Sometimes I feel like I’ve been existing on this Earth the past 16 years or so to buy stuff. I have no amounts of money to truly speak of, yet I constantly feel I must buy stuff. Am I just that acutely aware of all the stuff I seem compelled to buy because I lack the money to do it without thinking about every single purchase very carefully, very thoroughly?

Sometimes, for a couple weeks out of the year, it seems I am not compelled to buy stuff. I have no idea what makes these particular weeks so special. Coasting on not too many needs, maybe. But most weeks out of the year, the needs are up, and they compel me to buy stuff. See, I don’t even mean luxury items. Far from it — I am talking about necessities that I nonetheless seem to view as frivolous, but that, I must concede in the end, are, simply, practical. They serve a need.

So we have gathered I feel I am constantly buying things, and it makes no difference what kinds of things these things are. It doesn’t seem to matter if the things I buy serve all these needs? How many needs can a person have that require a purchase of something from the internet? I buy less than 20% of the things I add to various carts as part of my sophisticated strategy to wait out what does seems to require purchasing versus what’s just a dopamine hit,^{1maybe even less than 5%} I feel like all I ever do is buy things and then they arrive and every day it feels like the delivery guys are delivering something to Esther Olschowy and I hate it I hate it I hate it. I wish I wasn’t constantly buying things. I wish my dopamine receptors weren’t so worn out by constantly buying things that a package addressed to Esther Olschowy would feel at least a little bit like Christmas did when I growing up, but without the sting somewhere, on a deeply subconscious level, of realizing that your parents just... don’t get you.

I despise everything being so expensive that I need a payment plan so I can’t just go to a store and beep my phone and that will be all, thanks. No actually you know what, let’s get these fun glitzy pieces of plastic sitting around near the cash register, they look fun, I’ll put them in the gift bags for my kid’s next birthday party. I despise that I need to try everything on for literal size before I know what’s right but I can’t simply go to a store to do that because the light and the noise and the bustle and everything, in general, about being somewhere other than home distorts my sense of what is real in such a way that i cannot make sound decisions.

I despise that I can buy small things, and so I do, but I cannot^{2or am too unimaginative to} buy larger things, like a read bed, or a pretty coffee table, or, well, if we’re doing the dreaming thing now, what about a home that is not the house my twitter-addicted father also inhabits, but ours, just ours. I think about this and then I think what if I hadn’t bought all these little things over the years? Clothing, the minimum necessary, for myself and my child? A new electric toothbrush, 35% off, after using my spouse’s toothbrush for two years and, before that, a hand-me-down from my brother for much, much longer? None of the furniture in my attic place is mine, yet yearning for a nice couch — one that is mine — is off-limits. I bought two sets of sheets about three years ago yet facepalm internally even thinking about buying a new set.

So what do I actually buy? Supplements seem to be a thing. I remember distinctly viewing them as completely over-the-top, unnecessary, frivolous, indulgent, and then, on a walk, a switch flipping, mind now framing a Vitamin B complex as an investment in my (mental) health. Now, how am I to know if this is true? I take thiamine and magnesium every day, as well as tyrosine and a sketchy dark watery stuff that’s supposedly full of fulvic and humic acid. I have felt it helps me, like, be awake, though, quite often now. I think.

I have taken different forms of magnesium, two forms of potassium, l-lysine, creatine, spirulina, chlorella, wheatgrass juice powder, vitamin c, vitamin d, zinc, activated charcoal, diatomaceous earth, silver, cranberry extract, mannose, forskolin, monolaurin. Some of them I’d still swear by, but alas, I have no budget to keep some of all of them around.

Last revised May 22, 2026.