Jane Powers on Buy Nothing Day
I do my best to follow my own advice in this column, but I have to admit that I'm feeling a clutch of panic when I contemplate the promise I've made for next Saturday, November 25th. It's something that would not have bothered me a bit 10 or 20 years ago, but now I find it surprisingly disturbing.
So what is it? Quite simply, next Saturday I've pledged to buy nothing. That's all. Just to buy nothing for a single day. But buying things has become so easy: shops are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and so much of the stuff is so cheap that it hardly costs a thought - or any significant portion of one's pay packet. Shopping in the 21st century has become as easy as breathing.
Buy Nothing Day (BND) is an annual event, established in the early 1990s by a Vancouver artist, Ted Dave. It is now promoted by Adbusters Media Foundation in Canada, whose founder, Kalle Lasn, urges us to remember that "over-consumption has ecological consequences". BND takes place on the Friday after Thanksgiving in North America; elsewhere, it falls on the following day (www.adbusters.org/metas/eco/bnd).
It offers us a little pause for thought, an opportunity to turn off the "constant consumer" switch in the brain, and to turn on the "thinking shopper" one.
A 24-hour withdrawal period from automatic purchasing might help us to wade in a bit more carefully in future, and to ask questions such as "Where did this come from?", "Do I need it?" and "Why is it so cheap?" We could even think of alternative ways of acquiring things that don't involve the creation of more and more stuff on our already groaning planet. For instance, sharing and borrowing are reliable ways of fulfilling needs - and of hooking up with friends and neighbours. And the internet now offers several websites for giving and receiving goods (www.freecycle.org, www.jumbletown.ie and www.dublinwaste.ie).
Sometimes, as one of this column's readers, Katie Johnston, has proved, you don't have to look very far. Not so long ago, she kept her two children entertained by resurrecting her own playthings from her parents' attic. "Not only did I save myself a heap of cash, but seeing the old toys again gave me great joy, as indeed it did my friends, who all seemed to have had the same toys, and are hugely amused to see them revived."
There are some things that money can't buy.