The other evening I cursed as I sorted out some books I didn’t want anymore. This doesn’t sound like a lot of work but if you have a lot of books like me, it is a lot of work. Years ago I cut my books down to 1,000. Now I’m up to over 1,400 again.

“Tsundoku” is the Japanese word for buying books, piling them up at home, and never reading them. According to the Austrian artist and author Julius Deutschbauer, who founded the “Library of Unread Books,” Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” tops the list of unread books. As I really liked Musil’s book “The Confusions of Young Toerless,” I bought “The Man Without Qualities.” I had it sit on my shelf for years and years until I finally donated it. In my defense, I did start reading it but didn’t like how it read, and if I don’t like the writing style, my mind keeps drifting off and I read the same sentence over and over again.

Nina Birkner-Troeger, a researcher on consumerism, distinguishes between “purchasing” and “consuming.” According to her, people like buying things but then don’t consume them. She must have studied my husband. Rick clearly gets a kick out of purchasing things: the kick of looking, selecting, paying, and taking the item with him. But once he possesses the thing, and after perhaps consuming it for a little while, his enthusiasm subsides and something else needs to be purchased.

The social psychologist Arnd Florack says people enjoy shopping because they feel a sense of control and success, and they feel particularly happy when landing a great bargain. Furthermore, shopping is a social activity we can experience with others, while escaping unpleasant thoughts or tasks we don’t want to do. Florack’s findings certainly don’t apply to me. If it’s not books, I find shopping extremely exhausting. In fact, I can’t stand shopping, especially for clothes and shoes. I really needed warm shoes for the winter, and when Rick and I visited Lancaster, I forced myself to try some on. I was lucky to find four pairs, which will spare me from having to shop for shoes again in the next few years.

Rick, I’m sure, only shops with me because I carry his bags. In contrast to me, he absolutely loves trying on shoes and clothes and spending money on them, as long as they are “on sale,” and I can tell he doesn’t like me constantly asking him,”Can you really see yourself using this? Do you have a place to put it? Doesn’t this look like the shirt you already have?” While my questions certainly discourage him from buying as much, he still has more clothes and shoes than I’ve ever owned in my entire life. The things I own fit into only one room. The rest of our apartment is filled with his stuff. Rick sometimes says we need to get a house, and my response always is, “No! A house would just mean you buying more things!”

Every time I walk into a huge store, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, the massive amount of products amazes me. On the other hand, this is just one store of numerous others around the globe, filled with masses and masses of products people think they need but really don’t. And this is how our economy works: producing and selling as many things as possible. Businesses are indeed incredibly clever when it comes to making us think we can’t live without those items. But by producing these masses of products, a lot of resources are unnecessarily wasted as the purchases sit in people’s homes without being consumed. We are creatures of habit, as Birkner-Troeger explains, and buying something new means to incorporate it into our life. If the new product, however, is more time-consuming or complicated to use and requires a change in our habits, we probably won’t use it.

Florack says we imagine ourselves using the item we buy but are actually bad at predicting what we really need and what will make us happy. This is exactly how Rick works. He has this image of us playing games, even though he doesn’t like playing games. Typically, when he wants to buy a game, I remind him we most likely won’t play it, and he responds, “No, we will. It’s going to be sooo nice.” We’ve bought a number of games over the years and hardly ever play them. Back in October of 2024 we bought the last one. It’s called “Pandemic.” Rick wanted a cooperative game. I removed the plastic wrapping in January of 2025 and looked at the manual for about five minutes. For the past seven months or so I’ve been using it as a kind of “stand” when I sit with the laptop on my lap.

Last year Rick suddenly declared not to shop for a year. “Good luck with that!” I said and grinned big time. Surprisingly, it went really well for a few months. And I do mean really well. In fact, I almost felt guilty I’d doubted him. Until his will cracked and he went right back into shopping mode. Of course he also made up for all the months he’d missed. Well, there’s always hope, right? I’m sure at some point he’ll renew his resolution. We’ll see how far he gets then.

Dr. Daniela Ribitsch, a native of Austria, is a resident of Lock Haven.