I loved to scour apps and charity shops for cheap clothes and toys \u2013 but now I know it is another kind of overconsumption<\/p>\n
\u2018Guess how much this was,\u201d I say to my partner mischievously, revealing with relish the latest toy I\u2019ve found for our youngest son. It\u2019s wooden, Montessori in style (apparently a ball dropping through a hole teaches him object permanence), and retails at about \u00a320 new. \u201cA quid,\u201d my partner proffers, wearily: he is savvy to this game by now. This time, though, I can go one better. \u201cFree!\u201d I screech with glee. \u201cFree! Can you believe that? Someone was giving it away on that secondhand WhatApp group.\u201d I\u2019m giddy with my find, drunk on the size of the bargain, but, as I add the new (to me) toy to the teetering pile of others \u2013 dolls, a tunnel, toy cars, a lunchbox \u2013 I can feel something \u2013 guilt, I think \u2013 gnawing away at me. Am I a secondhand overconsumer?<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always been a champion of secondhand shopping. I was plundering charity shops before it was cool and, in a tale that has become family folklore, once found a standard lamp in a branch of the British Heart Foundation and carried it home on the bus. In fairness, that lamp has moved house with me seven times and still stands, resplendent, in my living room. But I fear too many of my other secondhand purchases have been flash-in-the-pan dopamine hits. These purchases gather dust in our bedroom, the study, my son\u2019s toy box. Clothes I\u2019ve bought from charity shops, heady with the exhilaration of them being \u201conly \u00a35\u201d, lie crumpled and forgotten in the depths of my wardrobe before, months later, being dragged out and sold on Vinted<\/a> for a couple of quid. And still I buy more, ensnared in the grip of what I\u2019ve started to believe is something akin to an addiction.<\/p>\n Chlo\u00eb Hamilton is a freelance journalist<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I loved to scour apps and charity shops for cheap clothes and toys \u2013 but now I know it is another kind of overconsumption \u2018Guess how much this was,\u201d I say to my partner mischievously, revealing with relish the latest toy I\u2019ve found for our youngest son. It\u2019s wooden, Montessori in style (apparently a ball … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}