It’s almost Christmas, and most of us are shopping more than usual. It is the most natural thing to do in our part of the world, it seems, and is even perceived as entertainment.

I want to offer a small piece of advice—something drawn from experience and from the principles of aesthetic sustainability.

In my experience, shopping intuitively and pre-rationally sometimes seems to be the most rational and sensible way to navigate through the many temptations and consumer choices we are faced with daily in our consumption-based late-modern societies. Not least around Christmas, Black Friday/week/month etc., when the temptations seem to turn from a few to a gazilion! If you are able to tune into your real needs and your true preferences and likings, you are reluctant and even indisposed to getting swept away by a trendy product that might provide you with brief, quick satisfaction and momentary status-providing gazes from peers but is neither aligned with your needs and yearnings nor aesthetically sustainable.

This tuning-in obviously takes a bit of practice; you will likely make some initial irrational, impulse purchases, before you start understanding the difference between navigating intuitively and irrationally. Noticing which items are short-lived and beginning to think of each product purchase you make as an investment, as well as observing which items in your home and your wardrobe nourishes you aesthetically is a good start. Slowly you will become more and more reluctant to buying things that are short-lived, and as a part hereof you will feel the burden of having to get rid of them again disappear.

The idea that navigating intuitively and pre-rationally through the consumer-jungle is the most rational and sensible way to behave might sound rather odd. However, sensible behavior and deep, profound insights often occur on the basis of intuition! Whenever I buy something, I have noticed that I often intuitively and immediately know what I want.

Knowing our preferences, knowing what aesthetically nourishes us, and knowing our needs are crucial elements when investing rather than irrationally shopping—or, when focusing on usage rather than on consumption.

Intuition is our authentic voice. And, navigating the world intuitively is not the equivalent of navigating it irrationally. Intuitive reasoning based on phenomenology is more than an irrational gut feeling; it is a pre-rational, pre-lingual approach to the world that allows us to enter without our rational filters immediately setting in. Being based on phenomenology, the pre-rational approach is linked to our senses or our bodily interaction and engagement with our physical surroundings. A good example of a pre-rational experience is a déjà-vu experience: You can be walking down the road minding your own business, saying hello to a few people, looking a shop windows, and then suddenly the sunlight reflects beautifully in one of the windows, and everything is lit up and you feel like you have experienced this exact scenario before. What happens is, according to phenomenology, that our body—or our senses and bodily alertness—is way ahead of our rational mind. Once the mind gets there the body has already been there and has already had the experience, pre-rationally. Déjà-vu experiences are therefore a sign of the mind’s post-bodily, rational confusion.

In order to move beyond a rational understanding of our needs and preferences, we must tune into our intuitive compass and allow it to guide us. You can easily rationalize your way to convincing yourself that you really do need that trendy jacket or that new excess sofa; because you’ve worked so hard earning your money, and so you are allowed to spoil yourself by buying something; or because you can always use an extra sofa for when you have people over, and if you get tired of it you can just sell it on a secondhand online forum. Ironically, in that sense, rationalizing seems to become an excuse for irrational consumption, and consequently over consumption.

Rationalizing is not always the most sensible—or sustainable—way to navigate through the world then. On the other hand, when we seek to invest in long-lasting products that will serve us well for many years and nourish our senses on a daily basis, making use of our intuitive compass could be very beneficial.

Invest in the objects with which you feel an instant connection based on aesthetics; these tend to last the longest and resonate with the core of your longings and desires.

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) describes this sensation in his seminal work In Search of Lost Time:

“In fact, she could never resign herself to buying anything from which one could not derive an intellectual profit, and especially that which beautiful things afford us by teaching us to seek our pleasure elsewhere than in the satisfactions of material comfort and vanity. Even when she had to make someone a present of the kind called “useful,” when she had to give an armchair, sil- verware, a walking stick, she looked for “old” ones, as though, now that long desuetude had effaced their character of useful- ness, they would appear more disposed to tell us about the life of people of other times than to serve the needs of our own life.”

This Proust quote highlights something important about my praise of intuitive investments as an antithesis to irrational shopping: aesthetically nourishing things can satisfy and fill us up in a way that isn’t rational and that isn’t founded on comfort or the fulfilling of our functional needs. The most sustainable object might be an object that is charged with stories, emotions, and tracks of usage. It might be an object that aesthetically pleases you every time you use it or look at it, because of its “ability” to beautify your life or surroundings.

In order to reach an understanding of your authentic, anti-trendy needs, and aligning these with a more sustainable lifestyle founded in durable product investments and nourishing aesthetic experiences, the process of eidetic reduction might be beneficial. Eidetic reduction simply means stripping away everything non-essential in order to understand the core of something. An eidetic reduction of your needs and preferences can be valuable in order to avoid irrational shopping and to be able to intuitively tune into what really works for you and nourishes your senses.

The process of eidetic reduction involves peeling off layers of a phenomenon until finally grasping the core of it. In relation to the longevity and sustainability of the things you hold on to, beneficial questions to ask yourself could be: Which things have you kept for many years? Which garments, pieces of furniture, vases, pots, glasses, etc.? Is there an aesthetic link between them? Are there colors or color combinations that nourish you specifically well? Do you have tactile preferences? Do you, for example, like rough textures, handmade items, material combinations, or do you prefer even surfaces and smooth materials? Or more specifically, which materials are the pieces of furniture that you have held on to throughout the years made of? What about your wardrobe? Is there a fit and a look that you return to again and again that always works for you?

Eidetic reduction contains a certain amount of generalization. In the eidetic process you seek commons between observed phenomena or objects, and based on that you draw conclusions regarding their core and act accordingly.