Retail Therapy: Is it really therapy?

There seem to be few places in our cities where we are not continually bombarded by not-so-subtle messages from advertisers who would like to influence the way we think, or to tap into our deepest anxieties.

As an example of this, I recently noticed in passing a poster advertising the benefits of using a well-known national airport. Encouraging us to look forward to our no doubt planned foreign holiday, the message is “This way for … Retail Therapy!”. The meaning is of course that while we look forward to getting to our destination, we can sample the delights of the shops in the airport.

Originally meant to be used tongue-in-cheek, today its meaning of ‘shopping with the primary purpose of improving mood or disposition’ is increasingly used in all seriousness, as an all-too-necessary way to combat today’s multiplying threats to our well-being.

“Treat yourself to a little retail therapy”, we are exhorted. “When I’m sad, shopping helps”, because, after all “shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist”.

Vironika Tugaleva in her book The Art of Talking to Yourself puts ‘retail therapy’ into context: “We grasp for static things—ideas as much as material possessions—desperately trying to control the larger patterns that eat us for breakfast. We yearn for certainty. We run from confusion. Some people engage in retail therapy, buying new things to make themselves feel more secure ... We consume for comfort. We rely on certainty to shield us from the pain of confusion. The truth is staggering, colossal, unfathomable, so we cling to our bite-sized lies.”

Why should retail therapy be seen as a problem, as a mal-adaptive behaviour? Surely it is harmless to wander around the shops for a while, if it helps us feel a bit better about ourselves and the world, right?

The drawbacks are two-fold: one of limited resources which when manufactured and consumed pollute our world; and the other is one of attachment – we become less resilient and secure when we assign so much of our meaning to material possessions.

Professor Ernest Becker, in his 1973 classic The Denial of Death, helps us understand why we engage in retail therapy as a defence. A disguised fear of death – annihilation – is universally present in all humanity, because we are “ultimately helpless and abandoned in a world where we are fated to die.”

The idea of the extinction of the self is terrifying – we will do anything, engage in any activity, if there is a prospect of denying, avoiding or putting off our impending mortality. “[T]he idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity – activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death.”

In modern psychology, two categories of defences are known: proximal, and distal. According to the theory – backed up by experimental evidence – distal defences are more of a background, long-term thing caused by this ever-present fear in the back of our minds without us being consciously aware of it. These distal defences are responsible for things like our attachments to heroes, or to cultural world-views. We invest our desire for immortality in ideas and people outside of our selves, a process of transference.

Proximal defences on the other hand are activated when this ever-present fear of death rises to the surface of our consciousness; it is more of an immediate threat, and requires a dynamic response. We can deny our vulnerability; we can put off the event to an imagined distant future; or we can distract ourselves. Retail therapy, as such, is a distraction defence. While we are shopping, we don’t have to think about death.

Retail therapy is a modern term invented more than a decade after the publication of The Denial of Death. However, the idea of shopping, of acquiring material possessions as a proximal defence, is nothing new at all.

In recent years though reminders of death have been increasingly common and prevalent. Every way we turn our attention, there they are: climate catastrophe; the COVID-19 pandemic; and war close to home.

Unfortunately, attempting to live a normal life by activating our defences just makes the problem worse. Professor Becker again: “Even if the average man lives in a kind of obliviousness of anxiety, it is because he has erected a massive wall of repressions to hide the problem of life and death. ... [A]ll through history it is the ‘normal, average men’ who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget themselves.”

Imagine what would happen if, instead of giving in to the seeming inevitability of the consequences of proximal and distal defences we activate, we instead work hard to normalise reducing and ultimately removing the fear of death?

Abdu’l-Baha, the Son of the Founder of the Baha’i Faith, Baha’u’llah, leaves us in no doubt:

The conception of annihilation is a factor in human degradation, a cause of human debasement and lowliness, a source of human fear and abjection. It has been conducive to the dispersion and weakening of human thought, whereas the realization of existence and continuity has upraised man to sublimity of ideals, established the foundations of human progress and stimulated the development of heavenly virtues. ~ Baha'i Writings

So reducing the fear of death not only causes us to waste fewer resources on luxury goods we don’t really need, and pollute the world we live in less, but the realisation that the ‘I’ continues after death makes us behave better towards each other and indeed all things. In abandoning the fear of death, we build a better civilisation.

For some this realisation in of itself is sufficient; however, for many of us, we would need to appreciate some evidence. One line of evidence is that of the near-death experience. A key impact of having undergone an experience like this – or just simply being exposed to experiencers’ accounts – is that the fear of death is largely removed.

Let’s briefly look at some examples from experiencers’ accounts: “As long as we are afraid of death, we are afraid of life. If we are afraid of dying, we are also afraid of really living.” Or again: “I do not fear death and I am free. It’s the freedom that I find is the most important thing. God freed me of the chains society imposes on us.” Finally, “I wish everyone could experience what it felt like being there. I think a lot of conflict in the world would be eliminated if we all could feel how much we are all connected.”

Maybe next time then we are about to embark on some retail therapy to help us feel better, it would be a good time to work on our latent fears, and remind ourselves that they are illusory.