Unbinding Myself From Amazon
/I know, I know, I’m practically a hero. I’ll wait for you to stop applauding my bravery.
Done? Cool.
In a somewhat rash decision I leaped through all the cancellation hurdles Amazon erects in order to delete my account. I did this for several reasons:
My budgeting app showed that I was siphoning my money into Amazon at a truly stupid rate.
I became frustrated at the eerie convenience of living like an emperor but without the endless coffers to sustain my orders.
I noticed a steady decline in self-control because everything I wanted was a click or two away.
There is absolutely no reason why a portion of my money should help a billionaire reach low-earth orbit at his whim.
Now, I cancelled my full Amazon account on Wednesday and on Thursday morning I realized that I just eradicated access to a few hundred books from my Kindle Cloud Library. I’m not panicking, though it is irritating that I may not be able to access data that I legitimately owned because I’m no longer a member of the company that sold it to me. Data is weird like that. Fortunately, I still have my Audible collection because it’s sort of a third-party? I’m not clear on that, but I’m pleased that I can at least listen to stories.
Here’s what I do know: I deliberately made it more difficult for me to get stuff. A significant part of how I got out of debt came from switching all my online payment accounts off my credit cards and to my debit account. That made it much easier to feel the pain of every purchase and had me considering if I really needed an item. While I’ve been debt-free for six months, my Amazon order history showed that I still made indiscriminate purchases that satisfied my short-term desires but negatively impacted my long-term saving goals.
The deeper reason I did this was my health.
As much as possible, I try to live as a hunter-gatherer. This is an incredibly silly way of stating that, where reasonably applicable, I modify my life so my body and mind experience what it evolved to thrive in and not what modern life imposed. Near-instant-gratification is an astonishing accomplishment of present-day economy and industry, but my ongoing research into philosophy and biomechanics has me questioning the difference between gratification and value. We are hard-wired to appreciate the things into which we invest effort. Clicking and waiting on a delivery does nothing for my brain, and it is my brain that I’m constantly working to put into a healthier state.
Billions of people live genuinely good lives without two-day shipping. Until the most recent of human history we have, as a people, survived without the option of clicking on an item and knowing that it will be selected, packaged, shipped, delivered, and then handled to our front door. I cannot accurately tell you when I signed up for an account. It just sort of happened. This feels insidious looking back on what is at least a decade of purchases and subscriptions. Now that my life is no longer propped up by Amazon I’m forced to consider what I wish to own more fully. I think this is a good thing even though it will take more time.
More of my time will go into future purchases. As a result, I’ll value those possession more. I’ll have done more to put those objects into my possession and that will also fire up the reward pathways in my brain in a way far more consistent with how my ancestors experienced getting new stuff.
