THE Black Friday hype has already begun. Ostensibly it seems about Christmas and giving but really it’s just a grand festival of selling and consumerism with Christmas as its legitimiser, as the excuse allowing those who defend it to cry bah humbug at those who object. Given you only have to look across to China and see a similar phenomenon in the form of their Singles Day, all in the name, seemingly, of singledom, it’s clear the festivals themselves are just consumerism’s justification for making us spend.

It’s just five days till this annual spendfest, which was only really imported from the United States three years ago, but which saw us part with over £1 billion last year in Britain. November 25 is Black Friday, or, depending on your inclinations, the less-hyped Buy Nothing Day. If you want to participate in the former, you can choose to camp out in front of the doors of stores or hover over your laptop waiting for flash sales. If you lean towards the latter, you can call a halt on all spending and refuse to purchase even a takeaway coffee or loaf of bread.

Perhaps, as some Buy Nothingers are planning, you could wander round stores with an empty trolley. I know where my feelings lie. It’s the possibility of buying nothing that makes my heart sing.

Life, for much of the rich world, is one long Black Friday. Consumer society is always giving us some fresh reason to spend. And it’s not just the fact that every time you step out your door or go online there’s some advert or marketing strategy, it’s that all our rituals, all our exchanges, are now part of the collusion to make us buy more. From Hallowe'en to children’s birthdays or exhortations to treat yourself and indulge, we all egg each other on in this conspiracy of consumerism. Hallowe'en spending has rocketed in the UK from £100 million a decade ago to over £500 million this year. I myself bought a Mohican wig for my son, as well as vampire teeth and an alien brain hat, plus four cauldrons for the school disco.

Most messed up is our relationship to gifts. Most people, on receipt of a gift then feel obliged to reciprocate in kind. There is a politics of gift-giving that almost always leads to more gifts, and it’s incredibly hard to break those conventions. If you say you don’t want presents at a wedding or children’s party and that instead just want cash, it seems you are being a bit crass. If you say you don’t want anything at all, you’re just plain weird, and mendaciously depriving others of the pleasure of giving.

Consumerism is good at making us feel bad for not embracing it fully enough. If you’re not treating yourself, or someone else, somehow you’re not living properly. You’re a Scrooge; a hair-shirted Grinch who doesn’t understand what it is to be on the breadline and unable to pay your bills but craving the latest tablet just like everyone else. If you reject Black Friday you’re a middle-class liberal sneering at working-class shoppers whose only chance at a widescreen telly is the discount.

But we are not divided in being victims of consumerism. All of us are there, hypnotised by the same snake-oil. Black Friday wouldn’t be the monstrosity it is if it was merely driven by the spending of low-earners. When one of the much-hyped Black Friday deals of the year is the Nutribullet – "The World's Original Nutrient Extractor" – you know that the middle-class are in the scrum too.

Of course, the pressures of consumerism do exert themselves more greatly on the poor. It’s they who work longer hours, save less and are more likely to get into debt. This makes it all the more tragic to learn that Which? magazine recently found that 49 per cent of Black Friday deals were cheaper at other times of year.

But buy nothing for me doesn’t just mean don’t buy any gadget or other consumer product destined only to end up in landfill. It doesn’t just mean don’t buy material products. It also applies to the whole new market that exists in "experiences". For consumerism isn’t just about the stuff, it’s about selling us activities we never yearned for, often as presents and treats: the hot air balloon rides, the tank-driving days, the spa sessions. Many of us, in a bid to avoid contributing more waste to landfill and clutter to our homes, are choosing to purchase these instead. But aren’t we just shifting from material stuff to digital stuff and experiential junk? Our idea of a life literally well spent is changing – but it remains all about spending.

We could surely do better than this as a way of life. Not long after the financial crisis, American activist Jeffrey Kaplan, writing in Orion magazine, proposed that if United States society made a collective decision to get by on the amount they produced and consumed 17 years ago, they could cut back from the standard 40-hour week to 5.3 hours a day. Instead we consume more, and work more, in a seemingly unstoppable cycle.

In some ways, of course, a buy-nothing day is all too easy. When your larder is already stocked, your broadband already paid for, it’s easy to get through a day without flashing your debit card at a contactless reader, or digging into your purse. Probably you’ve already paid for most of the services you use through direct debit. But at least it provides us all with a focus, a reason to consider what it would be like to live the rest of the year, purchasing nothing but the basics needed to survive.

At least it allows us to cast a glimpse, for a moment, outside the consumer bubble.