Buy Less

In 2007, a Banksy mural appeared in a London train station: a simple blue rectangle bearing the words, “THE JOY OF NOT BEING SOLD ANYTHING.” A friend photographed it and sent it to me with a note. “That’s our open sky,” he said.

These days, advertising seems to be everywhere. It’s no longer just Don Draper trying to sell you cigarettes. Social media turns everyday human interactions into constant promotion. And now, with AI, advertising can be personalized, predictive, and nonstop.

But 2,600 years ago, the Buddha understood that there's a far better salesman than Madison Avenue or even AI: the human mind, which has evolved over millennia to sell us greed, hatred, and delusion. Your mind knows exactly how to convince you that you deserve another drink, that blind rage is “truth-telling,” or that self-harm is self-care.

The salesman mind is a professional. The more you argue with him, the more he uses the energy of your own stories against you, wearing you down, insisting you can’t be happy till you buy what he’s selling. The Buddha saw that the way to disarm him, therefore, isn’t more narrative thinking, but simply to recognize the salesman, name him, and in doing so strip him of the power of surprise. This is why we meditate: to learn to do this in real time.

But meditation isn’t just what we do for half an hour with our eyes closed. It’s bound up with living from a place of gratitude for life as it is. If you’re going to buy less — both from corporations and because of your own insecurities — you have to see that real joy doesn’t come from getting something or becoming someone important. Joy is subtractive. It’s what remains when you learn to tell your thoughts, “No thanks. I’m good as I am.”

As the song goes, there's no richer man than one with a satisfied mind.

Painting by Anthony White