Consumed - Escaping the Grip of Consumer Culture

I've recently decided to take a step back and analyze my spending. I've always enjoyed minimalism, and keeping my belongings curated, but I still occasionally find myself falling back into bad shopping habits. There are many reasons for this: boredom, sadness, influence, and distraction...

What prompted my most recent backslide was my husband getting a raise. To give a little context, I've always been what I would consider a medium earner while my husband has always worked minimum wage or not at all. My income was enough to pay our bills, but there was never any wiggle room.

Recently my husband had gotten a new, better paying job, and our financial circumstances improved greatly. We had taken on some debt, and were now paying it off quickly, as well as having some extra for our rainy day fund. With the new numbers in the bank, I found myself back-sliding into mindless spending.

You might think, "Wait, if you can afford it now, what's the issue?" Besides the oncoming recession barreling towards us, we're also ass-deep in an environmental crises partially caused by our culture's astronomical rate of consumption. People are using consumption to distract themselves more and more; scrolling TikTok shop has replaced reading and credit cards and pay-later apps have replaced budgeting and pocket-books.

But I get it. I get the allure of pretty things and the craving for that dopamine hit associated with getting a package in the mail.

There is a woman named Ashley Viola who makes commentary on social issues. In a recent video, she was talking about how millennials and gen-z have found many traditional indicators of "success" out of reach for us. College is unaffordable and results in crippling debt, and the only fellow millennials I know who own a home either got a loan from their parents, or someone died and left them a house.

Real investments are difficult to acquire, so people in our generation often settle for what is accessible to them: stuff. Clothes, makeup, and whatever else is trending. We've transformed overconsumption into the new indicator of "success."

I'm tired of falling into cycles of consuming and decluttering, caused by buying shit I don't need for a fleeting dopamine hit. It's time for a change.

So what did I do about it?

Deleting my social media accounts and wiping my Youtube algorithm

• Instagram

  • This one is probably the most obvious one for me. Not only is it heavily curated to an unrealistic degree, but the advertisements are constant and pervasive. I've been tricked into buying so much shit I did not need from aesthetic advertisements.

• Pinterest

  • I'm not gonna lie, Pinterest has always had a special place in my heart. It's where I used to get all my recipes before they became so unreliable, and my interior design ideas before it was all AI. The advertisements are disguised to look like real content, which is morally questionable, and the amount of them is just insane. I still keep a Pinterest account to circulate my blog posts, but that's all I use it for now.

• TikTok

  • Okay, I admit I've never actually had a TikTok account, but I have watched a lot of commentary specifically about TikTok shop. People often complain that TikTok has become a shopping site just as much as a place for social media, and TikTok creators have a reputation for being some of the least honest influencers. Some of my favorite creators from Youtube say they often find themselves buying things they don't need on TikTok simply because of how easy it is and how calculated the advertisements are.

• Youtube

  • Youtube can be an amazing tool for learning, but it can also be a catalyst for misinformation and unrealistic lifestyle propaganda. Some of the most engaged-with content is vapid and consumeristic, and I don't want that shit on my feed anymore. No more "what I eat in a day"s presenting me caloric deficits like it's a lifestyle, no more "go to bed with me"s advertising 17 skincare products and taping my eyebrows to my forehead. Even some influencers I liked I had to opt out of, because they're likability is why I bought what they advertised. I now use Youtube as a tool to learn and stay informed about the world around me.

    
    

Removed shopping applications from my phone

• I would often find myself scrolling through YesStyle or Olive Young, two of my most visited apps for buying skincare and makeup, whenever I would get bored. Buying things from these sites became a lot less enticing once I stopped consuming social media, which would drive me to purchase items I recognized, but it's still just shopping out of boredom. Using shopping sites like a form of entertainment is a dangerous game, much like window shopping. Sure, I might not buy anything, but I probably had to work a LOT harder to convince myself not to, so why force myself all that effort?

• Decision fatigue tells us that every time I present myself with the choice to buy, I am wearing down my ability to think critically and make the right decision. Removing the trigger relieves me of the choice.

Decision fatigue is “the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make more decisions over the course of a day becomes worse,” said Dr. MacLean. “The more decisions you have to make, the more fatigue you develop and the more difficult making decisions can become.”

Reading instead of scrolling

• If you're anything like me, you love the library and your tbr list is a mile long...but when I get home from a long day at work where I've spent all day reading documents, it can be hard to choose a book over a phone game or doom scrolling. Pinterest is very enticing for zoning out and turning off my brain. I started by going through my libraries catalog and saving or reserving all the books I'm interested in, that way I can just pick up my holds; it requires no money and very little time. I carve out time that seems the most reasonable for me to read, my lunch hours, or before I go to bed at night. These are the times I find myself scrolling the most.

  
  

Ditching TJ Maxx and Marshalls.

• These places are my kryptonite, especially after moving to the west coast where their selection of skincare (my weakness) is so much better. If you let me in here I WILL find something to buy - and the fact that it's all "discounted" makes it hard to resist. It's one of those situations where you need to remind yourself your not actually saving money if you didn't need it in the first place.

  
  

  Me at TJ Maxx

  
  

Budgeting.

• It's impossible to control your finances without some form of budget. For me I just used a google spreadsheet (linked below). I compiled a list of all our expenses and all our income, then subtracted one from the other. Boom, done. This showed me how much extra income I had available to tackle the next step:

  
  

Debt pay-off and savings goals.

• In 2023 I was laid off from my programming job with 10% of the company. They claimed it was "random selection" but somehow most of the pregnant women were laid off, myself included at 8 months pregnant. I had been the provider for my family for years at that point, and we had just used up most of our savings moving to Oregon and preparing for the new baby. After the layoff, we went into debt to keep us afloat while I was unable to work because Echo was too young for daycare. During this time we racked up a terrifying $12k in debt. After Echo was 3 months old, I took another job in technology, but with a better work life balance for my daughter's sake. Unfortunately that also translated into less money, and it wouldn't be until 2025 that we would stop living paycheck to paycheck.

• After finding out how much expendable income we had, I developed a plan to pay $1000 a month towards the credit cards, and $500 a month into a rainy day fund, so we can avoid the same mistakes in the future. It's painful to think about how much money we could have had in a rainy day fund before the layoff if I would have put all the money I spent shopping into a savings account, but we live and we learn.

If you're interested in the template I used for my budget, it's available here for free:

Monthly Budget Template

This also includes the plan I made for repaying our cc debt on the right-hand side.

Do you have any other tips or tricks you use to curb mindless spending? Let me know!