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Buying Is Doing?

How important is shopping to you? How much time do you spend buying things? And how much time do you spend organizing these things in your home? In the future, how much time will you spend in movie theaters, at amusement parks, at shopping malls, or at convenience stores? When you add it all up, you will probably see you spend a lot of your life consuming（消费）things. Consuming products is not necessarily bad. However, if we spend too much time doing it, we should look at it carefully.

Imagine that you have a week off from school. You don’t have to go to class. However, in this week, you cannot spend any money — no shopping, no movies, no eating out. How would you spend your time?

What things would bring you happiness? Perhaps you would take a walk with your best friend. Perhaps you would help a child read. Or you might spend time with your family.

When we look back, it is likely that non-consuming experiences like these will be our most important memories. Why? Non-consuming activities are active, not passive. They don’t come in a package. You make the experience yourself. For example, each person who reads to a child will have a different experience. The experience changes with the reader, the child, and the book. Similarly, when you have a conversation with a friend, you are actively creating an experience. The conversation that you have with your friend cannot be experienced or recreated by anyone else. However, if you watch a movie with a friend, you will each have a package experience. It requires no action and little interaction between the two of you.

The environment we live in encourages us to have packaged experiences. We feel that we must consume because we believe that buying is doing. However, we can start a personal revolution（变革） against consumerism. How? By consuming less, we can ask ourselves what experiences bring us the greatest satisfaction. Then we can organize our lives so that we have more of those kinds of experiences.