I Keep Buying Things, but I'm Still Unhappy

When I was in high school, I put a lot of my hopes and dreams into shopping. I was a teenage girl, after-all. At least, that’s what the world told me I was. So, I went along with it and did my best to be the best teenage girl I could be.

According to movies, shows, and magazines, teenage girls LOVE to shop. They love to go to the mall and buy things. They love clothes and shoes and makeup. They love little trinkets and decorations. When a teenage girl is happy, she shops. When a teenage girl is sad, she shops until she’s happy again.

When I was 14 and a freshman in high school, the cute and cool 16 year old junior I was dating broke up with me. I was frustrated and upset. I went to the mall with another teenage girl to do a little “retail therapy.” I bought new shoes, a mini skirt, and a scratchy, tight top. I showed up to school the next day looking hotter than ever in my new material goods. My now ex-boyfriend’s eyes got wide when he saw me and he told me I looked good. And that was that. He didn’t want me back and I was left feeling exposed and vulnerable in my new outfit in the busy halls of the high school.

This was my first clue into the false claims of advertising. Shopping had seemed to help at first. Buying that new outfit made me feel like I was about to buy my way back into the life that I wanted, but it didn’t work. I had felt a lack and I had tried to fill it by buying products, because that’s what every single advertisement tells us to do. But it didn’t work. The lack was still there, made even more uncomfortable by the fact that the products hadn’t cured me.

Maybe I had just bought the wrong products? Next time, I would find products that actually filled the hole in my soul. This was my fault for making a bad shopping decision and wasting money. Next time, I would be more discerning and I would be successful. I was dubious, but I kept trying because no other options were presented to me.

It never worked.

On my spiritual journey, I got a deeper insight for the failures of capitalism and materialism. I learned that attachment to the physical reality creates suffering, while connection to the spiritual reality creates enlightenment.

The material reality is temporal and in an ever-changing state. Things in the material reality disintegrate, break, transform, and die.

The spiritual realm is immortal and eternal. Things in the spiritual reality reside in a plane of stability and fulfillment at all times.

Understanding this truth is very helpful for disengaging from the material reality. We still LIVE in a 3D plane, so we still have to interact with the material realm. The sweet spot is being able to interact in the 3rd dimensional reality without getting attached to it, but that’s easier said than done.

The strange fever-dream of capitalism has predicated our entire functioning society on the need to convince consumers to buy products. It is difficult to exist on Earth and not occasionally get distracted by the strange systems by which it operates.

One way that we can easily get bamboozled is by products that are out-of-reach. Sometimes this can be a product that is no longer being manufactured, or has a limited quantity, but usually it’s because it has a price that is too high for us to easily afford.

With products that are out-of-reach, we easily fall into that age-old trap of thinking, “This product would definitely be what I need, if only I could afford it.”

This belief plays into our insecurities of not being good enough to deserve what we want and need. When we don’t have enough money to afford something we want, we fully take the blame and feel that money is the only thing standing in the way of our happiness.

We may become resentful at ourselves, or our parents for not providing enough money for us to get what we want, or we may become resentful towards society for keeping us restricted from our happiness. Maybe in your resentment, you silently vow that you WILL make enough money to buy the thing, and prove your worth, and then finally be happy. You may not even be aware that all of these feelings are happening when you are confronted with something that you wanted that was too expensive, but if you take time to sit with your feelings, you will see underneath a whole world of tumultuous emotions.

When you Get Rich Quick, you realize that you can have anything that your soul truly wants. Nothing that is meant for your highest growth is out of your reach as long as you let go of attachment for how it shows up and simply let the universe bring it to you. You realize that the journey of wanting and getting is just an ego ride, a rollercoaster of attachment and expansion.

As you start to acquire the things which felt so far out of reach before, you will likely feel a profound sense of emptiness. If there is an item, relationship, or a lifestyle that you have spent your lifetime yearning for, it may fall flat in its ability to fulfill you compared to the fantasy you built up around not being able to have it. You may have been wanting it out of a place of insecurity. It may have been something you desired merely because you couldn’t have access to it.

After the empty feeling comes the shame. Someone must be to blame for this emptiness - it must be… me! And then the self-loathing and insecurity might come in. Perhaps you will choose to beat yourself up for mismanaging your money or not doing enough research on the product. Perhaps you will find other reasons, reverberations of your parents voices in your subconscious playing out as a form of punishment.

Stop this cycle by expanding the vessel of awareness to hold every emotion. See the entire journey and love it for what it is in this moment in time. We live in an ABUNDANT universe. There are no wrong decisions, only decisions you make.

Remember to detach from the items in your shopping cart as potential solutions to your soul’s desires. Physical reality is here as a playground for us to explore and nature will always be better than products.

The images in this newsletter were made using AI called Dream by WOMBO app.