On Shopping

What is it about shopping that makes people feel better? Buying new clothes, new gadgets...for the more comfortable, new cars and new houses. We, of course, are inundated with advertising all the time - on every possible surface or screen, on every object we own we will find the strategically placed and designed company trademark, and we even find advertising on ourselves as we become walking advertisements for our favorite stores. So now that we are so far removed from recognizing that buying something is an act independent of our mental health, have our brains become corporatized as well? Has retail therapy bought out all the room in our conscience? What would it take, then, to de-shop ourselves?
We all confer power on the things we own. There are those that we endow with independent life, that win the prized spot in the living room, those that travel with us through life, and those that stay boxed away somewhere for future trips down memory lane. We all take up more space than our body allots, as we are all sums of our material possessions; our identities derive from its accessories.
So perhaps having our own cache of enchanted objects saves us from corporate takeover; perhaps those early twentieth century advertisers, in conceiving our current consumer climate, also provided us with a loophole. It is when we stop having a relationship with the things we consume that we suffer, thus the success of retail therapy.