Buy Nothing
Chi Siegel
The scroll wheel on Ting’s mouse has a ribbed texture that lets Ting’s finger force it down quickly, with repeated, strong strokes. A bit masturbatory, perhaps. This Facebook group is endless. Goods are being given away, ditched, forgotten, bequeathed, faster than she can scroll. Trading or selling is not allowed—only giving, freely.
Ting first joins out of necessity. She needs to furnish her new place and does not have the budget to leave it to Ikea deliveries. In order, she obtains: a dented dresser to house her sweatshirt collection, mismatched chairs and a scratched wooden dining table, and several sets of shelves. She has a bright, sunny, “Thanks!” ready for every meeting, but there is only so much she can get out through the muffle-muzzle of her cloth mask before the giver retreats back up their apartment steps with a parting wave.
She takes things home like an animal carcass she stalked and hunted herself, and she is swimming in the dopamine soup of budget-friendly nirvana. She gets a thrill when she can say to her friends on Zoom calls, who receive a tour from her turning her laptop camera every which way around her place, “This shelf was free!” Before long, the acquisitions slow. Her apartment is full.
But she does not stop receiving her notifications, and she always goes back to that page, at first, just to look. She volunteers her name to receive things she does not want: an air fryer (she brought one from home), an unopened set of manicure implements (she does not do her nails). It’s the eyes of the givers that bring her back. Interactions limited naturally by the disease, but somehow limitless in the few seconds of the item changing hands. Every meeting is different; some get arranged past midnight, and at the random streetlamp they choose to meet, she can hardly find the eyes of the person beneath their winter coat’s hood in the dark. Every meeting: an awkward shuffle closer through the snow, an exchange, a retreat. Like waves.
Her apartment being full, she receives things, holds them, and then within 24 hours she has re-listed it in the group. Then, the same brief meeting as before, though this time, she is giving.
After a time, the number of users clamoring for things thins, and it’s her and the same maybe ten people all passing along items. Some containers they don’t even bother opening before handing off again. The same givers, sometimes the same item passing through her hands or apartment three or four times before eventually disappearing, some outsider coming in to break their chain and actually take the thing for themselves. The people she meets in their winter-coated and hatted-and-masked appearances look almost nothing like their sunny profile pictures from the before-times, and so she stops associating those profiles with them, stops distinguishing them altogether, these same spirits that are all part of her same chain.
It is only a matter of time before she arrives to a meetup empty handed and package-less. The receiver appears before her in the dark and takes hold of Ting with both arms. She, the given, is guided gently out of the street.
Chi Siegel is currently based in Oxford, UK. She is the co-founder and Art Director of sinθ magazine.