How should we describe this curve, so different from the pattern of purchases and addictions? I’ve come to call it the pattern of practices. This curve describes the satisfaction that comes from a practice: an endeavor that starts out difficult, even positively painful, but over time becomes rewarding. It can apply to learning to cook, learning to garden, learning to paint; learning to play tennis, golf, or basketball; it can apply to becoming a doctor or becoming a scuba diver.

The differences between purchases (playing an MP3) and practices (playing a violin) don’t stop with the different satisfaction curves each delivers. Purchases almost always involve consuming something someone else has created. Practices almost always result in the creation of something that was not there before. Even if the only thing your practice creates is a slightly out-of-tune rendering of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” that rendition, however beautiful or flawed, only comes into existence because you take the risk of playing it. With purchases, on the other hand, all the hard work of creating has been done for you.

And this points to an even more significant difference between purchases and practices. Practices, done consistently over time, expand our own capacities in fundamental and irreversible ways. Practice the violin for an hour a day, for twenty years, and at the end you will be able to do things, to create things, you were completely unable to do and create before. Listen to recorded violin music for the same amount of time, and while you may by the end have a pretty complete mental grasp of the violin repertoire, you will be just as helpless with an actual violin as you were twenty years earlier. When we purchase, we are simply freeloading off the capacities some other person has developed, and our own capacities change very little or, most often, not at all. But when we practice, we change.

There’s another intriguing difference between the pattern of purchases and the pattern of practices. Purchases, at their most exhilarating and satisfying, give us a taste of godlike control over the world. I press play on my iPod, and Yo-Yo Ma or Radiohead instantly begins playing at my command. I pull up to the drive-through window, and food is provided for me in an instantaneous exchange that requires nothing of me except my wallet and my wishes.

But practices, especially at the outset, are almost always humbling experiences of creatureliness. It took me months of practice before I could successfully return my coach’s squash serve (and it didn’t help my ego that she was a girl!). When I was learning to bake chocolate chip cookies, I forgot the baking soda half a dozen times (or substituted baking powder instead — is there a difference?). Growing tired of the simple, even monotonous exercises that are the rudiments of the piano, I’d start goofing off, drawing a rebuke from my mom, who was listening with growing impatience from the kitchen. There is nothing especially notable or admirable about someone beginning a practice — we would never pay to watch even a professional musician play scales, let alone an eight-year-old. If purchases give us an absurdly elevated sense of our command, practices cut us down to size.

And yet over time, practices lead, much more surely than purchases, to freedom. Since I, unlike my wife, have never practiced the violin, I am not free to play the violin. Put a violin in my hand and I can do nothing except hold it gingerly and try not to harm it. Meanwhile, a life built around purchases, even ones that do not lead to the deadly downward spiral of addiction, is often a life of shrinking capacity, leading to more and more constrained freedom. I become dependent on the things I buy — my iPod becomes a mood-altering device, my wardrobe becomes my identity, my car gives me a sense of power and control.

With their quick reliable hits of satisfaction, purchases are seductive. Building our life around them almost guarantees that we will never take the risk of embracing practices, which call us to long sustained difficulties and deferred gratification. But if we build our lives around practices, if our lives are defined by choosing what is initially difficult and staying committed to it over time, not only will the practices deliver long-lasting satisfaction — our purchases will take on a new and more satisfying quality. When my wife listens to a recording of the violinist Itzhak Perlman, she enjoys it in a way that I cannot — because she quite literally hears qualities in the recording that I cannot. She can appreciate the years of discipline, concentration, and creativity that go into Perlman’s seemingly effortless playing. And in our house it works the other way around as well: having spent several decades studying and performing folk, pop, jazz, and gospel on the piano, when I buy a recording that features the terrific Nashville session pianist Matt Rollings, I swoon over his inventive chord structures and breathtaking rhythmic precision, while Catherine simply taps her toes and hums along.

But a life of practices doesn’t just equip us to appreciate the nuances of our particular field of expertise — violin for Catherine, piano for me, maybe tennis, vegetarian cuisine, or woodworking for you. It reorients us toward a different kind of satisfaction, freeing us from looking to purchases to shore up our sense of well-being. When you build your life around practices, purchases are satisfying without being, well, consuming. When you build your life around purchases, practices and their deeper joys always stay out of sight, and even more surely out of reach.

THE DISENCHANTED CONSUMER

Surprisingly enough, I believe there are some strong reasons to believe that our culture is becoming disenchanted with the pattern of purchases. Just as citizenship, as a defining ideal, began to wane when the post-war economy served up an abundant smorgasbord of enticing consumer goods, so I believe we can see signs that Americans’ love affair with effortless consumption is growing cold. Many of our neighbors are discovering that the passivity of the consumer is unfulfilling. And just as a massive economic shift and novel technologies made the consumer economy possible, so new technologies are offering a new kind of satisfaction: the satisfaction not of consumption but of participation, and even creation.

Think about the paradigmatic change in “screen time” that has taken place in the last twenty-five years. In 1983, the year before the Macintosh computer was introduced, the only screen most people owned was a television. TV was the epitome of the passive consumer economy, perfectly designed to deliver both prefabricated entertainment and advertisements for further adventures in purchasing satisfaction.

In 2008, to be sure, most Americans still have a television screen, and it is larger and flatter than ever. But it has been joined by at least two other screens that compete for attention: the personal computer and the cell phone. And even the television spends only a fraction of its time delivering broadcast media — it is just as likely to be hooked up to an Xbox as the cable box.

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