Shopping

Q: Do you enjoy shopping? A: Not especially, if I'm honest. I find it somewhat draining — particularly shopping for clothes, which requires far too many decisions for something I'm not particularly interested in. Grocery shopping I don't mind; there's something satisfying about buying actual ingredients and knowing what you're going to do with them. Q: Do you prefer shopping online or in physical shops? A: Online, for almost everything except food and things where the fit or feel matters — clothes, shoes, that kind of thing. The main reason is time: buying books or household goods online takes about two minutes rather than a trip across the city. I'm also less susceptible to impulse buying online because I deliberately avoid saving my payment details, which adds enough friction to make you actually think. Q: How often do you buy clothes? A: Infrequently — probably four or five times a year, and usually replacing things rather than adding to what I have. I've found that having fewer, better things is more pleasant than having a large wardrobe of mediocre things, which took embarrassingly long to figure out. Q: Do you think people buy too many things they don't need? A: Yes, broadly speaking, though I'm wary of being moralistic about it. Consumption is partly tied to social signalling and partly to genuine enjoyment, and the line between necessary and unnecessary is blurrier than it appears. What I'd say is that the ease of buying things now has probably removed some of the natural pause that used to come with purchasing — and that pause had some value.