"I can afford it"

Perhaps you can. Not everyone who buys for the lift is in trouble with money, and I'd be inventing a crisis if I told you otherwise. If sixty-eight pounds a week disappears from your account without a ripple, the arguments about debt and cushions don't apply to you, and you can ignore them.

This objection deserves a straight answer, because it's the one that lets a comfortable person wave the whole book away. My answer is that money was never the main cost. It's only the easiest one to count.

The main cost is the one from chapter 6. The evening needed something and got a bag. That's as true on a large salary as on a small one. A well-paid person who's lonely on a Tuesday is as lonely after the purchase as a badly paid one, and both have now used up the evening. Being able to afford it makes it easier to go on not noticing, because nothing ever forces the question. No statement arrives that makes you stop and look. So the habit can run for twenty years.

The second cost is the one "I can afford it" is designed to hide, which is the total. The phrase is always about one purchase, and one purchase is always affordable, which is why the phrase never fails. Nobody ever says "I can afford all of them" at the checkout.

So do the sum once. Go back to the count you made after chapter 1, or make it now over the last three months. Add up everything that wasn't a planned purchase, then multiply by four. You're not doing this to tell yourself off. You're doing it because you may never have seen the figure, and you ought to see what you're spending on this.

Then hold that figure against chapter 12. Whatever the number is, it would also buy something from the list of purchases that go on paying. It might be the very good chair, a week away with someone you like, or a cleaner for a year of Saturday mornings. Those are all things you like too. The lift purchases don't add up to a bigger pile of nice things. Mostly they've been bought in place of the nicest ones, a bit at a time.

There's one more thing, and I hold it more loosely. "Afford" describes this year. Jobs end and rents rise, and a habit that was harmless at one income can be a real problem at another. It's easier to change while it costs you nothing much than later, when it's the thing you lean on in a crisis. I'm not predicting a crisis for you. I'm only pointing out that a bad year is when the lift will pull hardest.

I should be fair about where this argument stops. Suppose you can afford what you buy, you use it, your evenings are mostly fine, and the top of your wardrobe is clear. Then you don't have the habit this book is about, and you can stop reading with my blessing. The book is for the person who can afford the bag and still, somewhere around the following Tuesday, wonders why they keep doing this.