A seasonal battle with my conscience

Yes, I’ve already done a lot of Christmas shopping on line. And yes, I feel a little guilty about it.

But when I take a closer look at the guilt, it really just serves to remind me that there are very few ways of Christmas shopping that don’t make me feel guilty. The whole concept can just seem so self-indulgent, even if I’m shopping for other people.

At the same time, it’s so satisfying to point, click, and save myself a trip to….well, anywhere. A mall. A superstore. A plaza.

Last weekend, I was lucky to be in Portland for a couple of days.  So, having not shopped at all – on principle and by preference – on Black Friday, I actually did quite a lot of small-scale purchasing on Saturday. But that didn’t seem so bad. A far-reaching public relations campaign had dubbed the day “small business Saturday,” and it felt like that’s what I was supporting: small businesses. Even though I know many of the little unique-looking boutiques in Portland’s Old Port are actually small chains, with counterparts in other boutique-heavy communities like Edgartown, Nantucket, Chatham, and Portsmouth, I still felt like I was shopping the old-fashioned way, ducking in and out of little shops, carrying my purchases by hand rather than pushing a cart, aware that since I was car-free, I’d better not buy more than I could comfortably tote the several blocks back to the condo, on foot.

It did feel like the right way to shop, compared to the newspaper and TV images of people in line at big box stores on Black Friday. But my self-righteousness only goes so far. None of it was really necessary – not the little pieces of Christmas candy for the kids, the token gifts for friends, none of it. We could all celebrate Christmas with no gifts at all. But it was fun, and I was contributing in a very small way to local vendors and artisans, so I mollified myself with thoughts of how I was adding to the city’s economic development.

A few days later, though, I couldn’t resist plowing through most of the remainder of my gift list on line. I still had no desire to get into the car and drive anywhere to shop. And even though it pains my conscience to give so much business to Amazon rather than local businesses, it still doesn’t seem entirely wrong. I was saving carbon emissions by not driving anywhere. And, well, I was saving myself a lot of aggravation, which I would like to think benefits the world in other ways, though that may be a bit of a stretch.

But the reality is, there’s no one answer to whether it’s right or wrong to indulge in holiday shopping, and whether there are right ways or wrong ways to do it. Yes, any shopping supports employees somewhere – whether in Framingham or Bangladesh – who no doubt need the work. No, I still can’t begin to explain how buying stuff has anything whatsoever to do with the birth of Christianity. Yes, shopping on line means avoiding the environmental impact of driving. No, I don’t feel great about the often bizarre amount of disposable packaging in which each small item shipped from Amazon is swathed. Yes, I do understand that those “two-day shipping” promises exact a toll on the overworked employees required to fulfill the orders at breakneck speed.

But in a way, what I was left with was realizing, mostly, that there seldom are cut-and-dried answers when it comes to matters of the conscience. Yesterday on NPR I heard a debate about communities outlawing plastic shopping bags. A great idea, in my opinion – except the other side of it is that people end up buying plastic bags for things like lining wastebaskets and cleaning up after pets for which they previously used their old grocery bags. It’s easy to have strong opinions when you don’t give things much thought.

Last night after dinner, my ten-year-old sat down at my computer and designed a brochure advertising holiday services. According to the full-color printout she gave me, she’s willing to do tasks such as wrap presents, design cards, address cards, and “personalize gifts,” all for less than a dollar. I contracted her immediately to wrap and make cards for any gifts on my list that weren’t for her. It will run me about six dollars. That’s one form of Christmas spending I think I can do with a clear conscience. Possibly the only one, but it's something.

Click here for guilt

Oh, the guilt.

It all started with a hair care product that a stylist introduced me to last fall. Unlike just about every other hair care product on earth, it’s perfectly suited to my very curly hair. But like many salon products, it’s expensive, and once I got hooked on it, I was spending three or four times more on my hair per month than I did when I relied on drugstore inventory.

Maybe I can find it online, I thought to myself. Of course, if I could, it would probably be on some obscure beauty supply wholesale site where the ordering system would be complicated and the minimum shipment would be two hundred dollars’ worth of the product.

But no. To my surprise, the first hit that came up on my Google search was Amazon, offering the same product for half what I was paying at the salon: nine dollars a bottle, which would likely last me about three weeks. With a click, I virtually deposited two bottles in my cart.

That added up to eighteen dollars, which was a fantastic price for this product but left me seven dollars short of the $25 minimum that qualifies an order on Amazon for free shipping. Normally when this happens, I throw in a book or small electronics accessory, but at the moment I didn’t feel particularly deserving of a gift, and the point of the purchase was to save money, not to spend extra.

Then I remembered a fragment of a line I’d heard on NPR a few days ago. “People on Amazon buying diapers….socks….laundry detergent,” it said.

The lightbulb went off. I could fill up my cart with ordinary grocery dry goods. “What do I least like to lug home from the supermarket?” I asked myself. Paper towels. Click! Toilet paper. Click! Twenty-pound bags of dog kibble. Click!

A vision developed in front of me as I sat at the keyboard. Everything that’s a pain to buy at the supermarket was going to appear on my doorstep. Free delivery, and at purchase prices marginally lower than what I normally pay.

And that’s where the guilt kicked in. I know ordering from Amazon has its ethical drawbacks. Avoiding state sales tax means I’m not helping to build Massachusetts infrastructure. Having a truck deliver grocery items rather than taking them home in my Prius increases our carbon footprint. And it’s not like I want my local Market Basket to go out of business. Not at all.

I gave it some more thought. It was just a one-time event, but already I was finding the idea of never again unloading bulk paper products or heavy dog food bags from the car tantalizing. Was I really willing to take on the ethical implications of this choice?

It was a powerful reminder that just about every decision we make comes with costs and benefits. The thought of having these items delivered to my door made me happy. But was I willing to use that sense of good cheer and the extra time it earned me to do something really positive and productive to benefit the world? If so, it was a fair trade-off. But if I didn’t make a conscious effort to somehow compensate for my decision, it was harder to justify.

So I’ll try to think of a way to “pay back” the time and freedom that having paper towels and toilet paper delivered to my door will gain me. I’ll try not to squander the extra time or take it for granted.

I’m sure I’ll still make plenty of visits to our local supermarkets to buy food. I’m not ready to go so far as to order edible groceries on line yet. But it’s definitely a quandary to which I need to devote a little bit more thought. And with the mental space I freed up by not having to shop for paper products this month, that’s what I’ll try to do.

Seven steps to stress-free; one step to joy

Amazon.com thinks it knows what I should read. And so it regularly gives me recommendations. I understand where these recommendations come from – most of the time. They come from an algorithm that relates books I’ve not purchased to books I have purchased, or at least viewed. Or else it makes connections based on gifts I’ve ordered for other people that have no relation to my own interests at all: for example, three years ago I bought my brother-in-law a home-brewing kit and I’m still getting recommendations from Amazon that I buy “Make Moonshine by Midnight” and similar quick-help guides to homemade spirits. My son likes fantasy fiction, so plenty of covers featuring dragons and knights march across my Amazon home page. And, like a lot of people, I took a quick peek last week to see what all the fuss over Amazon’s suddenly questionable sales standards involved, so I will apparently be getting recommendations for how-to books that, if the instructions within were followed, would probably land me in jail.

But sometimes I’ll see a recommendation that is neither quite so off-the-wall as the moonshine handbooks nor quite so obviously targeted as a new novel by a writer whose last book I bought. And then I just look at the title and say, “You think I should read that? Yeah, maybe. I suppose it might make sense…”

This was the case when earlier this week Amazon’s recommendation for me was “Addicted to Stress: A Woman's 7 Step Program to Reclaim Joy and Spontaneity In Life.”

“Addicted to stress?” I mused, puzzled. “I’m not addicted to stress. I’m not even that stressed.” Sure, I have plenty of plates to spin at once, from work assignments to the kids’ activities to volunteer tasks to household upkeep to planning for the upcoming holidays. But stressed? Not overly. And, moreover, addicted to stress? I don’t think so.

Yet the title made me wonder. Seven steps to reclaim joy and spontaneity in life? On the one hand, that sounded like a lot of meticulously prescribed steps in order to reach spontaneity. (Follow all of these steps but then forget you ever followed them, because the important thing is to reach this state without trying.) On the other hand, joy and spontaneity in life? Seven steps seems like a rather small price to pay for that desirable outcome.

I couldn’t quite decide whether I was truly stressed or just busy, and I couldn’t decide whether I was lacking joy and spontaneity or, like most people, just have a few unsatisfied wishes and a few unmet goals. Then I received my “Word for the Day” email from an organization called A Network for Grateful Living. This isn’t really a word in the sense of a vocabulary word; it’s a quote. And on that particular day the quote was this: “O how I laugh when I think of my vague indefinite riches. No run on my bank can drain it, for my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.”

That’s by Henry David Thoreau. He did not use the word stress. He did not suggest seven steps. Just as he went to the woods to live deliberately, he made joy a simple thing too: “my wealth is not possession but enjoyment.” Somehow that quote told me I didn’t need seven steps, or a book, to find my joy. I just needed to remember these essential words from Thoreau: joy, the concept as well as the word itself, is to be found inside of enjoyment. Remembering to take pleasure in all we have, rather than stressing out about all we need to do, is the best stress-reliever we will ever find. No seven steps. No steps at all. Just remembering to be joyful is joy enough, and I was so glad to be reminded of these words at just that moment.