Toward Ecosophy

For quite a few years now, the Friday after Thanksgiving has been celebrated by some of us as Buy Nothing Day.  We celebrate it -- quel choc! -- by buying nothing that day. It's an opportunity to step outside of the manufactured frenzy of the consumer economy and, just for once, kick back and do something that doesn't involve money changing hands. It's also a way to take a little of the pressure off the people who have to work shifts as store clerks on the notional first day of the Greedmas -- er, Christmas -- season, and can usually count on seeing crowds of foam-flecked consumers shed their last scraps of human decency in the frantic struggle to get the latest shoddy and heavily marketed gewgaw, fresh off the boat from some overseas hellhole where sweatshops churn out plastic crap to make billionaires richer at your expense. 

(Of course those who celebrate any of the many religious holidays around the beginning of winter -- very much including Christians, whose holy day got hijacked by the mass marketers of Greedmas -- may like to use the break to reflect on what the season's really about. That's up to each of us, however.)

I keep Buy Nothing Day strictly -- that is to say, I won't be buying anything today. No, I don't expect that to have any effect on the consumer economy or society as a whole; it's simply a personal celebration and an act of personal intention. Your choices are yours to make, dear reader, but I hope that some of you will join me in having a happy Buy Nothing Day today.