This Time of the Year
For children, December is the month when Santa sends presents down the chimney; however, for others, finding the prefect gift is the goal. To facilitate the shopping list, online shopping has been a massive help in picking their presents. However, for others it may have opened up a door to a bad shopping habit. With the use of the Internet, the phenomenon of shopping spreads to people that doesn’t originally have this obsession.
It’s become another way of access for people to spend their money on things they don’t need but want, rather then buying things for others; we always end up buying presents for ourselves. Christmas becomes another excuse for people to buy as many things as they want.
Guilt Free
When online shopping, the commitment to buying something becomes less heavy as you don’t have to walk towards the cashier with a load of everything you are going to buy. The guilt of having a fully loaded cart is taken away when you don’t have to walk around the store or to the cashier with all types of eyes staring at the cart filled with everything you’re about to buy. The only guilt left is that of the people going to your house and seeing the accumulation of things that you haven’t used but have in your house.
The Spread of #ShoppingAddict
Whenever you’ve overspent on anything, you often want to secretly brag about. Although people feel guilty about their shopping habits, they want to find a way to share the wealth that they have, one way or another. In our day and age, this is done through the use of hashtags like #foodporn or, in this case, #shoppingaddict to express just how much we love or overly love some things. However, because the uses of these terms are used in a very oblivious way it can be seen as inappropriate to other people. When searching these terms on social media, such as twitter, you can clearly see that the term #shoppingaddict has been over used WAY TOO MUCH.
(pictures screenshot from twitter #shoppingaddict)
When I was doing research for this blog, I thought I would find people talking about their issues on social media. I guess I was wrong cause with the term being overly used so easily, no one can actually tell if it’s really an issue or not. Because of such hashtags, it has become a phenomenon that is taken lightly.
Today, it is easier to fall into addiction as people take it lightly on social media. The term #shoppingaddiction is easily used by people on social media so that they could show how much they bought on the internet, without taking in to account people that actually have a problem with it. It wasn’t that long ago, when professional psychologists took Internet addiction lightly. If professionals don’t admit that it’s an issue how could everyday Internet users believe it?
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