Why we go down shopping rabbit holes..

Am I a shopholic? Is it OCD? Or is it a good old fashioned act of lonliness.

I’ve fallen down countless shopping rabbit holes scrolling through eBay, Etsy, Amazon, Google Lens trying to track down the exact object I’m imagining in my head. Most of the time, after a long and exhaustive search, I find it. And when I finally hit “purchase,” there’s a quiet satisfaction, a sense of arrival. But this particular rabbit hole made me pause and really question why I do this at all.

The photo above is my neighbor’s window here in Portland. How quaint, how deeply nostalgic it feels or maybe it’s just me. I became completely fixated on it, passing by day and night, letting the mood sink in, trying to understand and possibly recreate the very specific atmosphere it held. That obsession quickly turned into a hunt.

I learned the pieces were one-of-a-kind vintage Christmas light-up displays from the 1960s, and that Portland has its own peculiar relationship with this light up Santa Claus. Each piece cost around $70 on eBay, so I spent $140 to recreate the exact display I had grown attached to over the past week after Christmas, no less hoping, unrealistically, that they might be discounted. They weren’t.

So this brings me back to the question I’m left with: why do I do this?

My theory is that we don’t like things because of taste. We like them because of familiarity because of nostalgia. I think this is how trends work, how they spread so fast. People see something and think nothing of it, then the next day buy something they don’t even remember seeing. The mind forgets, but the subconscious keeps score. And we confuse that feeling the quiet recognition with liking it. When really, it’s just familiarity. So much of rabbit-hole shopping isn’t about wanting something new at all. It’s about craving nostalgia, dressed up as desire.