"At the end of 2016, our country had swung in the direction of gold leaf, an ecstatic celebration of unfeeling billionaire-dom that kept me up at night."

"I couldn’t settle down to read or write, and in my anxiety I found myself mindlessly scrolling through two particular shopping websites, numbing my fears with pictures of shoes, clothes, purses and jewelry. I was trying to distract myself, but the distraction left me feeling worse, the way a late night in a bar smoking Winstons and drinking gin leaves you feeling worse. The unspoken question of shopping is 'What do I need?' What I needed was less."

From "My Year of No Shopping" by Ann Patchett, who gave up shopping for a year and lived to tell the tale (in the NYT). She didn't give up food shopping — or anything-in-the-grocery-store shopping — or shopping for anything she had but ran out of — like shampoo, batteries, and toner cartridges. And she didn't give up buying books, because... books!

I once did something like this, but it wasn't out of some politically motivated desire for psychological renewal. It was the challenge of sending 2 sons through college. My incantation was: Don't buy anything. I found that surprisingly easy to follow. When you reach a certain age, you probably don't need anything (putting aside the things you regularly consume, like food, toiletries, and cleaning supplies). Most of what you're buying is just things you're taking the trouble to think about wanting. You go into a clothing store and look around to find something to want or to feel that you need.

I like that Patchett's last paragraph calls attention to something particularly stupid about what's on the racks in the stores this year: Clothes with the shoulders cut out. It really is best not to go to the insane mental place where you feel you want that. Just project yourself forward into next year when, it's easy to see, you'll think you were crazy to have believed that was even wearable.