A few years ago I was going into a Barnes & Noble bookstore I attended frequently to check out some new reading material. (This was about a few months before the introduction of the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble's own Nook e-readers.) One of the titles which caught my attention was the seminal business and lifestyle design book by Timothy Ferriss called The 4 Hour Workweek. While it was intended to be a book about business strategy and personal finance, what it really was about was adapting an entirely different way to personify living richly or being wealthy. The most radical concept in the book was, thanks to technology, one could seriously alter the way they worked in the workplace and design a lifestyle that would not only allow people more and time and freedom to pursue the lifestyle they really wished to live but simultaneously be more productive with work in the process. One of the concepts most seriously challenged in the book was the accumulation of "stuff" as a way to define comfort and leisure, if not wealth itself.
One of the things Mr. Ferriss railed against was working 80 hour weeks to pay for a mortgage, a car, and a lot of stuff around the house people will only use a few times, if that often, when what people really say they want to do is pursue their hobbies, travel the world, or have more time to raise their families. In essence, his idea of wealth was having the time and money (with more emphasis on time than money) to pursue life experiences than buying lots of goods to keep up appearances with the neighbors. He also had a radically different view of retirement, in which he emphasized actually taking regular sabbaticals to pursue your life interests for 3 to 12 months at a time while you are still young enough to enjoy them, as opposed to working 45 years and saving money until you are elderly before enjoying the fruits of your labor.
I thought about that yesterday while I was spending time with my family for Thanksgiving. Since not all of my family members were able to come home for Thanksgiving, we decided to go out to eat for Thanksgiving dinner. Me and my family went to Golden Corral for dinner, and for those of you who don't know Golden Corral is a chain buffet restaurant like Old Country Buffet. The diner was surprisingly delicious, but the place was packed to the gills with people. I suppose this was my experience with overflowing Thanksgiving crowds, as I had no plans or intention to go shopping on Black Friday. At any rate, after having a pleasant dinner, my family and I all wanted to go to the movies afterward, but since the next movie didn't begin for at least an hour after we left the restaurant, we went to the only other place open for business at that time, which was the local Walmart.
There were more cars in the parking lot at Walmart than I expected to be at that time, but overall it wasn't too bad compared to a typical shopping day. I had no intention of actually buying anything, so I just looked around the store at all the merchandise they had set up for Black Friday. It seemed as though I couldn't go into any aisle without seeing pallets of shrink-wrapped merchandise that all had signs on them stating the items in the pallet would not go on sale prior to 10:00 pm that night. The employees of said store were busy assembling the goods together for later sales, and at the checkout registers there were plenty of security people, though for the most part they were lazily standing around, as it was several hours before the official Black Friday sales began. After being there for about 45 minutes, mostly waiting for my stepmother to finish her shopping, we left the store and headed to the movies. After watching the movies I went home, but along the way I saw a huge line of people camped out in front of a Best Buy store waiting for the doors to open for Black Friday. My stepmother thought those people were out of their minds waiting outside in the cold air just for a bunch of bargains.
As we heard in the news today, those people in line at my local Best Buy weren't the only ones out of their minds. We heard about the shopper in California who attacked other shoppers with pepper spray so she could get first dibs on an Xbox 360, the shoppers in Arkansas who broke out into fistfights just to get $2.00 kitchen goods, the shoppers in North Carolina who fired guns into the air just to scare people away so they could have free reign in the store, and the various other reports of armed assaults and robberies in store and mall parking lots where the perpetrators stole the victims' purchases. And all this happened on top of the major chain stores opening up at midnight or even two hours earlier for their huge Black Friday sales, cutting into the even more limited precious time their employees get to spend with their families on Thanksgiving day.
When I think about all of the insanity and violence associated with Black Friday, I wonder whether all of the shoppers jostling for bargains realize whether these purchases are going to make their lives that much better in the long run, or whether they really need that huge flat screen TV, that whiz-bang smartphone with the huge cell phone contract, that designer dress or accessories they will only wear a couple of times, or those super cheap kitchen appliances which are so cheaply made that they will break down days or weeks after use. In the end, though, I don't even think the whole Black Friday escapade is about the "stuff"; I think the whole shopping experience is a substitute for that trip to Disney World or the Grand Canyon that these shoppers would rather go to but can't afford.
Which gets me back to The 4 Hour Workweek. Timothy Ferriss talks about the futility of working 60 to 80 hour workweeks to buy lots of stuff or even saving or investing tens of thousands of dollars to buy assets that would generate enough income to buy time to pursue your life goals, when with a little bit of leveraging one can do the same for less money and a whole lot less stress. He is really big on reflecting at what you will say at the end of your life, which in most cases doesn't involve people saying they were so glad they bought that huge house, or that fancy car, or that big yacht or fancy sparkly trinket. It also doesn't usually involve people saying they should have spent more time at the office. It's about living one's dream, and while there is an entire consumer industry devoted to making lifestyle choices for people, it doesn't lend itself to getting people to stay up late and camp out in front of Walmart, Best Buy, or any other big box store or mall to get that special deal.