SHOP SOILED

    Depressive euphoria brought about by a failure to find satisfaction from shopping.
        One of the signal achievements of mass marketing has been to convince consumers that pleasure:
a) comes in the form of goods and services and can be had for ready money;
b) is perishable and therefore demands repeat purchases if one is to live fully and die content.
        Nothing short of retirement to a desert island  could shield us from the enticing prospect of finding joy off the shelf in Oxford Street or the rue St Honoré, in Maceys or The Bay, in the Mercado Modelo or  Liverpool, at the Cattle Fair in Pushkar, or in the street market of Lomé1. Some can aspire to happiness bespoke: a suit from Saville Row, a designer chalet in the Alps, servants in livery.
        Only the impoverished - a mere  two-thirds of the world - must make do with hope and limit their material desires to the needs of survival. Since their funds don’t stretch to happiness, they must derive their satisfactions from family and communal interchange, from the earth’s fecundity, from rain and sunshine, from crops they have sown, cloth they have woven, tools they have made, stories they have swapped,  books borrowed and loaned, help given and received, prayers offered and - occasionally - answered; from God’s presence in the landscape; from the murmur of flowing waters and the breathing of the wind.2 
        If the development agencies have their way, a time will come when the poor  will pass from subsistence to discretionary spending and thus be able to exchange simple, cost-free joys for the sophisticated pleasures of regular shopping-sprees at their favourite malls. They will thereby join the happy ranks of those who... “getting and spending, lay waste their powers.”3 Our middle classes spend much of their lives at it, ever on the lookout for a bargain and in a state of heightened sensitivity to the price of things.
        A few - the shop-soiled - become disillusioned, ceasing to find pleasure either in shopping  or in adding to their material possessions. They are rumoured to be less indebted than their fellows, and marginally less miserable - though nobody is sure.

1Respectively: London, Paris, New York, Canada, Salvador da Bahia - Brazil, Mexico City, Rajasthan - India, Togo.

2 Bangladeshi novelist Akbar Rahim, article in the Chittagong Herald, Oct 2009. One of the poorest countries and  most vulnerable to natural disaster, Bangladesh is said to harbour the  happiest citizens.

3 Wordsworth of course!