Case study

Suppose a successful businessman – we’ll call him Mike – says he “feels most alive” when nailing down a big business deal. Whenever Mike completes a major business project, he will immediately start working on the next. In fact, he will quickly get rid of the money he’s made on the first deal, so he will have to start working on the next one without delay. Mike is driven by an almost obsessive need to create new challenges constantly—and is utterly incapable of enjoying the fruits of his labors. He describes how work provides continuity and stability in his life. When disruptions occur in his personal life, he immerses himself even further in his work to reestablish his internal sense of order. He remembers that even as a child, when he became upset, she would retreat to his room to engage furiously in his childhood version of “work.”

Mike maintains the lifelong illusion that money will some day equal happiness and self-validation. He lives in continual pursuit of “the big deal,” urgently repeating the slot machine players’ mantra— next time, next time, next time —in an effort to stave off the existential depression that swallows him when he realizes that the next big deal will never arrive.

TEXT 2. SPEND, BABY, SPEND!

Read the text below and discuss the following questions in your group.

1. How are your spending habits different from your parents' spending habits? How about your grandparents?

2. Which is better, shopping alone or shopping with friends? Why do you think so?

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Economic growth is the route to global prosperity. Or is it? The term ‘economic expansion’ suggests something desirable and benevolent, but expansion simply means spending more money.

More spending doesn’t mean that life is getting better. We all know it often means the opposite – greed, deprivation, crime, poverty, pollution. More spending merely feeds our whole economic system, which is based on production and consumption. Unless money keeps circulating, the economy collapses.

As a leading economist put it, consumer societies are ‘in need of need’. We don’t need the things the economy produces as much as the economy needs our sense of need for these things. Why, in our supermarkets, do we have to choose from sixty different kinds of toilet paper and a hundred different breakfast cereals? Need is the miracle that keeps the engines of expansion turning relentlessly. In economics, there is no concept of enough, just a chronic yearning for more. It is a hunger that cannot be satiated.

When people are getting the same message - live to spend, dress to kill, shop...your way to happiness, there will always be some who are unarmoured, without protection against being swallowed whole by some set of ideas that need have no relevance - and to their own self-harm.

A Psychiatric Times survey conducted in December, 2006 revealed that almost 6% of Americans report having the problem often referred to as compulsive buying disorder (CB). Perhaps surprisingly, the percentages for CB were about equal for men and women (5.5% and 6% respectively).

Compulsive shoppers are actively acquiring the items, but they don't care about them after they have them. Women will hang new clothes in the closet, yet never take them out of the bag and never take off the tags. Men will leave the CDs wrapped in plastic and never listen to them.

Earlier research showed that men tend to buy electronic gadgets, tools, books, and compact discs, while women tend to buy clothes, makeup, craft items, and objects for the home.

Like most addictions, compulsive shopping is typically an effort to remedy a depressed or empty feeling, or is driven by an emotional craving for the feeling of connectedness with others. The act of spending changes how we feel, but the actual state of euphoria after the purchase is typically short-lived, and when the discomfort returns, it is sometimes even amplified. The cycle begins again, often escalating to larger purchases, and in time what began as an occasional impulse unfolds into a full-fledged compulsion: Impulsive spending becomes compulsive shopping.