How Online Shopping Turned Desire into Dependency

Have you ever tried checking Instagram late at night and you stumbled into a beautiful picture and before you know it you already inquired about it and made a purchase.

Late at night, when the world is quite an innocent scroll through Instagram that ends with “Order Confirmed.”

You didn’t need another pair of sneakers. You didn’t plan to buy that lamp. But you did. And it felt good… until it didn’t.

We’ve been told shopping addiction known as oniomania, as psychologists call it, is a matter of willpower. But what if it’s not just the buyer who’s broken?
What if the entire architecture of our digital world is designed to make us sick, to blur the line between wanting and needing, to sell us the illusion of identity itself?

Scroll long enough on social media, and you’ll notice something eerie: it’s no longer about products, it’s about promises. A fragrance doesn’t sell scent; it sells confidence. A hoodie isn’t about fabric; it’s about belonging. We don’t buy things to use them, we buy them to become them.

Every “limited-time offer” or “only 3 left!” notification is not a coincidence. It’s code well crafted by behavioral psychologists who understand that scarcity triggers panic, and panic triggers purchase. Algorithms now know your loneliness, your insecurities, your late-night boredom. They whisper to you: “You deserve this.”

But the truth is darker. The digital marketplace doesn’t just sell goods it feeds on emotion. Every click is a confession, every abandoned cart a psychological profile. The more you shop, the more it learns.

therapy meant confronting your emotions. Now, it means curating them into an aesthetic. You can “treat yourself” into debt, fill your cart instead of your soul, and call it “self-care.” The language of wellness has been hijacked by capitalism, in the process, healing became a subscription model.

We don’t need priests or philosophers anymore to tell us what’s good we have influencers. They tell us what to wear, how to decorate, and even how to feel. The marketplace has replaced the monastery; the algorithm is our confessional booth.

The Cost of the Click

Here’s the irony: we’re drowning in things but starving for satisfaction. Possession was supposed to bring peace, but all it brings now is pressure to upgrade, to unbox, to show off, to stay relevant. The dopamine hit fades fast, and when it does, the cure is just one click away.

The addiction isn’t to buying, it’s simply to becoming someone new with every purchase. But the price of that constant reinvention is authenticity. We’re no longer living for ourselves; we’re performing for the feed, measuring worth in “Add to Cart” moments.

What if, instead of asking how to stop shopping, we asked why we started in the first place? What void were we trying to fill? What pain were we trying to quiet? Because at its core, shopping addiction is now about grief.

To escape the trap, we don’t need to cut up our cards. We need to reclaim our attention. To remember that wanting is human but being consumed by wanting is slavery.