According to UK researchers, four out of ten women would rather go shopping than have sex, and bargain shopping in particular lights up the same part of the brain as sexual arousal, in both men and women.
For the 21st century materialistic society, shopping’s no longer the process of getting essential survival items but rather an entertainment and reward activity. We shop till we drop with girlfriends as a way of socializing, browse online catalogues when bored, wander around shops as part of our Saturday afternoon ritual…. We even use shopping as an anti-depressant: compulsive shopping is the new emotional overeating. And the internet only makes things worse: there’s an entire online community of compulsive shoppers — people posting so-called ‘hauls’, showing what they’ve bought while convincing their viewers to do the same. And then Google tailors ads to our interests, linking us to sites where we can shop around the clock from our own homes. Shopping’s the foundation of our consumer-driven economy, so it’s no wonder we’re addicted to it.
As a student on a budget, I’m usually good at resisting the Hollywood-style shopping sprees, but even I have my consumerist weaknesses, things I buy to indulge or reward, like makeup, accessories, books. These micro-sprees eat away at my monthly budget until the holes are difficult to stitch. So upon experiencing a post-skiing vacation empty wallet syndrome, I decided to find out what life would be like without the spending, declaring a ‘No-Shop February!’
The rules were simple: no shopping for anything but food for a month. Within the first few days I noticed changes in my daily routine. Browsing through stores often helps me unwind after work, a simple task that appeals to my ancestral hunting/gathering instincts with an instant reward: I catch my prey and then take it to the cashier for slaughter! But now that I’m only
allowed in grocery stores, I find that I’m suddenly particularly picky about my pasta sauce, taking my time to pick one out.
I soon notice how many shopping areas there are in the small city of Delft: shopping centres, passages, stores on every corner, all trying to grab my attention with bright banners and product displays. So this is what recovering from addiction feels like?
In the third week of No-Shop February I end up having dinner at Ikea, the worst place to be if you’re a recovering shopping addict. Once in it’s impossible to get out without going through the entire store. I expect to get that rush again, but instead end up bored. Why did I find this so appealing before?
Finally, March 1st arrives. I walk into the stores with my meticulously-composed February wish list and feel…absolutely nothing. I look at all the superficial items on my list and walk out of the store empty-handed.
I’d like to say that this is where it ended, but within a week I’d restored my habitual browsing and by mid-March had bought most of the things I had initially held off buying. Old habits die hard. Still, I learned one thing from this experiment: it’s the thrill of the hunt, rather than the end prize, that makes the ritual so exciting.
“For hours we drove by taxi to a little river deep in the jungle. From there a small boat took us to the coast, to the headquarters of Pacuare Nature Reserve”, hydraulic engineering student, Frank Melman, laughingly recalls. “To get to that nature reserve for turtles you have to perform quite some tricks. It’s really in the middle of nowhere.”
Last autumn Melman and three fellow hydraulic engineering students, Sander Post, Viannette den Boer and Dennis Joosten, spent three weeks in that remote place, modeling the local hydrology. Small as it may be, this little river poses a threat to the nature conservationists, just as the poachers do to the sea turtles that lay their eggs along the shoreline each summer. The students’ objective was to analyze the river and coastal morphology, in order to provide recommendations for the safe discharge of water during the winter months.
One branch of the water system ends in a lagoon that is separated from the ocean by a 100-meter wide strip of beach. Or so it is under ideal conditions. The problem is that, due to heavy rainfall, the lagoon regularly overflows in winter, flooding the beach. The homes of the conservationists meanwhile are built right at the corner where river and ocean meet. With the beach gone, ocean waves and strong river currents gnaw at the pole bases of the conservationists’ homes.
Not very smart to build your living quarters right on that particular spot, one would think. But Melman disagrees: “I wouldn’t say it was stupid. The Englishman John Denham, who first started working as a conservationist in the park in 1989, couldn’t have known about the dangers. There was no scientific knowledge about the river dynamics at that time.”
And what’s more, the water problems have increased since 1989, owing to an increase in upstream banana crops. In order to cultivate areas along the river that normally flood in winter, the farmers built dikes, which, consequently, means more water flows towards the lagoon.
Somewhat to their surprise, the students found that the hydrological model they developed seems to be fairly accurate. They had predicted that if a lagoon a few miles away was to overflow this winter, the beach next to the conservationists’ homes would remain intact. Since the two lagoons are connected to each other by inland waterways, if one of the lagoons overflows, the result is less water buildup in the other lagoon.
And this exact scenario occurred. Farmers, who wanted the water level in the canals to decrease, dug a channel in the beach in front of the other lagoon. As a consequence of this, the water level in the lagoon next to the conservationists’ homes lowered exactly as much as the students had predicted.
Adding to their thrill of discovery was the fact that the students developed their model with very basic equipment. The most sophisticated gear they used was a little boat outfitted with GPS and sonar equipment to measure the depth of the water along the river.
Other parameters were obtained more primitively. “We used intuition to estimate the height of the dikes”, Post explains. “And we used two Coca Cola bottles tied together to measure the current: one of them empty, the other filled with sand. When you throw them in the water and measure the speed of the floating bottle, what you’re actually measuring is the speed of the current deeper in the river, which is what you need in a hydrological model.”
Removing the dikes along the banana plantations would be one solution for preventing erosion; however, a more practical solution for the conservationists is to reinforce their lagoon with sandbags and dig a small channel each winter in the other lagoon.
“Of course the best solution – also for the turtles – is beach nourishment, the adding of sand from the ocean to the beach, as we do in Holland”, Melman says.
“But that’s not going to happen”, Post counters, “because it’s too expensive. It would’ve been different if there were tourists there, but the tourists are all on the west coast, which isn’t surprising. You can’t swim in the ocean there because of the rip currents and the lagoon is full of crocodiles. But worst of all are the sand fleas: they drove us crazy!”
According to UK researchers, four out of ten women would rather go shopping than have sex, and bargain shopping in particular lights up the same part of the brain as sexual arousal, in both men and women. For the 21st century materialistic society, shopping’s no longer the process of getting essential survival items but rather an entertainment and reward activity. We shop till we drop with girlfriends as a way of socializing, browse online catalogues when bored, wander around shops as part of our Saturday afternoon ritual…. We even use shopping as an anti-depressant: compulsive shopping is the new emotional overeating. And the internet only makes things worse: there’s an entire online community of compulsive shoppers — people posting so-called ‘hauls’, showing what they’ve bought while convincing their viewers to do the same. And then Google tailors ads to our interests, linking us to sites where we can shop around the clock from our own homes. Shopping’s the foundation of our consumer-driven economy, so it’s no wonder we’re addicted to it.
As a student on a budget, I’m usually good at resisting the Hollywood-style shopping sprees, but even I have my consumerist weaknesses, things I buy to indulge or reward, like makeup, accessories, books. These micro-sprees eat away at my monthly budget until the holes are difficult to stitch. So upon experiencing a post-skiing vacation empty wallet syndrome, I decided to find out what life would be like without the spending, declaring a ‘No-Shop February!’
The rules were simple: no shopping for anything but food for a month. Within the first few days I noticed changes in my daily routine. Browsing through stores often helps me unwind after work, a simple task that appeals to my ancestral hunting/gathering instincts with an instant reward: I catch my prey and then take it to the cashier for slaughter! But now that I’m only
allowed in grocery stores, I find that I’m suddenly particularly picky about my pasta sauce, taking my time to pick one out.
I soon notice how many shopping areas there are in the small city of Delft: shopping centres, passages, stores on every corner, all trying to grab my attention with bright banners and product displays. So this is what recovering from addiction feels like?
In the third week of No-Shop February I end up having dinner at Ikea, the worst place to be if you’re a recovering shopping addict. Once in it’s impossible to get out without going through the entire store. I expect to get that rush again, but instead end up bored. Why did I find this so appealing before?
Finally, March 1st arrives. I walk into the stores with my meticulously-composed February wish list and feel…absolutely nothing. I look at all the superficial items on my list and walk out of the store empty-handed.
I’d like to say that this is where it ended, but within a week I’d restored my habitual browsing and by mid-March had bought most of the things I had initially held off buying. Old habits die hard. Still, I learned one thing from this experiment: it’s the thrill of the hunt, rather than the end prize, that makes the ritual so exciting.
Olga Motsyk, from Ukraine, is a BSc aerospace engineering student.
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