A week or so ago, I listened to Russ Roberts' interview with Tyler Cowen. At one point during the interview, Tyler talked about "retail therapy":
Go to Amazon.com, look for some CDs, click, buy the CD....Lots of people do this. What is nice about his approach is that he is quite open about it: no guilt, no regrets.
It's genuinely fun. It's fun to do the shopping; it's fun to get the CD.
And "retail therapy" provides utility not just if you are feeling down. Even when you are up, and not in need of a boost, shopping for something, buying it, getting it home, and trying it out — they are all fun activities. For someone to unabashedly admit it and support it is refreshing.
I am certain that retail therapy has at times acted as a form of marital therapy for Ms. Eclectic and me. We always seemed to be able to patch over or work out our differences when we went shopping for something together.
One drawback to retail therapy: what to do with the accumulation of "stuff". Tyler Cowan talks about being ruthless in his discards; I'm not sure I have the will power to do that.
Moving to a smaller home, as we did nearly four years ago, means that we must continually think of ways to get rid of things, though, as we buy more stuff. That was one of the major reasons we made the move. We saw the congestion that had appeared in our parents' homes as they accumulated stuff, and we realized we had to seek out some sort of pre-commitment strategy (i.e. buy a smaller house) to keep from accumulationg too much stuff.* Fortunately, our children and grandchildren have been happy to receive many of our discards, and so have many charities in the area.
*When I apologized to my older son for having accumulated some memorabilia in the attic that he would have to go through when we die, he said, "Well, Dad, here's hoping you go in house fire."