Austerity. I had to look it up. It’s one of those words I thought I understood. I used to know it in a certain context, i.e., sternness or severity of manner or attitude. I had an aunt who had mastered the austere look.

But it’s been reinvented or perhaps the secondary meaning is now primary.

Austerity: difficult economic conditions created by government measures to reduce public expenditure.

My man, Anthony de Mello, was of a similar mind.*

In the 1970s, President Carter appealed to the American people to go in for austerity. I thought to myself: He shouldn’t tell them to be austere, he should really tell them to enjoy things. Most of them have lost their capacity for enjoyment. I really believe that most people in affluent countries have lost that capacity. They’ve got to have more and more expensive gadgets; they can’t enjoy the simple things of life. Then I walk into places where they have all the most marvelous music, and you get these records at a discount, they’re all stacked up, but I never hear anybody listening to them—no time, no time, no time. They’re guilty, no time to enjoy life. They’re overworked, go, go, go.

Many lifetimes ago, a customer told me that she’d saved and saved to buy her little lad a bike for Christmas. She was so excited to see how excited he would be when he opened the box.

When I asked her after Christmas how he’d liked it, she shrugged and said he’d had more fun playing with the cardboard box it came in. She said she’d know better next time. That she’d gotten caught up in what she thought he wanted, underestimating his capacity for enjoyment.

As Christmas approaches, I’ve noticed a boost in posts showing how to make stuff, how to wrap stuff, and how to do stuff instead of buying stuff. But I doubt that spending will be any less than usual. It’s Pavlovian.

Today is Black Friday.

The day when I ask: Austerity? What austerity?

According to Britannica and numerous other outlets, the term ‘Black Friday’ was first associated with the day after Thanksgiving in the 1960s in Philadelphia. Police used the term to describe the scene as large numbers of suburban tourists came into the city to begin their holiday shopping.

In Ireland, the equivalent would have been 8 December, when all the farmers descended on Dublin for the same reason.

Unsurprisingly it was Amazon that introduced the Black Friday sales to [the UK in 2010] and that first sale was so popular that customers complained that items sold out too quickly and the traffic volumes actually crashed the Amazon website.

It’s arrived in Hungary, too. But here, at least one Hungarian company, Mountex, closes its doors on the day in protest against over-consumption. The outdoor clothing and equipment chain suggests that customers take a walk or a hike instead of shopping.

Black Friday is an easy pulpit for anti-consumption heads to preach from, but it’s hard to judge people when austerity has driven them to consume when they can. For many, and I suspect far more than we think, Black Friday deals are like manna from heaven.

Psychology Today posted an interesting article during the week that says:

Black Friday isn’t just a shopping event; it’s a psychological battleground where our instincts take over.

Who’d have thought it?

Since 1992, Black Friday is also Buy Nothing Day, where people don’t buy anything for 24 hours. I’m 9 hours in and optimistic that I’ll make it.

Buy Nothing Day was born in September 1992 in Vancouver, Canada, as a creative response to the ever-growing consumerism associated with the holiday shopping season. Canadian artist Ted Dave, the visionary behind this movement, sought to highlight the environmental and social impacts of our consumer culture. As Kalle Lasn, editor of Adbusters magazine and a prominent advocate for the day, explains, “Buy Nothing Day isn’t just about changing your habits for one day. It’s about starting a lasting lifestyle commitment to consuming less and producing less waste.”

Maybe next year, I’ll be more organised, and host a no-buy gathering.

Grateful, as ever, for the reminder that I have enough. I don’t need more.

PS The owl sitting in my friends’ palm tree in San Diego is a buy-nothing fan, too.

*AWARENESS: A de Mellow Spirituality Conference in His Own Words by Fr. Anthony de Mello, S.J. edited by J. Francis Stroud, S.J.