Bought Another Pile of Stuff You Don't Need on Singles' Day? Why We Shop for No Reason, and How to Stop | Hack Your Life

Buy what you need, not what's cheap

You bought it, it arrived — does it feel good?

Singles' Day is over and Black Friday is coming. After that there's Double 12, the Christmas shopping season, Chinese New Year — a whole line of shopping festivals waiting their turn.

We've grown used to stockpiling our shopping needs and then "splurging" when a festival arrives. According to figures from the China E-Commerce Research Center, transactions across the whole internet on Singles' Day 2017 reached 253.97 billion yuan.

Don't be shocked by the number on next month's credit card bill, even though a lot of what you bought may hardly get used — or was bought in quantities that will last you into the year after next.

Loving to shop is a human instinct. Several studies show that shopping, like good food, makes the brain release dopamine, and dopamine eases the bad feelings inside, which traps us in a loop: the more we buy, the more hooked we get.

The instinct took shape as far back as the Paleolithic. Research by Ryan Howell, associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University, holds that for ancestors who lived by hunting and gathering, any scarce thing that helped you survive was worth hoarding.

The human groups that lacked the habit have probably long since vanished in one disaster or another.

Today's world is nowhere near that dangerous — you won't starve because you stockpiled one fewer box of food on Singles' Day. But a habit carried through hundreds of generations is not easy to change.

And when the package finally shows up, you probably won't be all that happy either.

A study in the Journal of Consumer Research analyzed the spending behavior of 2,500 consumers over six years. Eighty-five percent of them said that when shopping is only about showing off, or about filling something empty inside, the pleasure drops sharply and all you gain is more boredom — and boredom and emptiness make you want still more things to fill the gap.

Psychologists call this state the "loneliness loop," and there is even a mental disorder named for it: oniomania, shopping addiction.

German psychologists Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuler were studying "shopping addiction" as early as the start of the 20th century, and wrote it into the psychology textbooks. By the American Journal of Psychiatry's estimate, about 5.8% of Americans can't fill the emptiness that follows a shopping trip, and the number is still climbing.

So let's talk about how to fill that emptiness, and break the loneliness loop.

Year-end mega-sales won't save you money, and no merchant wants to save it for you

Can you really buy cheap during a big sale? The discounts are real, but buy too much and you almost certainly won't come out ahead.

The deepest discounts obviously don't sit on the most desirable products. They usually sit on things that have been on sale a long time and are being cleared out of the warehouse, or on products that, because of how they were positioned, never appealed much to buyers in the first place — the iPhone 8 Plus, marked down to 5,388 yuan for this year's Singles' Day, for example.

Because of the discount, you're more likely to end up with a product that isn't the right one for you.

Not every discount is real, either — look at the "one yuan" Leica lens offer this year.

More often, a handful of cheap items you have to stay up past midnight to grab pull you in, and then the whole store or mall starts to feel cheap. Whatever bargain you did find gets cancelled out.

The scramble for deals also gives you the pleasure of buying, which makes you likelier to join the next sale. This year, Black Friday cross-border shopping came two weeks after Singles' Day. Two weeks after that, Double 12. Two weeks after that, you're getting ready to spend for New Year's.

Merchants, banks and payment companies like Alipay have all worked out ways to speed up the moment of payment, so that in a sale you can pay faster and spend more easily.

Credit cards turned counting out bills into pressing a few numbers. Mobile payment, led by WeChat Pay and Alipay, made it simpler still.

According to a recent report from the business research firm Bain & Co., among people earning about the same, mobile-payment users spend on average more than twice as much as people who don't use it.

Prepaid top-ups work the same way: money loaded onto a membership card doesn't get counted as carefully as cash. It's why the hair salon keeps pressing you to buy a card for the discount — once you're swiping it, the service being upsold doesn't feel expensive.

Spend enough and the bank will tell you that you can pay it off in interest-free or low-interest installments. The cash-loan and installment-credit products from the big internet companies — Ant Group's Jiebei and Huabei, JD.com's Baitiao — pull users in with phrases like "daily interest" and "0.x% per installment."

By our own calculations, the real annualized rates on these services run from 14.5% to 42%. Once you work the interest out, it is not a small expense.

Finally, even if you do get a real bargain in a sale, or really do use an interest-free installment coupon, prepaid balances carry risks of their own: the little shop closes, you stop liking the brand, or the ride-hailing or bike-share company goes under and won't even return your deposit. Years of careful bargain-hunting can go with it.

Saving money has a time cost

Chasing savings, we tend to ignore what the chase costs. Scrolling through bargain feeds and comparing prices takes an enormous amount of time.

Once you're gripped by the need to pay the lowest price, the list of things to do keeps growing. First you have to find a reliable price-comparison app or browser extension to see who on the platform sells it cheapest, and then you have to look up the lowest price the item has ever reached.

Work out your pre-tax hourly wage, and the trade usually isn't worth it.

Good prices don't come along often, so glancing at them now and then becomes a daily habit. You never find the thing you wanted; instead you quietly buy a pile of cheap things and make do with them.

Games work the same way. Paying for a game outright is more likely to be fun than playing a free one, because a paid game's logic is to sell you something you'll enjoy playing, and the design starts from that goal.

A free game makes it easy to start playing, then spends the rest of the time finding ways to get money out of you. Its ultimate design goal is your payment, not your enjoyment. There's a line game designers like to quote: "In a free game, the free players are the content provided to the paying players."

If you don't want to pay, the likely outcome is that you spend a huge amount of time to get the same items and the same experience.

Which brings us to the question of what should replace shopping that has no point.

The dopamine you get from shopping, you can also get from exercise

The rush of shopping is really the production of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that carries excitement. Dopamine, plus serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins, are the four substances that produce our sense of well-being.

What dopamine mainly does is hold a shopper's anticipation of the delivery at a high level, because you never know whether the courier will turn up in the next second. Once the waiting ends, the dopamine drops off too.

Buying things over and over isn't the only route to dopamine. Foods like coffee and bananas, combined with exercise like jogging or lifting dumbbells, will get you more of it, and that is currently the best way to get it. The foods on their own can promote the production of tyrosine and dopamine, but it takes exercise to make that happen.

When you're working out, more of your energy goes into the details of the movement and your attention moves off everything else. At the same time, as your heart rate rises and hormone release increases, the stress you feel falls to a lower level.

Exercise counts as the best and most efficient way to raise dopamine production because better results promote more dopamine, more dopamine pushes you to exercise more, and more exercise promotes more dopamine again — a loop that runs in your favor.

Put the same logic on shopping and there are two likely outcomes. Either you buy more and more useless things and each one stirs less dopamine than the last, or you buy better and more expensive things — and whether that's good news depends on what you can afford.

Take up exercise for the long run — jogging, say — and you can also build a steadier kind of excitement. Research at the University of Arizona puts this down to more endorphins; other research links it to more cannabinoids, which help produce relaxation and pleasure.

If you want more endorphins, of course, there's an easier route: find something that makes you happy. Smiling promotes endorphins too.

The happiness of shopping disappears fast; travel holds up better

After you finally grab the thing you wanted on Singles' Day, how happy does it make you?

Research by Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University in New York who has spent years on the relationship between money and happiness, shows that the pleasure of buying things falls far short of the pleasure of a wholly new experience.

That experience can be taking leave and travelling, changing your surroundings, or trying something unfamiliar in a city you know well.

Both kinds of happiness are bought with money, but the happiness of an experience lasts longer than the happiness of a purchase. The reason, Gilovich says, is adaptation.

Consider the thing you fought for on Singles' Day: staying up to midnight, waiting at the checkout, finally getting the payment through, finally owning what you wanted. At the delivery speeds e-commerce platforms now advertise, the courier is at your door the next day, and the thing you'd been looking forward to quickly becomes part of ordinary life.

The first pleasure of the purchase fades with time, and your satisfaction with it falls along with it.

Travelling somewhere, or going to a concert, is different. Living for a while in a way that isn't your daily routine, and learning about other places and cultures, keeps the mind moving.

Barring some unusual mishap, travel generally makes most people happy.

A study from Hong Kong Polytechnic University found that when interesting things happen on a trip and the senses are fully engaged while they happen, the benefits are beyond counting — happiness among them.

We also remember the happy parts. We adjust the filter and take the photo, shoot a short video, post it to Moments and Weibo, and collect a rising count of likes. What stays in the photo album is a good memory too, and looking back at it feels satisfying.

If you go through all this with friends, or make new friends along the way, the memories can be shared, and that binds people more closely.

But if you and someone else own the same phone or the same jacket, that bond barely forms. Unless you're writing a professional review, you won't share much about a phone after you buy it.

Same screen, different text: books calm you more than product listings

Physically speaking, the brain is the organ that senses emotion. To fill the emptiness and make yourself satisfied, even happy, what you have to do is satisfy your brain.

Reading is the cheapest way to do it — and specifically reading good books, which keeps you thinking and lets you explore the pleasure of thought.

Research at Stanford University found that reading a lot, with full attention, stimulates several regions of the brain at once, and in the end strengthens both rational thinking and emotional experience.

The researchers had volunteers first leaf casually through a Jane Austen novel, then switch to calm, focused reading. Watching their brains, they saw blood flow to different regions rise noticeably during the focused reading. Activity in those regions can raise the sense of pleasure.

Reading also does more than films or TV series to improve our self-control and our ability to understand other people.

In October 2016, Science published a paper in which the psychologist David Comer Kidd had 1,000 participants read randomly assigned texts in groups, or else watch TV series and films. The participants who read Dickens, Aubrit and others showed a greater ability to read other people's emotions in later long-term tests.

Explained through Maslow's hierarchy of needs, reading serves the need for self-actualization, the one at the very top of the pyramid, and what it produces is worth far more than the emptiness left by impulse spending, or by time.

You may be thinking of a bestseller you can finish in two hours, or a web novel on Qidian. Those can indeed fill the emptiness of watching the sky darken and the hours go by — but two hours later a fresh emptiness arrives: why did I spend the time on garbage like that?

If you're going to read, read good books.

What makes a book good is a subjective matter, but whatever the type — reference, novel, philosophy, anything else — a good book either bears on your work or your field and helps you there, or it widens the edges of your thinking and lets you explore further out. That is the pleasure of thought that reading brings.

We won't rehearse the case for reading good books again, but we will insist on one thing: don't read "secondhand books."

There are plenty of "secondhand reading" services on the market now. They take someone else's impressions of a book and sell them, and manufacture the illusion that "you have no time to read, so we'll save it for you."

Pouring ten of those secondhand versions into your head is unlikely to feel as good as reading and understanding one good book yourself. Your time is already shredded into fragments; reading is training that lets you concentrate.

As Wang Xiaobo put it, knowledge can bring happiness, but compress it into a pill and force it down and the pleasure is gone.

Reading is at bottom a private thing, and most of the world's variety is created by people who think hard. To discuss something and find a newer, better explanation for it — that pleasure of thought is satisfying in itself.

QDaily runs a year-end book list every year, and every one of them collects thousands of likes. How many people actually read one to the end, we have no idea.

In short: read something, rather than reading only book lists or listening to "secondhand" summaries and buying yourself the illusion that you've read the book.

6 ways to make yourself hesitate before you buy, buy, buy

In 2003, the Illinois Attorney General's office issued a notice during the Christmas season warning shoppers not to pick an item up casually, in case they couldn't resist buying it. It may be one of the odder public notices ever issued, but research from Yale's psychology department shows that touching a thing does increase the wish to own it — and nobody wants to lose what they own.

Lowering your own appetite for shopping takes practice. Here are 6 principles to help you build a sane approach to spending:

List what you actually need, instead of buying with no aim

Write down what you need from the supermarket on a note on the fridge. Sorting through what's already in the house, regularly, cuts the odds of buying duplicates and shows you what you really need.

For a new thing you like the look of, the best advice is to buy only what you'd pay full price for without the discount. If the one reason you want it is that it's cheap and a good deal, don't buy it. More often than not, a purchase like that only adds to the emptiness you feel when it arrives.

Here's a simple method: sort what you want into four grades — "need," "sometimes need," "just want," and "junk." Take the things you want at face value and put them in a category.

Then forget the first and the fourth, because for those you already know without hesitating whether to buy or drop it. Ask yourself three questions only about the "sometimes need" and "just want" lists:

• When did I last use something like this?
• When will I use it again?
• Will this thing really make me happy?

Take the color out of your shopping apps

Malls are always brightly decorated, and the discount signs are always red or orange. Even the shopping apps on your phone tend to use warm tones and busy color schemes to prod you into buying.

You can try making that interference disappear. iOS has a built-in feature that turns the whole screen gray. Go into iOS Settings and, in the last option under Accessibility, set Color Filters as a shortcut.

Then, while you're browsing Taobao, you only have to press the Home button three times — or the side button three times on an iPhone X — to switch it on.

Now go into Taobao and look: with the color gone, isn't it much harder for Taobao to stir the urge to buy?

Don't decide to buy at night; it'll be clearer when you think it over by day

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman described in detail in one of his books how cognitive overload and physical fatigue can seriously weaken our self-control.

At night people are usually more tired, emotional thinking is let loose, and shopping turns impulsive.

Tired thinking is also easily swayed by advertising or marketing into spending more. Your rational mind won't be there to tell you that what's being promoted doesn't deserve your trust.

So close the shopping cart and get a proper night's sleep. If you still want it when you wake up, don't hesitate.

Don't hesitate over returns either

If you impulse-bought a pile of things you don't need, don't sink into gloom once the excitement wears off. Almost anything you buy can be returned.

The thing to do is start returning them. As consumer protection law has improved, returns have become easier and easier. Check the parcel when it arrives — the return slip or a free-shipping coupon may already be inside.

You don't even have to spend time filling out a shipping form; JD.com offers doorstep pickup and other services to make returning easier. So if you bought something by mistake and you now count it as "junk," there's no reason to hesitate.

To calm down quickly, meditation also works

Wang Xiaobo describes a scene in The Pleasure of Thinking: "At dusk, you sit under the eaves watching the sky slowly darken, lonely and desolate inside, feeling your life being taken from you."

Unlike in Wang Xiaobo's day, if you really could sit under the eaves for a whole day now and quietly watch the sky go dark, you probably wouldn't need to worry about post-shopping emptiness at all.

To settle yourself quickly and steady your mood, mindfulness meditation works well. All you need is a quiet, comfortable place to sit or simply lie down, to relax, and to pay attention to your breathing — that's enough to complete this kind of training for the mind.

White-noise tools — Noisli, Tide, Ruixin Lingxi — are all in the app stores, and WeChat mini programs like Xiaoshuimian let you drop into a meditative setting at any time.

Turning inward also lets you look harder at your own needs, and see what you actually want.

Plan a budget and you'll find you have less to shop with than you thought

Planning a budget is necessary. When your income is high, you will very probably spend more.

After an overseas trip over the National Day holiday, or after paying three months' rent, you may feel broke; a month later you feel you can go back to buying, buying, buying. So you overspend again for a month or two, and soon the next quarter's rent, Valentine's Day, Chinese New Year and the rest come round again.

Spread those costs across a whole year's income and you actually need to be putting money aside every month for the big items. If you're not normally aware that this spending exists, the result is a credit card balance that keeps growing.

Spread the quarterly rent and the annual big-ticket costs evenly across the months, and you'll have a clearer view of the money you really have. That's what a budget is for.

Planning a budget is far easier than keeping accounts for months on end, and it at least gives you a rough grip on your finances. YNAB (You Need A Budget) is the app we'd recommend: its budgeting is flexible and powerful, and it lets you adjust the budget as your monthly income changes, so you can spend rationally.

The point of keeping accounts isn't to frighten yourself with spending charts; it should be to set the budget before you spend, and control the spending that way.

The fewer times you stare at a credit card statement racking your brain over where the money went, the better — right?