As you might expect, the most difficult part of not-buying-it is explaining it to others. Both Sophie and I have remarked that it imposes drastic simplifications on our lives: options, like buying that cup of coffee, are removed before they can tantalize. But explaining why we would choose to eliminate unnecessary consumption when we don't have to, such conversations are delicate. On the one hand, you don't want to sound sanctimonious. People often think you are passing particular judgment on them. (This is an annoying feature of vegetarianism, too. Not liking meat or avoiding meat for health reasons are universally acceptable; deploring the meat industry, both for its cruelty to animals and for its environmental consequeces, provokes sharp responses from many people.) On the other hand, you don't want to sound like you're a raging consume-a-holic or deep in debt. Although Sophie and I are fairly frugal, these past three weeks have shown just how freely I spent money and how frequently I indulged little impulses. Perhaps the hardest part, though, is losing certain social possibilities: on Friday some friends were going to lunch at a restaurant I quite like, people I hadn't seen in a while and want to see more frequently, and I had to turn down the offer due to not-buying-it.

I have come to rely on an analogy to fasting when I try to explain what Sophie and I are up to. One doesn't fast to save money on groceries or to shame others (of course, people go on hunger strikes, but this is not the only or predominant role for fasting). One fasts to grapple with one's embodiedness, to face hunger, to remind oneself that food isn't just about pleasure, to put oneself in communion with others who are hungry, to break up the soul's stagnancy under the routine and repetition of daily life, and to turn one's thoughts elsewhere. We're fasting the will to consume American-style, we're rediscovering that the ordinary routines aren't all there is, we're opening another region of the soul. It is both nice and misguided when friends offer to buy something for us, like a cup of coffee: you don't offer a fasting person food because they're not eating out of choice, not stinginess.