How to Stop Wanting in Seven Easy Steps

Amazon Addiction, Pseudo-Needs, and the Joy of Decluttering

1.    Off the Wagon

I dug myself into a bad habit.

For six months straight, right after my alarm blared and while I waited for the headshot of caffeine to catch up with my brain and body, I’d grab my phone and start scrolling through Amazon.

• Anything and everything was on the table: books, vitamin supplements, clothes, collector’s items, interior décor.

• It’s like a hedonic slot machine of unnecessary items, all capable of arriving in a day’s time and packaged in a way that simulates the experience of receiving a little gift.

• Specifically, I chose to do this right after waking precisely because my prefrontal cortex hadn’t warmed up enough to exercise proper self-control.

• Even if I didn’t buy anything, just scrolling through the app, entertaining the possibility of purchase was enough of a dopamine loop to keep me coming back morning after morning.

Now, by this point in my life, I’d thought I’d mastered my phone addiction. I took off all social media apps, games, set strict time limits, grayscaled, and capped it off with a 24 hour no-phone Sabbath each Saturday-Sunday from noon-noon. I even wrote a section in my first book specifically urging people to avoid looking at their phone first thing after waking. But for an embarrassing stretch of time, I fell off the wagon.

The app in particular is so devious because it capitalizes on one of our most basic features: our bottomless capacity to want.

you rn

2.    Pseudo-Needs & You

John Calvin famously called the heart an “idol factory.”¹ Were he around today, he might’ve called it an “idol super-corporation” (or probably something catchier, just bear with me).

Modern daily life sees the invention of busloads of wants, necessary but mostly otherwise, that push us into non-stop desire.

Emile Durkheim named this state of being “the malady of the infinite.”² It’s the paranoia that comes from believing that if we can just get enough money, enough popularity, enough workout hacks or oatmilk matchas or keto supplements or Hinge matches, then we’ll eventually reach eternal satisfaction.

But as Durkheim noted then and psychological literature attests to now, when our desires aren’t given any limits, they don’t go away – they only get more intense.³

Regardless, we’re now more deluged in wants than ever. And the primary mechanism that trains us to want more and more is advertising.

• In the 70’s, the average American saw around 1,000 ads per day. Now, we see anywhere from 7 to 12,000.

• Meaning, on average, 7 to 12,000 new wants are planted in our mind every day.

• There’s a kajillion torch and pitchfork diatribes against the advertising playbook in circulation, but it’s still just as effective as ever. This is because the ad industry essentially uses psychology to make people forget their own psychology.⁴

• They target our mental frailties through fabricating what philosopher Herbert Marcuse called “pseudo-needs.”⁵ They’re not true needs. You could live forever just fine without them – and the desire would’ve never existed apart from the ad’s existence.

• As writer David Foster Wallace describes it, advertising is the business of creating anxieties “relievable only by purchase.”⁶

Even though we might realize these products won’t fulfill us, persuasive ads cause a momentary amnesia that suspends our best judgements.

If advertisements were honest, they might look something like this:

Feel a strange craving in your soul that something’s amiss? A perpetual low hum of malaise and normality? Well, you’re in luck because we have a momentary solution: a brand-new Escalade! Is your current car still technically fine and you need more reasons to justify this unnecessary decision? Well, if you buy this Escalade, we guarantee that when your neighbors see it, you can transfer your original sense of discontent to them! That’ll provide a few more short bursts of satisfaction. Finally, since you have a psychological inclination to cease being excited about anything you buy soon after you buy it, a few days from now you’ll feel another itch of discontent – and make sure to call us when you do!

This captures the haunting way life can feel like a never-ending cycle of wanting.

• You see an Instagram ad and suddenly feel incomplete.

• A younger version of you passes by and you start coveting their care-free attitude and wrinkle-free complexion and wonder where yours went. Maybe it’s a trendy new dessert, pay raise, or garden fixture.

• Whatever it is, the pattern is predictable. You desire something, you get that something, you gradually experience being let down by that something, and then you replace that let down with a desire for a new thing.

• Like the philosopher Alain de Botton points out, “Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another.”⁷

Which brings us to a fact that’s sad but true: if you want to stop wanting something, the only thoroughly effective method is to get that something. Every second that passes after you get something brings you closer to not caring that you have it.

de Botton continues:

The quickest way to stop noticing something may be to buy it — just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry them. We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the deep steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.⁸

All this to say, our want is more like an endless cycle than a solvable problem.

“virgis” - ??

3. Stop Wanting in 7 Steps

Unfortunately, there’s no cure for wanting. The title of this article, like advertisements themselves, intentionally overpromised on what it could deliver. However and thankfully, there are some strategies for disciplining the impulse. I narrowed it down to seven that have done wonders for me personally.

1.     Pause

The foremost strategy might be the pause: taking time before you buy something to consider whether you really need it. One psychologist found that if you’re taking a long time to decide to purchase something,⁹ it’s most likely because you’re trying to justify an unnecessary decision by tricking your mind into believing you need something that you, deep down, know you don’t.

My friend Jake follows the “Wait Until Tomorrow” rule. Whenever he gets tempted to buy something unnecessary, he makes himself wait until the next day before pulling the trigger. But, upon waking, the desire’s usually gone.

2.     Simulation

The next trick is to simulate the feeling of getting the product. Do a rendition of the process in your head: the package arriving at your door, waiting in the check out line, trying on the outfit in the comfort of your own home, the two-month mark after buying that new car when the smell is gone. And then remember the thousands of times that experience has left you unfulfilled in the past. Put your imagination to work. It’s simple, but effective.

3.     Anti-Mimesis

Sometimes we’ll find that we don’t really want the product, we only want it because others want it. This is called “mimetic desire.”¹⁰ It’s basically this wicked strong bend in all of us to want what other people want – the toy the other kid is playing with, the husband the other girl has, the job that 800 other people applied for.

But when the dust clears, we might find we don’t care all that much. The desire was thin, propped up by others desiring it. This is why writer Luke Burgis argues for living an “anti-mimetic”¹¹ lifestyle. It’s basically the practice of taking inventory of how many of our wants are there because we really want them – and how many we’ve only learned to want from others. Once we weed out the mimetic, we discover the wants that are most meaningful.

4.     Cost-Benefit Analysis

Henry David Thoreau has this line from Walden that goes, “The cost of a thing is the amount of . . . life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”¹² When considering a purchase, take into account the collateral: how many hours of work are you trading for this item? Is it going to give you more opportunity for things that are proven to make you happier (like connecting with others or doing fulfilling hobbies), or will it take you away from those things?

For example, I’d love a boat. It’d be perfect for entertaining friends or taking kids tubing. Fantasy scenarios start rolling out whenever I’m passing harbors. But then I remember the cost-benefit analysis: the amount of time boat maintenance requires, the price of boat storage, or even just the cost of gas. And then I remember why I don’t own a boat.

5.     Fight Spending Through Giving

One study found that when people in the Eastern hemisphere feel happy, they’ll try and boost their happiness through connecting with friends or volunteering for their community. But when Westerners want to keep their happy feelings rolling, their go to method is buying something. And, as you might guess, the study shows that Easterners are generally happier than Westerners.¹³ Buying something can actually decrease satisfaction because we quickly realize whatever we purchased wasn’t as great as we envisioned.

The idea that giving is more joyful than receiving isn’t just a Bible platitude – it’s a truism etched into the universe. When Jesus said it’s “more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35) He wasn’t overspirualizing. It is actually better, in almost every conceivable way, to give than to receive.

This is one of the reasons why, whenever money anxieties start bubbling up, I try to actively fight the anxiety through donating money. It sucks; and it’s hard; and sometimes I mess up and don’t give and let the anxiety win. But when I do follow through, it puts money anxieties into a Kingdom perspective. Joy really is found in emptying ourselves (see Phil. 2:3-11) rather than filling our pockets.

6.     Starving the Craving

Next, we can practice wanting less by starving the craving.

Materialistic consumerism operates like reverse hunger. You feed normal hunger with food and that makes you less hungry. But want works the opposite way. The more you give into wants, the more you’ll keep wanting. But if you give into wants less, you’ll learn to want less in general.

The Desert Fathers called this acesis. The more you intentionally deprive yourself of stuff — be it food or expensive clothing or comfortable luxuries — the more satisfied you’ll feel with the minor pleasures you already have.

Starving the craving can also be done by exposing ourselves to less ads.

• In a groundbreaking study from the University of Warwick spanning 900,000 subjects, 27 countries, and over 30 years, Andrew Oswald and team discovered that there was a direct correlation between advertising and satisfaction.¹⁴

• During years in which ad spending in a specific country was higher than normal, life satisfaction went down.

• During years when ad spending lowered, life satisfaction raised right along with it.

• The correlation was so direct that Oswald and team concluded that the more advertisements we see, the less satisfied we’ll feel in general.¹⁵

• This basically frames Wallace’s quote from earlier in an actual science: advertising really creates “anxieties relievable only by purchase.”

Further, spending less time on social media apps like Instagram and Facebook (which has a huge correlation on how much money we spend) helps a bunch, too.

if scrolling through meta looked how it felt

(I’m holding off the 7^th one until the last few paragraphs because I thought it’d be cool and I’m experimenting with form; however, if you think this is totally dumb, plz let me know)

4.    Freedom through Decluttering

There’s never been an era where we’ve had so much to want. The moral manual built into our media doesn’t help either: fight spending addiction through retail therapy; solve money problems through this sports gambling app; fix dissatisfaction with your current partner through breaking up or going polyamorous.

None of those options can heal our ache.

But what can are slow, arduous practices of non-conformity toward our materialistic culture.

The majority of which will probably make you look weird. And it’ll attract some critiques from anyone who might see your resistance as a reminder of their own moral culpability.

But fortunately, lots of people are already on this path thanks to the Minimalism movement. Which is wonderful but does pose the risk of being subsidized into nothing more than Instagram aesthetic. As in, you still buy perpetually but declutter for the sake of creating enviable snapshots of your “minimal” lifestyle.

If we want to stop wanting, we have to actually discipline this desire for ourselves, not the camera.

In classic language, Christians call this the practice of “simplicity.” On the surface, it sounds like pained discarding of our prized possessions; in actuality, it’s about decluttering our lives until we stumble upon an inward and outward calm, peace, and unhurriedness.

As the mystic Thomas R.  Kelly put it, God “never guides us into an intolerable scramble of panting feverishness.”¹⁶ God desires our freedom from the malady of the infinite – and He can lead us there through simplicity.

Probably the best summary of simplicity comes from the godfather of spiritual formation himself, Richard Foster:

Christian simplicity is not just a faddish attempt to respond to the ecological holocaust that threatens to engulf us, nor is it born out of a frustration with technocratic obesity. It is a call given to every Christian. The witness to simplicity is profoundly rooted in the biblical tradition, and most perfectly exemplified in the life of Jesus Christ. In one form or another, all the devotional masters have stressed its essential nature. It is a natural and necessary outflow of the Good News of the Gospel having taken root in our lives… Jesus Christ and all the writers of the New Testament point us toward a way of living in which everything we have we receive as a gift, and everything we have is cared for by God, and everything we have is available to others when it is right and good. This reality frames the heart of Christian simplicity. It is the means of liberation and power to do what is right and to overcome the forces of fear and avarice.¹⁷

5.    On the Wagon

I entertained the habit for sixth months. Some days, I’d feel convicted and start my day the right way. But mostly, the Amazon scroll through was my go-to.

What stopped me cold turkey was coming to the haunting realization of how much of what I was buying wasn’t really providing any real satisfaction. It’s nice to buy a book and support an author, of course; but most of the purchases inevitably ended up either unused, wasted, or reminders of my own financial idiocy. It swallowed up way too much money and time. And since the habit was so deeply ingrained into my reflexes, I had to delete the app entirely.

7.     Practicing Gratitude

So, rather than waking up and scrolling, I started waking up with gratitude: thanking God for everything I had, for every good gift (James 1:17), for all in my life that I didn’t take enough time to appreciate in the ordinary quiet moments of the day. And then I kept practicing gratitude whenever my mind drifted into daydreaming pseudo-needs.

Gratitude is still difficult — especially given those 12,000 daily ads. But it’s a virtue that humans seem to either learn or die trying to avoid. You don’t become grateful by accumulating enough stuff. You become grateful by practicing gratitude regardless of how much stuff you have.

The first six steps were helpful, but the seventh, practicing gratitude, was the most helpful of all.

It took awhile to rewire the neural pathways, but the new habit eventually took root. Adding a gratitude section to my daily prayer liturgy has been one of the easiest ways to shut up my bottomless want. I still want – a lot – but I’m slowly noticing that I want much less.

Walden, probably

1. John Calvin, Institutes, 1.11.8.

2. See Roger Cotterrell, Emile Durkheim: Law in a Moral Domain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

3. Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Free Press, 1997), 39, 60, 108; Iris N. Mauss, et al., “Can Seeking happiness Make People Unhappy? Paradoxical Effects of Valuing Happiness,” Emotion 11 no. 4 (2011): 807-815. 

4. For one of my favorite books about advertising, see Davi Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising (New York: Vintage, 1985).

5. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (New York: Routledge Classics, 2002). Thanks

The Low-Level Theologian with A.J. Swoboda

for pointing this out in The Gift of Thorns, which is a book you should all buy with haste.

6. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Back Bay Book, 2006 Reissue).

7. Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety (New York: Vintage, 2005), 197.

8. de Botton, Status Anxiety, 197-198.

9. This is discussed in Jennifer Breheny Wallace, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic – And What We Can Do About It (New York: Portfolio, 2023).

10. For an excellent summary, see Wolfgang Palaver, René Girard's Mimetic Theory (Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture) (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2013).

11.

Luke Burgis

, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don’t Truly Want (London: Swift, 2022).

12. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1910), 39.

13. Brett Q. Ford et al., “Culture Shapes Whether the Pursuit of Happiness Predicts Higher or Lower Well-Being,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 144, no. 6 (2015): 1053-1062.

14. See Nicole Torres, “Advertising Makes Us Unhappy,” Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2020, https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy.

15. Chloe Michel, Michelle Sovinsky, Eugenio Proto & Andrew Oswald, (2019). “Advertising as a Major Source of Human Dissatisfaction: Cross-National Evidence on One Million Europeans,” The Economics of Happiness Online (2019): 217-239.

16. Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (New York: HarperOne, 1996 Reissue).

17. Richard Foster, The Freedom of Simplicity: Finding Harmony in a Complex World (New York: HarperOne, 2005).