I was at my son’s soccer game in Portland when the skies let loose with a healthy barrage of good old Northwest rain. Over the roar of the rain pounding the field, one of the other soccer Dads quipped “how about this weather?” I murmured a joking response about running for shelter. “You know what, I’m going to run to Costco and buy one of those pop up canopies so the team will have a dry place to stand,” he exclaimed. I smiled and nodded “great!” while inside I was cringing at the thought of impulsively spending money to solve a non-urgent problem.
My mind turned to alternatives that wouldn’t involve spending money, creating waste, or using a lot of energy:
- Go next door and borrow a canopy from my neighbor, who uses it only in the summer for camping
- Rent a canopy
- Use the tarp we had on hand with some rope and microphone stands to create a canopy.
- Hand out umbrellas to the team members when they are on the sidelines
- Wait out the rain (which, as it turned out, stopped about an hour later, or half-hour after the brand-new canopy arrived)
- Endure the rain (least popular choice, but hey — these are Oregon kids.)
Sending money for instant convenience is no longer my style, partly due to my own instincts, but also because I have been heartily influenced by my favorite financial blogs, including Early Retirement Extreme and Mister Money Mustache. Those blogs encourage people to try and solve problems without spending. And their reasons are only partly financial — they also have to do with reducing waste and energy consumption, and promoting creativity.
But let me get off my high horse for a minute and tell you about my former self — the one who spent a lot of money on convenient solutions. In fact I’ve had a shopping tic since I was a kid.
My shopping tic
When I was a teenager my stepdad kept a shopping list on our refrigerator, printed in his meticulous penmanship. Every weekend he would leave the house in his green Mercedes 300D, holding a cup of coffee in one hand, and begin making his rounds: hardware store; auto parts store; grocery store; sporting goods store; marine supply store. At each stop he checked an item or two off his list: shoe laces, corrugated wood screws, iron gate latch, 12-gauge bailing wire, window cleaning fluid, half-inch nylon rope, slip-proof mariner’s gloves, Glade air freshener.
It seemed there were endless knickknacks and doodads needed to shore up our crumbling house and automobile collection. And shopping was the weekly ritual that plugged all the holes and shined all the chrome. My stepdad was a great guy, and he was just doing we he had been taught to do. I learned to do the same, and throughout most of my life I was a shopper too. But instead of hardware and household goods, my shopping lists favored music and audio recording gear, ostensibly to further my dreams of becoming a songwriter and composer.
There was a multitude of gadgets and audio whiz-bangs I felt I needed to elevate my music career. But the fact is, most of these gadgets did the opposite: They put me further in debt and distracted me from my work. In addition to guitars and amplifiers, I regularly shopped for pedals, mini-disc recorders, high-fidelity cables and adapters, signal processors, vintage English microphone preamps, compressors, and reverb units. I charged most items on a high-interest credit card that ran a balance of several thousand dollars for years.
Then, one day, I was faced with the ultimate gadget — the gadget that would help end my folly.
The ultimate gadget
It was the late 1990s and Alesis had just released their amazing 8-track digital recorder the ADAT. Every studio was dying to have one, and my small living room studio was no exception. My 8-track reel-to-reel tape recorder seemed antiquated, and I fantasized about the crystal clear tracks I could produce on a new ADAT. After a couple of weeks of back and forth, I finally decided that it wasn’t in the budget. And yet, I couldn’t turn off the daily mind alerts that urged me toward purchasing the $3600 beast on my credit card. My buying tic was too strong for my willpower.
Closer and closer I came to making the purchase. And suddenly, with one small step I backed away from the precipice. I wrote myself a note. In fact, I wrote my self several notes and even made stickers. They all said the same thing “ADAT nope.” I applied the stickers to my gear, to my bathroom mirror, to my bed post. I had one prominent sticker on my Tascam TRS-8 reel-to-reel recorder. It helped remind me that audio production is about more than the gear, it’s about the ears.
I made several more notes and pasted them all around my apartment. The campaign worked. I never bought an ADAT and I kept using my reel-to-reel deck for 20 more years. Even after I began using a computer for recording, my 8-track remained in use in my studio. Twenty-five years later the ADAT has come and gone. But the guy I sold my reel-to-reel recorder to is still using it to make records.
The cure for the shopping tic
My brother and I often talk about the shopping tic, and how when our minds are not otherwise occupied, we’re always shopping for the next thing. That may be simply planning and agitating in our heads, dreaming of the perfect electronic door lock, a mobile phone upgrade, faster internet, new seat covers for our car, or having the gutters cleaned. In a culture dominated by advertising, the shopping tic never goes away entirely. It just has to be mitigated through our own efforts.
The shopping tic occasionally keeps me awake at night, but usually it’s with me throughout the day like a little devil sitting on my shoulder. But now I realize he’s just a tic trying to suck away some of my wealth by saying stuff like:
“You need a 300 mm nikon lens to get those proper soccer shots”
“Wouldn’t it be cozy to have a gas heater on the back patio?”
“A garage door opener would pay for itself in the gas I save idling the car while I open the garage”
Now I know it’s better to stop and take a breath before I spend. Perhaps I’ll Google a few alternatives. In the end, the cure for the shopping tic is a change of mindset toward creativity and problem solving instead of spending.
And if worse comes to worse, I can always write myself a note.