Why Do We Buy Stuff?

Adventures in sociology, identity-building and conspicuous consumption

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been studying the topics of consumerism, conspicuous consumption, and retail therapy. I’m at a loss. I considered postponing this newsletter yet another week, but I doubt that I’d be able to make heads or tails out of this topic next week, next month, or even next year. I’m tormented by the question “why do we keep buying stuff?" and the answer is a can of worms that can only be described as “it’s complicated”.

My first memory of buying stuff is from when I was maybe ten years old. Unlike a lot of kids in my class, I didn’t get pocket money from my parents. I wanted to buy stickers and a cool notebook, so rather than being upfront about my wants with my parents, I pinched money from my mother’s purse when she wasn’t looking and went to the stationary shop at the local mall. I bought stickers, a new eraser and some very pretty pencils, and I was very pleased with myself. I knew that stealing was wrong, but I didn’t know how to explain to my mom that I’d want money for buying stationery that I didn’t exactly need. I ended up doing this a few times and eventually I got caught. I remember my teary confession, and my mom asking me why I had done it. I couldn’t explain myself. I had just wanted to buy stuff. 

When I started to make a little money in my late teens I started to buy clothes. I worked as a model in Milan for a while in my early 20s and even though I was never successful, I earned enough to spend a good chunk of my paycheck on clothes. Luckily I lived out of a suitcase and that prevented me from buying a lot of stuff. The money wasn’t great, and I just didn’t have the space either. This continued throughout my university years. In the late 2000s I moved back to Finland, and I got my first real apartment and a full-time job. That’s when things went off the rails for me. 

I had got myself tangled up in an unhealthy relationship, and I often shopped to make myself feel better. If I had an argument with my boyfriend, I’d buy a new pair of shoes and for a while I’d feel fine – and we’d argue, a lot. I knew it wasn’t healthy to buy stuff like this, but I felt like everyone was doing it around me, too. My co-workers often went shopping on Fridays after work, to reward themselves for having coped that week. Retail therapy had become a thing. Carrie Bradshaw was doing it, so why shouldn’t we?

My shopping started with fast fashion, and I worked my way up from buying the cheapest stuff to purchasing mid-priced clothes, and eventually more expensive, borderline-luxury clothes. After a while I realized that I couldn’t afford to spend money like this, and I found thrifting. I could have all the shopping I could ever want, for a fraction of the cost. I had started to read about the disastrous consequences of the fashion industry to our planet, and thrifting felt like a justifiable way to buy as much stuff as I wanted. I didn’t only buy clothes, I bought homeware, too: plates, tea cups, art, books, furniture, you name it. Soon my apartment was packed. I got out of the bad relationship, but my shopping habits stayed the same. It was like I was hooked, and for the last 15 years or so I’ve tried to stop, with varying results. 

The question lingers: “why do we keep buying stuff?” When I initially began researching this topic, I googled the question above and came across a Psychology Today article that talked about the dopamine hit. Buying stuff is rewarding, it’s as simple as that. Our brains like shopping the same way that we like overeating or taking drugs. Dopamine, a type of neurotransmitter associated with pleasurable reward and motivation, hits your brain when you are at the cash register paying for your purchase, and if you buy stuff online, you’ll get two dopamine hits: one when you order, and another when your package arrives. Your brain remembers how cool it was to buy stuff, so it wants to buy again and again to feel the dopamine rush, especially if you’re feeling stressed out, anxious or depressed.  

And let’s face it: post-modern life makes us stressed out, anxious and depressed, and we buy stuff to cope with it. Already in 1928 Paul Nystrom argued that capitalism in general and industrialization in particular had fundamentally changed us: our lives in the so-called Western world had become narrowed and empty, plagued by the absence of truly meaningful things like the pursuit of a good life through the means of philosophy and religion. Instead we occupied ourselves with participating in shallow consumerism to fill the void. Nystrom called this the philosophy of futility. He wrote:

“This lack of purpose in life has an effect on consumption similar to that of having a narrow life interest, that is, in concentrating human attention on the more superficial things in which fashion reigns.” 

Fast-forward almost a hundred years, and we’re engaging in retail therapy like never before. Buying stuff is so ingrained in us that we define ourselves and our lives based on our purchases. “You are what you buy”, claimed sociologist Colin Campbell in 2002, arguing that we buy things to feel alive, to reassure ourselves about our very existence. We expose ourselves to a variety of products and services to discover who we are. We look for our own self-identity through consumerism, whereas people of our grandparents’ generation might have seen themselves as a part of a bigger whole first: a family, a religion, a race, or a nation. 

From the 1990s onward buying things and services to form a personal identity has been closely linked to the idea of conspicuous consumption. The term ‘conspicuous consumption’ has been floating since 1899, when sociologist Thorstein Veblen came up with it to describe the process of purchasing luxury goods in order to display wealth and to gain social status. A wider definition of conspicuous consumption is buying and using goods of higher quality, price, or in greater quantity than what’s necessary or practical. We buy certain types of things, or just a lot of things, to create an identity and then display that identity to others. 

Within that larger framework of our role in society, we might also buy stuff to ease off our boredom, anxiety, low self-esteem or depression, or to fulfill some basic human needs like security, love, and self-actualization. We might want to feel special and have things that no one else has, or we might want to be just like everyone else, to belong in a group, in order to feel safe. Either way, we buy things to get a feeling. That feeling and the things we’ve bought to achieve it, in one way or another, translate into our position in the society we live in.

We now live in a world thoroughly permeated by buying: we’re bombarded by ads and social media, and whether we do it consciously or subconsciously, we engage in social comparison when it comes to other people and what they have. We build our sense of identity around the things we have bought, and we compare that to what others around us have or don’t have. Essentially we define ourselves and our place in society on the basis of wealth and the stuff that comes with it: what kind of neighborhood we live in, what type of house or apartment we live in, what clothing brands we buy, what type of music we listen to, which restaurants or supermarkets we frequent. It comes down to what type of consumer you are, and how much money you have to take part in this kind of identity-building. 

The marketing forces know how intricate the link between identity and buying is, and the way products and services are sold to us today is based on our search for identity. Fashion is a good example: are you a Gucci person or do you lean more toward Jil Sander? Any fashion fan will immediately have an answer to that question. It’s about buying the brand and becoming it. Those of us who really love fashion and clothes have recently gone further from just superficially associating ourselves with a favorite brand or two: we now toil with things like style adjectives and personal style services to figure out who we are and how to dress accordingly. And of course, we have to buy clothes in order to complete the process. 

We see identity-based marketing and our response to it as a fascinating exercise (after all, we’re all trying to feel something), and ironically we think that the brands who push this type of marketing are somehow more honest than mere product-pushers. We even form consumer tribes around brands that we feel understand and speak to us. And we buy, buy, buy. We think we’re making our own choices but really we’re being influenced. It’s like that famous scene from ‘The Devil Wears Prada’, where Miranda Priestley, played by Meryl Streep, delivers a powerful monologue to Andy (played by Anne Hathaway) about trends and the power of high-level fashion executives while picking clothes to a photo shoot: 

“...you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry, when in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of “stuff.”

Funnily enough, if you can display your identity through buying stuff, you can also engage in identity-building and not buy stuff. Sending social signals to others about having opted out of consumption is known as conspicuous non-consumption. No Buys, Low Buys and shopping diets are a form of conspicuous non-consumption. Whether we buy stuff or not, we’re all operating under the same umbrella of consumerism. We’re all trying to forge our own identities within the capitalist system.

I think of my own shopping history, and my first experience of buying stuff (with stolen money) definitely had something to do with wanting to have what other kids had. (That’s called upward social comparison.) Over the years my shopping has gone from text-book mood shopping and retail therapy (“just a little pick-me-up”) to buying all styles of clothes in order to play with my identity, to present myself in a myriad of ways to myself and to others. Luckily I’ve never had the type of money to fully engage in luxury fashion shopping. I would have spent a heck of a lot more money over the years just to feel something. I don’t quite know where I am right now. I still like to buy stuff but I try to ask questions and I try to be more disciplined. 

I don’t think there’s a way out of this, really. The complexity behind our need to buy stuff is very uncomfortable, and it would probably take years of therapy to overcome the way we’ve been conditioned to operate under our economic system. Even opting out seems like it’s not quite real, but a performance. What is real, anyway? Is anything real?

I’m left wondering, in all of this, where does an honest love of clothes and beautiful things fit in. Is it even possible to buy something from the heart, just because we truly love it? I don’t have an answer. It’s getting increasingly difficult to differentiate between a justifiable purchase and a frivolous one, or between a purchase based on real feeling and an imagined one. Maybe we’re just mindless consumers, small pegs in the massive machine of capitalism, and none of it really matters. If buying stuff makes us happier, what’s the big deal? Like I wrote at the beginning of this newsletter, it’s complicated. I think it’s good to ask questions though, even the uncomfortable ones. Who would you be if you didn’t have the stuff that you’ve acquired over the years?