Here’s your ONE drop:
We’ve been told for years that aspirational purchases are failures of self-control. Buy what you need. Live in the present. Be realistic.
Sounds responsible. It’s also psychologically naive.
When people feel themselves shrinking, they don’t just accept it gracefully. They buy things that represent the identity they’re losing.
Psychologists call it symbolic self-completion.
When you can’t actively live a part of your identity, you collect the symbols of it instead. The objects become proof that version of you still exists, even when current circumstances have buried her completely.
The new parent buying concert tickets they’ll never use. The burned-out exec stocking up on hiking gear. The PhD student with twenty unread novels (me, with six dresses still carrying their tags).
These aren’t failures of discipline. They’re acts of resistance.
The “be present, stop wasting money” advice misses the point entirely.
Killing aspiration to match your current brutal reality isn’t wisdom. It’s surrender. And it’s how people disappear inside hard seasons and struggle to find their way back.
Those purchases aren’t about the objects. They’re about maintaining a connection to Future You. The one who has energy. Who goes places. Who exists as more than a logistics coordinator for smaller humans.
Studies on identity threat show the same thing, people cope by protecting a future version of themselves. Even when she feels impossible right now.
The unused gym membership isn’t waste if it keeps you tethered to the belief that this exhaustion isn’t permanent (now, I’m not saying spend yourself into a hole. That’s a different problem, different psychology).
Not every unused purchase is a moral failure. Some are just proof you remember there used to be a version of you that wasn’t this tired.
// Ann