The parcel on the mat

It's Tuesday, ten past nine in the evening, and you're on the sofa.

The day wasn't terrible. A meeting was moved twice, someone sent a short email that could be read two ways, and dinner was something reheated. You're tired without having done anything you're proud of. You pick up your phone, and one of the things on it is a picture of a weekend bag. It's tan canvas with leather handles, and it costs sixty-eight pounds.

You have no weekend away planned. You look anyway. You read the reviews, and you find two similar bags and compare the pockets. There's an olive version, and for ten minutes the choice between tan and olive is the most interesting thing that has happened to you all day. You pick tan. Your card details are already there, so paying takes one tap. You put the phone down feeling brisker than you did at nine o'clock, like someone who has dealt with something.

On Wednesday an email says the bag has been dispatched, and that's a small pleasure. On Thursday you check the tracking twice at work. When you get home it's on the mat. You open it in the hall. It's a nice bag, and it smells of new canvas. You carry it upstairs and put it on top of the wardrobe. A milk frother from last month is up there too, still in its box.

By the following Tuesday you couldn't say where the bag is without stopping to think. That Tuesday you're on the sofa again, looking at something else.

Nothing here is a disaster. Sixty-eight pounds won't sink most households, and the bag may get used one day. I'm not going to tell you it was a sin. What I'd like you to look at is one odd fact about it. On Monday you didn't want a weekend bag. You hadn't thought about weekend bags in years. If someone had stopped you on Monday and offered you sixty-eight pounds or the bag, you'd have taken the money without a pause.

So the want wasn't about the bag. It turned up on Tuesday evening, along with the tiredness and the two-way email, and it happened to land on a bag. A week earlier it landed on a milk frother.

I'll use a few terms throughout the book. The lift is the rise in mood that comes with wanting, choosing and ordering something. A lift purchase is one made mainly to get that rise, whatever reason you'd give if asked. A planned purchase is one you'd have made anyway, on a good day, because you need or want the thing.

The lift has some habits worth writing down now, because the details matter later.

It arrives fast. A few minutes of browsing will do it. It peaks early, somewhere between choosing and paying, and it has a few small echoes afterwards in the dispatch email and the tracking page. It's tied to a mood you were in before you started, and that mood is nearly always a low or empty one. And it passes itself off as a want for the object. At ten past nine you'd have sworn you wanted that bag.

Here's something to do before the next chapter, and it takes five minutes. Open the order history of whichever shop you use most, or look down last month's bank statement. For each thing you bought that wasn't food or a bill, ask one question. Had I wanted this the day before I bought it? Don't judge the answers. Just count them.

I can't tell you what your count will be. I'd guess it splits more evenly than you expect, and that the things you hadn't wanted the day before are the ones you've thought about least since.