Saturday Without My Wallet

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The Jewish Sabbath is a festival of liberation, but for the uninitiated, it can also be quite a workout. No work is done on Shabbat, no commerce transacted. In the first winter of my observance, I diligently prepared Shabbat dinner every week, rose early on Saturday morning and walked two miles to synagogue. My enthusiasm carried me that far, but once I left shul, my resolution faltered. It was always the little things that tripped me up: stopping for a cup of coffee, hopping on a bus, nipping into Rite Aid to see if my favorite shade of lipstick was in stock and then treating myself to a tuna sandwich, pickles and potato chips at the tumble-down deli by the architecture school.

From a material standpoint, I needed none of these things. Yet I could not still my acquisitive impulse, my psychological need to assert my identity by spending a few dollars. The very idea of not carrying a wallet frightened me. When the film You’ve Got Mail debuted, I shamefully recognized myself in Tom Hanks’s grousing: “The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee.” I didn’t want to be the person who needed to order a “Tall! Decaf! Cappuccino!” in order to acquire “an absolutely defining sense of self.”

Twenty-five hours without spending money hardly seems like a marathon. After a few months of being repeatedly waylaid by my fixation on petty indulgences, I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me. Why did I crave this constant flow of small expenditures? I soon realized that spending for comfort was a pattern set early in life. I grew up in genteel poverty, wearing hand-me-down clothes, going without the expensive orthodontia my classmates had, sharing a room with my brother until 7th grade. But my mother loves small indulgences: ice cream runs, two-day vacations, baubles from the dime store and the dollar store. Her cure for almost any grief turns on “self-care,” buying a new outfit or a distracting DVD or going out for a meal or maybe just dessert. It isn’t about conspicuous consumption; she buys books at the bargain table and hoards coupons. Her theory is that the mere act of spending, even in a conspicuously modest manner, brings solace.