day two

The roots of my hiatus from shopping comes from two places. One is my latest author crush, Jonah Lehrer, who writes at The Frontal Cortex. Go check him out if you haven't already and buy his two books (ironic, no?). The other I'll write about another day.

I recently saw Jonah speak at the Walters Art Museum (Go there too. It's free!) and he talked about what happens in your brain when you shop. The release of dopamine that makes your brain all happy. How that dopamine is minimized if you pay cash - essentially, paying cash takes all the 'high' out of shopping. But paying with a credit card, even the one linked to a checking account, separates the act of buying - a dopamine rush - with the act of paying - the dopamine killer. The brain can't connect the action of buying something new with the charge that shows up on your statement, so you get all of the dopamine reward with none of the cost. Your friends at Visa and the kind vendors at the mall know this stuff.

In his erudite blog, he writes about how that rush is short lived, fueling a return to the mall for more new stuff and more dopamine rush. This idea that "Once we purchase something, we automatically start taking it for granted, and to begin yearning for something new." He says it better and more fully in this Christmas-time post from 2006.