I’m Also Giving Up Amazon
As one of Warren Buffett’s last acts at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway, he did something that caused a lot of headlines. From Investopedia:
Berkshire made a bigger cut to its Amazon holdings, selling 7.7 million shares, or more than 75% of its stake in the e-commerce giant.
Now, I’m not an investment guy, and it would be completely useless for me to give my opinion on this.
BUT it was the first of two things that gave me an idea for what I’m doing for Lent.
The second came from my friend Sam Vander Wielen, who decided with her family that they’d stop buying from Amazon for an entire year. I encourage you to read that piece:
So I’ve decided, more like Sam and less like Berkshire Hathaway, to give up Amazon for Lent.
A Quick Statement About Lent
I’m generally not one to talk about being Catholic; not because I’m ashamed of it or because I’m worried about how people will view me. It’s because I don’t think it’s relevant to my content very often, and I don’t want to shoehorn it into stuff for the sake of doing it.
But it’s pretty hard for me to talk about what I’m doing for Lent without at least mentioning it.
I would say I’m a practicing Catholic, but like Allen Iverson, sometimes I skip practice. I’m not the best Catholic; I’m also suspicious of anyone who claims they are.
However, I think hard about what I’m going to do for Lent. Mimicking Jesus spending 40 days in the desert following his Baptism, it’s supposed to help us reaffirm our commitment to our faith, reject temptation, and challenge ourselves to be better.
Challenging myself to be better is the main reason I don’t do the same thing every year. I want to spend the days of Lent trying to create appreciable change for myself, or in the world1.
In the past, I gave up soda (something I ultimately came back to, but drink way, way less of now). One year I built websites for non-profits for free. I’ve practiced more generous thinking instead of assuming the worst of people2.
Giving up buying things on Amazon continues this tradition.
It Removes Instant Gratification
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we’ve turned into a world where we favor instant gratification over lasting gratification. I wrote this in a recent article for Streamlined Solopreneur:
We need to move away from the instant gratification of ticking a box on our to-do list, in favor of the lasting gratification of completing something worth doing.
The context here was that it takes work to be great. You can’t just prompt ChatGPT and expect to get a great work of literature…or using the example from the article, compete in the Olympics.
But everything in our world has pushed us towards thinking we should get what we want as quickly as possible. Make the LLM sound like you, and tell it to write an article for you. Post on TikTok and get likes and comments immediately.
Order at 10am and get it by 4pm.
We need to be better at practicing patience; at investing our time in what matters, and really thinking about our actions.
I’m not trying to stand and deliver on patience by talking about Amazon. But also, removing the ability to rage buy something because it feels like solving a problem will make me actually solve my problems.
It Fits With My Yearly Theme
This was a little unintentional, but giving up Amazon for Lent fits in perfectly with my year of Digital Detox.
I’ve deleted the Amazon Apps off my phone, and now it’s yet another reason I’m less reliant on that device.
Instead, I will order from a smaller vendor who cannot offer same day shipping; they also don’t have an app to make purchasing as easy as possible.
If I need something more immediate, I need to actually go out and get it. That means it’s helping me do more in the physical world (as well as invest more locally).
This is very good because working from home, I sometimes have a resistance to actually leaving the house — especially over the last few weeks where the temperature never cracked 25F.
It’s Adding The Right Amount of Friction
Both of those reasons (removing instant gratification and doing more in the real world) reinforce this penultimate reason: it adds friction to something needlessly frictionless.
Something slightly implicit in this promise (and something that Sam mentions) is that I don’t just want to replace Amazon with Walmart, or Target, or some other massive chain that can offer the same or similar benefits.
After all, replacing one form of instant gratification with another doesn’t fix anything.
This promise means that instead of just clicking “Buy Now” at any whim or recommendation, I actually have to think about whether I should spend the money or not.
About whether I need this thing — and need it now — or not. “Is this worth taking time out of my day to get, or can it actually wait?”
And by adding friction, we can get to actual change.
It’s Forcing Better Spending Habits
By adding friction to buying things, this will encourage better spending habits. If I can’t impulse buy something, that money stays in my account.
I’m also not just accumulating stuff and then not returning it because I’m too lazy. Because even though Amazon makes it very easy to return things, the friction of returning something is still orders of magnitude higher than making the purchase.
The reduces overconsumption, or encourages, as my friend Brian put it, piety.
Bringing it back to the “Lent” of it all, piety can mean being religious, but it can also mean reverence.
And maybe this is a stretch, but I feel like a form of reverence appreciating what you have, and not rushing out to get something new or replacing something that still works perfectly well.
A Better Me
There’s a risk with the idea of giving something up for Lent that one defaults to something easy or common (no soda, no beer, no social media).
But I really want to force better change in myself. Hearing, “I’m giving up Amazon for 40 days,” the people I told immediately knew the challenge and the benefits.
Given that I just spent 1,000 words talking about the benefits of doing this, I trust that I’ll come out the other side, better, more thoughtful, and with a little more money in my pocket.
Money I can use to actually effect change…not just get yet another charging brick.
There are some who tell you Sundays don’t count. They are wrong. Giving up something you like for 6 days is not a challenge, and Jesus didn’t go home on Sundays to refresh.
Something I continue to work on to this day.