Greg Bruce with the leather shoes that cost him $500. But did they make him happy? Photo / Jason Oxenham
Three years ago, Greg Bruce became infatuated with a pair of shoes he saw online. He couldn’t afford them. He couldn’t afford not to have them. Something had to give.
The image appeared on my screen via an algorithmically-generated social media ad, and the speed with which it travelled to the part of my brain responsible for shopping – bypassing the part that cares about my family’s wellbeing – says much about why humanity is in such a state.
I have no idea what it was about them that made my brain so dumb. Now I have owned them for three years, I can say decisively that they don’t look like the sort of thing that would inspire one to part with a large proportion of one’s disposable income. I guess this is the defining quality of successful consumerist marketing: its ability to make us stupid.
They are of a style known as “derby”, or – as a “friend” described them to me at the time – “school shoes”. I hated that style of shoes when I was 11, so what changed? What was it about the ones on the screen that generated such a rush of endorphins that I was no longer a rational actor capable of acting in my own best interest, but a gibbering mess?
I set about doing what I thought of as due diligence, but which I now understand to have been self-justification. The truth is that my purchasing decision had been made in a split second and all subsequent research was confirmation bias, useful only for manipulating my wife.
I emailed the ad for the shoes to New Zealand’s fashion tsar, Viva creative and fashion director Dan Ahwa. I started with Dan not just because he’s an enabler when it comes to this sort of thing, but because he knows more about clothes than anyone I know and because he’s a deep thinker.
He replied: “I’m probably the worst person to ask because I’m an enabler when it comes to this sort of thing. They look great and won’t date. You’ll wear them forever and with everything so you’ll get plenty of cost per wear out of these guys. Love the soles too. So I say if it makes you happy, f*** it and treat yourself to some nice shoes.”
He concluded with an apology to my wife, even though she had not been copied in.
Reflecting on his email now, it’s obvious the key line was: “If it makes you happy”, but if I read that line at all, it didn’t make it to the part of my brain responsible for rational thought – possibly because that part had gone on holiday, probably to a shoe shop. Of course the shoes would make me happy. If they weren’t going to make me happy, why did I feel so happy?
What Dan was saying was: “You should buy the shoes if and only if you believe they will deliver you at least $500 of benefit”. This is what economists call utility-maximisation. Unfortunately, my mind was too full of the sensuousness of luxurious, tumbled and stonewashed Italian leather to engage in anything as dull as economics.
I showed the ad to another colleague who I thought would be encouraging, but she was immediately and obviously unimpressed. “You know what you need?” she said. “Have you seen Dan’s pants?”
Of course I had seen Dan’s pants. They were very wide – the first very wide pants I had seen in an office setting since the bad jeans era of the early 2000s. They looked fantastic, but they looked fantastic on Dan, and I was not Dan, and if anyone needed evidence of that, they just needed to look at the shoes I was planning to spend $500 on.
“You can’t go stove piping it out”, my colleague said, pointing disdainfully at my tight black chinos. She probably had a point, but I didn’t care about my pants. I saw no thrill in pants. I saw no thrill in anything except the shoes. My mind had become fixated and probably diseased. All colour, besides rich, stonewashed brown, had drained from my world.
My wife said no way, under no circumstances could I buy a $500 pair of shoes, was I crazy, did I not know we had three kids to feed?
But I had anticipated her objection and suggested I could fund them entirely from the sale of old stuff I didn’t need anymore. It was not a strong argument, economically speaking, since the proceeds from anything I sold could have been better spent on feeding our kids, but either her understanding of economics was even worse than my own or she doubted I could raise the funds, because she said okay.
I had been reading and very much enjoying Haruki Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood, but its place in my life was suddenly and violently taken by the shoes. I had no more time for, nor interest in, Murakami’s fever dream of the melancholy of young adulthood. I was too deeply absorbed in a fever dream of middle-aged conspicuous consumption.
It wasn’t just reading. I had no time for anything. All other goals and interests disappeared from my life. Almost every spare minute in my life was spent either finding stuff to sell, taking photos of stuff to sell, writing compelling ad copy for things I was selling, or ordering couriers for stuff I had just sold. In the little time that was left over, I would pick up my phone and admire the ad for the shoes.
It is now three years since I bought the shoes. Having spent much of this time considering the reasons for the purchase, I have concluded I wanted them because they looked good, would therefore make me look good, and would therefore cause people to look at me and go: “He looks good.” But even if that argument had been logically sound, why did I want that? Why does it matter to me what people think of me? I’m 47. It’s embarrassing.
Psychology Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky uses the example of a home renovation to explain what happens in our brains when we try to make ourselves happy with new stuff: If we renovate our bathroom, we get an initial burst of pleasure, but that feeling fades quickly, leaving us back where we were, happiness-wise. Then, because the bathroom looks so nice, we become more aware of, and dissatisfied with, the lousiness of the rest of the house. We can renovate the rest of it too, of course, but where does it stop? We end up just as unhappy as we were before, but with a lot less money.
It took several months to sell enough stuff to pay for the shoes, and several more weeks for them to be shipped from Italy or England or wherever. They arrived at my door in an elegant cotton drawstring bag, soft and luxurious, which I swore I would keep them in forever, but which I have not seen in years.
When I first picked them up, I felt a surge of pleasure and when I put them on, I was greatly pleased, but as Sonya Lyubomirsky had predicted, the quantity of happiness I derived from them quickly declined, and the thought that $500 was a lot of money for shoes soon began to nag at me. I comforted myself by thinking back to a phrase Dan Ahwa had used when he was coercing me into buying them: “Cost per wear.”
If I could wear them for the next 30 years, I reasoned, they would, on a cost-per-wear basis, be the cheapest shoes I’d ever bought, and also extremely environmentally friendly.
“Cost per wear! Cost per wear!” I chanted to myself whenever I noticed them sitting in my wardrobe, taking food from my children’s mouths. And that did make me feel a bit less bad, right up until the day, a couple of months ago, when the sole on the left shoe started to split. I took it to the local cobbler, who said I would need to replace the sole, and the cost of that would be greater than the cost of purchasing a new pair of reasonably-priced shoes.
I told the cobbler that, given the cost of the shoes, I’d hoped they might last a big longer. He smiled kindly but also, I thought, a bit sadly. He glued the sole back together at no charge, but warned me it would not last very long.
No one, not even a single person, has ever told me that the shoes look good, or that I look good in them. The crepe soles that looked so beautiful in the pictures attract and retain a huge amount of dirt, debris and even hair. It’s almost impossible to keep them clean. The shoes are enormously heavy. They’re not especially comfortable. The uppers are, as already mentioned, now heavily marked and scuffed.
In other words, they bear strikingly little resemblance to the items that moved me so emotionally three years ago. More and more, they feel not like items of desire but like things I wore to Bucklands Beach Intermediate in 1989. With the benefit of three years of hindsight, I can say there is categorically nothing special about them.
Still, they have taught me a valuable lesson about the link between money and happiness. The next time I want to buy an item of clothing I can’t afford, I’ll think not of the joy they’ll bring at the moment of purchase, but the regret and general ennui I’ll feel three years later.
Anyway, this is all moot. I won’t be spending much on clothes, or anything else, for a long time. We’ve just started renovating our house.
The new free open-air saltwater pool is already proving popular.