Impulsivity and the City

One thing I have always loved about living in London is the sense of all-hours, unlimited possibility: that there is always a corner shop open, that there is always somebody up and awake and active, that somewhere the lights are always on, has always felt to me a lot like freedom.

Freedom, maybe, if we are to think of freedom as unfettered, all-hours access to Tony’s Chocolonely. But freedom is an interesting concept when it comes to consumption, and when you take into account the many invisible drivers behind the desire to consume: boredom, loneliness, the feeling that something is missing, the enormous influence, of course, of marketing that manipulates all of these drivers into the impulse to purchase. In such cases, the two categories if impulsive choice and free choice seem to blur. Plenty of times, I could be spending money on things I don’t really want or need because I want to make myself feel better about or even erase a feeling of powerlessness or maybe purposelessness — consumption, particularly the impulsive kind, can simply put off the confrontation with such a void. Plenty of other times, it’s not that deep, and this is important to emphasise, because I really do think that guilt is a fairly unproductive emotion when it comes to our very personal patterns of consumption.

But I do think it’s interesting to think about different kinds of freedom, and the tyranny, for example, of too much choice when it comes to deciding how to spend your very limited time and money: of feeling that the decision you have made cannot possibly have been the right decision because there were so many other decisions you could have made and paths you could have taken. This feeling of being constrained or perhaps paralysed by too much choice is amplified by modern urban living and of course by social media, and this is where impulsivity comes in, and that sticky, unresolvable feeling that nothing is ever enough and that you will never be able to close all your browser tabs. So, instead, you keep on consuming. Acting impulsively starts off like freedom but begins quite quickly to feel like something else.

Something I have taken great pleasure in lately is discovering the freedom in constraint. It is a rejection of some of my more impulsive habits of consumption. I am not talking about militant restriction, but just about doing a bit less. Simplifying choices, and making those choices about what I want to eat, wear, and spend my time just a little further in advance and then following through, sometimes regardless of the impulses I might have to override. Making plans and sticking to them feels like a kind of freedom because it is freedom from the million other paths I could take — it frees up energy and time, and it removes me just a little from that persistent feeling that I might have missed something or missed out on something or taken a wrong turn somewhere. Simplifying my choices, making decisions and then sticking to them helps me to trust my own decision processes and stops me from spending so much time looking sideways. It allays just some of the impulsivity that has, for me, started to feel much less like freedom and more like encumbrance, and it opens up a whole different kind of freedom — slower, and much more plentiful.

Sending you much love, Rosie xxx