Happiness and the $300 couch

How people think themselves into unhappiness and how to think yourself out of it

I heard a couple talking as I walked around the thrift shop the other day:
“Well that’s an ugly couch. I wouldn’t want that in my home. Holy smokes! They want $300 for that thing? Who’s going to pay $300 for that!  It was donated!  Who are they to put a $300 price tag on something that was donated to them!  They shouldn’t be asking that much money!”

Reasonably clean white couch. Picture sold separately.

For donated couch, it’s pretty clean. I couldn’t have that couch in my own home. It’s white. Our dogs are allowed on the couch and it would be mud colored in no time.

But it’s painful to sit in resentment. It’s draining to know how everyone in the world should be running their business, setting their prices, managing their inventory, and to be unhappy because they didn’t ask me how they should do it. I could see discontent in the speaker’s face. I wondered what she looked like when she was happy. Shift. Get curious.

Try this:

“I wonder who’s going to pay $325 for a used white couch at the thrift shop? What kind of home would that go into?”

“I wonder how long it’ll be here? I wonder if they’ll have to put it on sale? I wonder what it sold for when it was new?” (I haven’t spent more than $50 on a couch in 20 years.)

And there’s the path to working out of unhappy certainty and resentment, into at least a disinterested curiosity. It helps when I can remember that the thrift shop’s business is to raise money for the schools, not to provide low-cost furniture for people who can’t figure out how to use Craigslist and get free couches.

The couch went out on the sales floor on January 19th. I’ll try to remember to look for it next time I visit.

Asking $325; will adjust price if it doesn’t sell.