your adventure….Have you read Tolstoy or Thoreau? Is this where your ideas have come from?
@Riddhi: Heh! Thanks. I found a jar of Nutella chocolate spread in my kitchen cupboard. It’s not the same as ice cream, but still…
@Shashank: I wasn’t pissed with any person, only pissed. Yes, being off consumption is good for the waistline. I have already lost an inch or two off mine.
@Ninad: My two hour daily walk on the Marine Drive has almost become a ritual now. It always leaves me refreshed, as it eventually did yesterday. I have read some Tolstoy, and almost no Thoreau, but the experiment is inspired by neither. My sources of inspiration are Judith Levine (Not Buying It), Po Bronson (What Should I Do With My Life?) and Naomi Klein (No Logo).
Gaurav,
Some more questions:
1. Blogging/reading blogs/surfing the net for recreation is also an element of consumption. Now this element is completely different from your work, so technically, you should be switching off internet connection at home. If the company offers it to you, is it allowed to use it for personal use when being off consumption? Ofcourse, you can use the internet if it is freely available. i.e. in public locations like coffee shops, airport lounges, wherever you may happen to find it for free! Even if you can identify an unsecured wireless network in your neighbourhood. Again the caveat here is, you cannot request the neighbour to unsecure it so that you can use it during your experiment.
2. An idea to help you while off consumption: You may not buy books, but no-one can stop you from reading what is freely available. I suggest, whenever you want to read a book, hop over to crossword and sit in the comfort of an A/C room and read a book, you can do it on the weekends
I did this a lot when I was a student, and hence, short of cash. That was a forced “off-consumption”
3. I think using friends’ couches to crash when you are on out of town on business is not a great idea, even if you are alone. The company provides you with a hotel acco in the best hotels because it wants you in full mental and physical health for business when you travel. I am not sure you can ensure that if you crash on a friend’s couch the previous evening!
Again, I am just thinking aloud here, I won’t be surprised if you have already ensured that smoe of these things are well thought about.
All the best!
it’s a brand new world — being vain and pompous is not necessarily a bad thing now.
And I am not being sarcastic.
Cheers,
Amit
@Amit: Well…
@Mayuresh: You make some interesting observations.
You might want to have a look at my ten commandments.
Rule #2 says that work is sacrosanct. So, I’ll couchsurf only if it doesn’t affect work.
Rule #10 says that I’m increasingly looking as my online presence as an investment. In fact, I’m quite sure that my next career change will come via my blog. So, not only writing my blog, even advertising for my blog is allowed.
Yes, I didn’t think of it before, but reading books in a bookstore, without buying them, should be allowed. In fact, bookstore chains are perhaps the only well-stocked public libraries accessible to all.
Thanks for your inputs.
I am not sure whether one can accurately tell if couch-surfing will or will not adversely affect performance. Anyway, I guess it is alright as long as you realize that there would be a cost to the company associated with it.
Next, I did read your 10 commandments! The point which bothers me is: You have decided to go off-consumption, but not beginning from zero. You do have some inventory stocked at home (like the liquor cabinet or that bottle of nutella or that Bvlgari perfume, or your frequent flier miles) or anything else that may be available. I understand that you had those things when you decided to go off-consumption, but it would be interesting to see what a person starting at zero would do. That would actually differentiate a necessity from a luxury. I am sure all kinds of liquor would be a luxury if you had started from zero!
Rest of the things are perfect, looks like we may have a new book soon! I would like a free signed copy
Please point me to the registration link.
Another suggestion: It is quite difficult to navigate your blog. Could you change the template, so that all posts appear on the main page in reverse chronological order?
@Mayuresh: You have a valid point, but it’s not really possible to start from ground zero. One nice thing is that I started the experiment on a whim one Sunday and didn’t even think of stocking up. The other nice thing is that I’m consuming what I already have as if I’ll never run out of it, which means that I’ll run out of it really soon. A year is a long time. I’ll hit ground zero months before the year is over.
A lot of people have complained about the navigation.
I really like the minimalistic single-column, single-post front page, so I’m keeping it.
However, all the archives, categories and search pages now show ten posts, so navigating through the blog should be much simpler now than it was a few hours back.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks (2)
[…] Welcome to The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption! Subscribe to my RSS feed in a feed reader or by e-mail and you’ll never miss any chapters from my year-long blog-as-a-book experiment on why we choose to consume, or not.The Saturday Night Movie Marathon turned out to be exactly what I needed after working all day on another big presentation. […]
[…] beginning that the key to my off-consumption experiment is to be happy most of the time, because being off-consumption means you cannot resolve to self-gifting to snap out of sadness — The problem with being off consumption is that you can no longer buy a ‘treat’ for […]