It’s a funny thing. You want to be a responsible consumer, but doing so means that you think about shopping (that is, the enemy of responsible consumption) a lot.

My latest foray has been into men’s business clothes. SO’s wardrobe really shows that he’s been working in the same “we don’t care what you wear” job for a long time. What started out nice enough has slowly become only nice enough for an office where everyone already knows you. If he’s really serious about finding a new job, it wasn’t going to fly anymore.

That means my last two weeks have been fueled by the perfect storm that is the pre-fall sales plus new, dressier, employment prospects. While the process itself was a little horrifying, what with it’s constant reinforcement of class and gender roles, I learned some interesting things.

Namely: men think about clothing entirely differently. (Duh, you say, but hear me out.) Women fall into a trap of buying “outfits.” They buy this handbag to go with those shoes to go with that skirt. They buy things, only to have them go on sale next week for half price, so instead they wait until sales and buy whatever’s on the rack in their budget. That green blouse is cute! And it’s a good deal! Who cares if it matches exactly one pair of pants, which in turn require that you wear the really high heeled shoes because you didn’t have them hemmed.

Men’s clothes just aren’t like that. I mentioned the annual Nordstrom sale to the clerk, and he made a comment like, “Yeah, this isn’t the ladies’ department. We have two sales a year. People plan all year for this.” Which we, in fact, had done.

Or, on shoes, which I find very interesting as a barometer: Doing my due diligence of research about men’s dress shoes, over and over again I read things like “Oh, don’t buy those. They can’t be resoled and the leather cracks within a year.” I honestly couldn’t tell you when I have ever heard a woman say, “those shoes will wear out too fast.” At the same time, you can’t find shoe polish or shoe trees (the cedar inserts that help shoes keep their shape) in the ladies’ shoe department of any store that I went into.

I’m not silly enough to suggest that this is entirely our fault. The fact is, a man’s entire wardrobe could be two suits, four or five shirts, one or two pair of shoes, and five ties. Not only would nobody care, but if he picked those things wisely he’d still be considered one of the best-dressed people in his office. Even in business casual, which is less uniform-y, he could easily look quite acceptable with three or four pairs of pants and five shirts. Women can’t quite get away with that. Convention (a code word in this case for internalized partriarchal demands) dictates that we have an array of “pretty clothes.” There is a larger disparity between our work clothes and our evening clothes. Women’s fashions change more rapidly. Not to mention, that same convention means that durable, well-made, practical, aesthetically pleasing clothes for women are extremely hard to find at any price point.

The thing that I’m interested by, though, is the two completely opposite directions that conspicuous consumption takes for men and for women. For us, the constant emphasis is on quantity. For men, it is, by and large, on quality. There are, of course, individual exceptions on both sides. The sales clerk in the men’s shoe department, though, doesn’t suggest that you get both pairs. Instead, he says, “Or, I have this nicer shoe . . . ”

Less but better hasn’t left the mall. It’s just not on our side of the aisle.

Excerpted from John Robbins’s book The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less:

“In the days to come, I believe that the homes that will be the most cherished will be human scale, chosen to enhance not our egos but our connection with those we love. Smaller homes free up our time and energy to do things other than work to pay the rent or the mortgage. By having lower housing costs and less house to clean and maintain, we can spend more time with our children, our friends, and our partners. We have more time to write poems or paint pictures, to plant gardens or bake bread, to play tennis or build bunk beds, to make love or volunteer for Habitat for Humanity.

“For many reasons, including the increased cost of many resources, the need to reduce waste, and the need many people feel to simplify their lives, our living spaces will get smaller. If at the same time we can make them more beautiful, more humane, more energy efficient, and more supportive of our spirits, we will have taken an important step into the new good life.” (page 103)

I have a former life as an academic. It’s only somewhat awkwardly behind me–it hasn’t been fully relinquished, but I’m no longer (if I ever was) on the “tenure track.”

In any event, part of my awkward semi-break with academia has been my awkward semi-break with reading, which was for the first thirty years of my life my defining state.

I have a vivid memory of watching a Donald Duck cartoon as a kid, in which his nephews buy him a box of cigars for his birthday. Donald, outraged that the boys are buying cigars to smoke for themselves, forces the boys to smoke the entire box. Nauseous and horrified, they’ll never smoke again. Graduate school was like that with books. After reading twelve hours a day, I was left with a vague discomfort around the book as physical object. How do I interact with this thing, now that it isn’t “work”?

Electronic books stepped in to fill the void, to some extent. Devoid of physical form, e-books are somehow separate from “book books” and thus that vague, lingering feeling of “work not play.” I’ve torn through fifteen “fluffy” fiction books electronically in the last six or seven months, but the real book (just as non-serious) that I’ve been reading over the same time period is still languishing on the end table.

I realized lately that the problem is writing. The physical separation of a “fun” book from a “work” book is whether or not I have a pen in my hand. “There will be a quiz later” it screams. “You’ll be expected to remember this.”  With an electronic book, there is no possible reason to hold a pen. No pen, no quiz, no paper to write later, no labor.

Oddly, though, the electronic book has been covertly working to bridge the gap. My choice of reading matter lately is heavily biased toward non-fiction, practical things. Mostly books about dog training, sigh, because I have the world’s most neurotic dog. They’re actually a terrible choice for reading electronically, because you need to flip to a certain section for reference later, but the prices are more dramatically disparate than fiction books.

That’s how I found myself obsessively using the highlight feature of my e-reader. And suddenly this very arbitrary but important division between fun books that I read electronically and serious books that I read in print has collapsed. I suspect that it’s partly the act of writing itself that has shifted–since there isn’t a physical book to “damage,” I can highlight anything I want in any book. There’s also no pen to track down and keep up with. I caught myself digitally highlighting, willy-nilly, in a “not serious” book yesterday. Writing in the margin has quietly become a thing of its own, not a marker of labor.

It’s early to say how this will play out. This morning I picked up a very serious book off my physical bookshelf, without feeling like it was “work.” I’m hoping that it’s the beginning of a trend. It’s certainly been long enough.

We didn’t stay up late on New Years’ Eve. We almost never do. Crowded parties aren’t really our thing. Instead, we were trying to get up early. The husband, you see, wants to get fit(ter) before bike season starts, and I gamely agreed to be his exercise buddy. The predetermined time for this exercise was 5:30 in the morning. He has to be at work early, and the evenings are already full. So, we went to bed early, hoping for sleep.

Then we had the worst fight we’ve ever had, over the dumbest thing of all time, as it usually goes. Sometime just this side of midnight produced an extremely uncharacteristic screaming match, because he wouldn’t quit flopping in the bed (he doesn’t just roll over, you see, he bodily lifts himself up and throws himself back down. I can sleep through it, but he has to be still enough for me to go to sleep first.). I don’t remember what it was that I was doing to generate my half of the fight–probably nagging him to lie still. At two or three in the morning we finally went to sleep.

The phone rang at 5:15. My grandfather, who had been steadily deteriorating since a stroke in July, had passed away. New Year’s Day. First thing in the morning. If he’d been a more dramatic man, I would say that he wanted to make sure no one forgot. If he’d been a more contrary man, I would say that he wanted to inconvenience the family as much as possible.

As he was dying, he got angry with my mother. He wasn’t entirely himself anymore, and he had never regained the use of his left leg. One night in the hospital, he wanted to get up. Surely, he said, there was some work to be done somewhere in that hospital. Some sheetrock to hang or something he could do. He never did entirely believe my mother when she told him there wasn’t. Like all very active men who are suddenly debilitated, he was a terrible invalid.

I had to be the strong person at the funeral, which I can now, if there was ever any doubt, put firmly into the “Do Not Want” category of adult human activities. My own father is still very weak from his last medical crisis, even though his long-term prognosis is better now than anyone expected. He wasn’t physically able to do all those things that he’s quietly done at all the similar crises. I took my mother to buy the flowers, sat with her at the graveside, made sure she was away from the cemetery before the casket was covered. After the funeral, I took on the work of hostessing, making sure the coffee pot was filled and an endless stream of guests could find the bathroom and the food and whatever else they needed. Fortunately the post-funeral traditions in the American south are alive and well and largely self-regulatory.

When something happens on New Year’s Day, it seems to carry an extra weight. The superstitious human brain always tries to ascribe meaning: “Is this a sign for the next year? What does this mean for the future?” The death of a sick, elderly man who lived a good life is impossible to interpret in a single way: a beginning of grief and an ending of suffering. Like all cleverly constructed portents, it is inherently difficult to read.

And so begins the new year.

Last night I was flipping through a magazine that I’ll call green-lite. It’s a genre that I’m increasingly frustrated with. Article after article, page after page, suggested, either overtly or not, that all I needed for a more environmentally-conscious and stress-free life was to buy ALL NEW THINGS. Never was it suggested that, just maybe, since the environmental damage of my old items is already done, the best way to ameliorate that damage might be to use them until they actually need replacing.

I understand that purchasing things is an ethical morass. What to own/how many to own/what compromises are acceptable. I find it very difficult, though, to accept the idea of carte blanche to own unlimited things, as long as they’re “green.” Even more problematic is the fact that most of these items are more “green-washed” than actually eco-friendly.

I think the thing that frustrates me the most is that educated consumers have a battery of defense mechanisms to resist the tactics of, say, Vogue. In fact, I’m guessing that the average reader of this kind of “green” magazine is well-trained to spot photoshopped models and scoffs at the blatant consumerism of a Fendi bag. But, LOOK! Recycled shoes! Cute reusable shopping bags! A PVC-free yoga mat! What can possibly be wrong with buying that?!

Yesterday I watched one of those internet train wrecks, wherein an intelligent and articulate group of women devolved into shrieking children over the number of lipsticks one person should own. The question at the center of the debate seems fair enough: what is the line between owning too many things and not owning enough? Of course, that’s a question with a hundred individual variables. Financial considerations and tendencies toward/away from minimalism seem the most pertinent, but even those aren’t cut and dried.

Complex personal variables aside, one side of this argument fascinates me. It attracts my attention because it’s the same argument I see happening amongst knitters about how much yarn a person should own. The two sides here break down roughly into: “I buy only things I can use, and my goal is to use things up.” and “This is a collection, and it makes me happy. My goal is to surround myself with beautiful items.” The use-it-up side often expresses the idea that love is use. For them, loving a skein of yarn means turning it into a beautiful sweater you wear every chance you can, or wearing a lipstick so often that you use the entire tube. The it’s-a-collection side has a more purely emotional definition. Loving something, for them, means that its mere existence makes them happy.

For something that is exclusively collectible, this debate doesn’t exist. While doll collectors, for instance, might quibble about how much money it’s fair to spend, other collectors don’t object that one has more porcelain dolls than one can play with. That is, the definition-of-love debate doesn’t exist, or certainly not in the same way.

A second problem with collecting consumables, like yarn or makeup, is the very idea that they are consumable. Some people have/can let go of that entire idea, and some haven’t/won’t. I’ll switch my example to knitting, now, because this is more my area of expertise. I, personally, stopped buying yarn years ago, because I realized that for me the “yarn stash” felt more like a really long to-do list than a joyful source of inspiration. I bought things with a use in mind, and not putting it to that use in a timely manner was causing me anxiety. Yarn buying, for me, is not like buying a porcelain doll; it’s like buying a head of lettuce and then watching it rot in the crisper drawer. This kind of anxiety about not using things up adds a level of guilt that makes discussions of “collecting” very fraught. “I wish I hadn’t bought so many things, because I feel guilty that I don’t use them” very quickly turns outwards, to “I don’t think anyone ought to own so much,” which in the sandbox that is the internet gets reduced further to “you disgust me.”

We also have a much more sophisticated cultural pathology for collecting than for its opposite. The less-is-more side has a rhetorical advantage, given to them by everyone from Suze Orman to Hoarders. We are a culture of consumers, so we are hyper-attuned to consumption. When someone gets rid of everything they own to travel the world with exactly 100 items, very few people stop to question the psychological or practical utility. Owning 100,000 items seems to make one a “hoarder” much more quickly than owning 100 makes one obsessive-compulsive. (Which is far from the opposite of hoarding, but I think the lack of a clear vocabulary proves my point.) In fact, most people in my acquaintance have a mild kind of envy that those 100-items people can “let it all go and be free.”

The pat solution in these arguments is always offered as “do what makes you happy, and let other people do the same.” Which is both true and kind, but, as with all questions of “happiness,” it masks a cultural problem that is worth examining.