Vivat Libertas

I really hate shopping. And not just the got-to-go-grocery-shopping or got-to-get-things-to-fix-up-the-house shopping, but the kind of shopping that girls and women are being socialised to like from younger and younger (and more disturbing) ages - what you might call recreational shopping, if you will. Buying things for the sake of buying things. Consumerism. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth for all sorts of reasons. Even the one kind of recreational shopping I engage in most - buying books - makes me feel a bit guilty and this is one of the reasons I try to avoid bookshops; the other is that I'll just end up rushing in there and buying as many books as my budget allows, or rush in there and think "My, what a crappy selection of books they have!". (I am very much a book snob.) I'll probably be getting weird looks and offhand comments from a lot of people. Not just because - gasp! - I go book shopping more than I shop for clothes, shoes or bags (I think you can ...

Aside from being an anti-capitalist , I'm also an anti-consumerist. People seem to be quite confused about what this entails, or maybe I just live with idiots. It's probably a bit of both, but anyway, I'm going to try and explain why I act the way I do. What's anti-consumerism?  A word I hope I didn't make up, for a start. In a nutshell, I'm against greedily consuming resources I don't actually need. Why are you an anti-consumerist?  Because I don't like taking up resources I don't need when they would be better off in someone else's hands. Because we live in an exploitative capitalist system where pretty much every product is the fruit of somebody else's exploitation, and I for one don't want to exploit people. Because consumerism is not a particularly sustainable practice and I want to reduce the damage I'm doing to this planet. So does that make you a tree-hugging hippie communist?  Maybe. In any case, I don't like hur...