It's just an obsession

I've just been watching a thing on TV about shopping habits and how our brains work. It talked about the creative side of our brain picturing how the item would look and what we would do with it once purchased, and the rational side evaluating how much we really need or can afford the thing in the first place.

They've got this girl with a serious shoe-buying problem wired up to see what her brain does as she goes into a shop with shoes in it. This graph on the computer goes haywire - the creative bit is working overtime, and within seconds she's bought the shoes.

She doesn't need them. She has about 300 pairs.

I sat there knowing exactly what was going through her head, because I do it myself all the time. I see a jacket, for instance, and within an hour I've already decided that I don't know how I exist without it. Even though I've quite comfortably managed my entire life without it. From that point on, the thought of that jacket consumes me, to the point that I can't think of anything else. Even eating.

Then I'm off, on a virtual tour of the world. Trekking through Amazon rainforests, marching across the frozen wastes of Antarctica. That jacket does more miles with me in my imagination than it ever manages in real life.

In the end, I buy the thing as much to clear the clouds of infatuation from my thought processes as through the need of ownership.

And that's how it goes on. I don't know if I will ever stop this obsession with clothes, but on the bright side, I think I look pretty sharp.

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