What the evening still needed

Let's say the lift works as advertised. You felt flat at nine and better at half past. Some things are still true at half past.

The email that could be read two ways is still in your inbox. You're as tired as you were, and you still haven't spoken to anyone since lunch. Whatever made the evening flat is where you left it. The lift went over the top of it for an hour.

I need to be careful here, because there's a lazy version of this argument and I don't want to make it. With something like smoking, you can argue that the habit produces the very discomfort it then relieves. Buying isn't like that. The shop didn't move your meeting or write that email. Your bad days come from your life, and a lift purchase doesn't cause them.

What it does is leave things behind that make later evenings a little heavier. None of them is dramatic, but they add up over a year. What follows is my own reasoning, and you can check it against your own experience.

The first is money. Sixty-eight pounds once is nothing much. A lift purchase most weeks is a few thousand pounds a year, and for a lot of households that's the difference between a cushion and no cushion. Money worry is one of the commonest reasons for a flat evening. Fenton-O'Creevy's survey found that impulsive buying went with worse financial outcomes across the whole range of buyers.

The second is the stuff itself. Every object you own has to be stored, moved, cleaned round and eventually got rid of. The top of the wardrobe fills up. A cluttered room is a mild, steady irritant, and the things in it that you never used are small reminders of money gone.

The third is a feeling you may recognise. It's the slight wince when another parcel arrives, or the habit of getting to the door before anyone else does, or the moment of not wanting to look at the total. It isn't strong enough to be called shame. But you don't get that feeling about things you bought on purpose.

There's also a broad research finding nearby that I'll mention with a warning. Helga Dittmar and colleagues pooled 259 samples and found that people who put a high value on money and possessions report somewhat lower well-being. The link is modest. It's a correlation too, so it can't tell us which way the cause runs, and unhappy people may well turn to things. I mention it only because it's the opposite of what you'd expect if things were a dependable route to feeling good.

The bigger cost, I think, is none of these. The evening needed something, and it didn't get it.

It may have needed rest, because you were tired. It may have needed a moan to someone who'd laugh in the right places. Perhaps you'd spent nine hours doing what others asked, and you wanted the feeling of having finished something of your own. Or the next fortnight had nothing in it, and you needed something to look forward to.

Those are four different needs, and buying is a quick general answer to all of them, which is why it's such a tempting one. It's also why it answers none of them well. Twenty-five minutes of looking at bags doesn't rest you. It doesn't connect you to anybody. What you finish is a transaction, and what you look forward to is over on Thursday. The need goes unmet, so it's back next week, and so are you.