Nothing New, A Challenge and a Community
Briefly or at length, a tentative desire, an actionable goal, rules to get me there, and a larger aspiratoin.
A Tentative Desire: There is, and I am surfing upon it as well, a wave of anti-consumerism fomenting. I can describe it as the following recognition in my soul: that the mere act of purchasing soothes me and gives me a bright bubble of joy, a fact which frightens me. Ordering something from Amazon, be it a designer pair of sunglasses I used for a week, or an old word processor from the 90s that I used for a semester, provides me a rush long before the product arrives at my door. In these particularly blue times, to self-soothe, I ask myself how can I spend a bit of dough. With giddy, earlier this year, I browsed AliExpress, wondering what Singles Day offer might make me happy. Black Friday is more holiday to me than Thanksgiving (though, as an indigenous person, this may be more indicative of my distaste for the latter).
I no longer want to derive my self-worth and identity and pleasure from buying things, from spending cash. Because, it has gotten to this point, and I believe that it has gotten to this point for a number of people. The mere act of exchanging cash should not be such a defining aspect of my life, and I shouldn’t look forward to the ability to wake up and surf deals for Singles Day. To me, this is what it means to be opposed to consumerism: to not make pleasure out of purchasing, but to experience pleasure without purchase.
One could imagine a world where this pleasure-complex associated with the act of purchasing in one’s daily life is innocent, but I do not believe it is. The reasons to resist the consumerist identity are multifarious. It’s why there is a wave of anti-consumerism. Or, frankly, given the many different reasons to divorce purchase and pleasure, there is more of a tide of anti-consumerism that produces lavish and grand waves to surf upon.
I want to detail them here a moment:
That of self-worth. Self-worth defined through objects, particularly objects that sparked little joy in their usage but great joy in the moment of their purchase, is an febrile self-worth which requires us to keep on purchasing objects. In other words, I never feel sustained joy from my purchases, and yet I keep making them. It is self-reinforcing, and not at all fulfilling. I think that COVID-19 has made that clear to a number of people that an identity based around what one consumes does little to staunch the pain in this world.
That of sustainability. The consumerist mode, in a way, makes every object single use and disposable. The purchase of a fashionable pair of glasses this last June was for the single purpose of having bought it. It had one use. And creating more and more one-use objects puts plastic into this planet. I am a proud environmentalist, like many in all save actions.
That of economic justice. The dollars I spend on fast fashion and on little electronic gadgets all end up in the hands of a wealthy elite, and since I ship so many of them from Amazon, I am rubber stamping the economic injustice that happens in Amazon warehouses, which were an issue before COVID-19 but are now all the more unconscionable.
That of counter-economics. Not to mention the sales tax placed upon these expenditures, which so rarely goes to funding our schools and so oft goes to police forces and the pockets of private prison barons.
That of simply owning too much stuff. I’m about to embark on a cross-country move, and so now I have to sell a number of things. This made me realize how much of my furniture, how much of my appliances, I simply don’t use.
That of hoarding objects. And the stuff I owned could be loved and enjoyed by someone else. A play off of Marie Kondo, none of these objects sparked joy… But they could be sparking joy for someone else! The recliner that I never used, but kept in my living room anyways, could have belonged to someone who adored it more than anything. It feels a little unfair to that person, not to mention the recliner itself, that it sat unused in my living room.
So, to be a consumerist is to take on a lot of guilt, and I don’t think that guilt is unwarranted! The cost of being a consumerist is to face the drawbacks above.
And guilt is only as useful as the action it spurs. So, I aim to use this guilt to do better.
An Actionable Goal: This goal however, to not be a consumerist, is nebulous. This is because consumerism is both a set of habits, a set of desires, and an identity.
It is a set of habits in that a consumerist purchases things for the pleasure of having purchased things.
It is a set of desires in that a consumerist desires to purchase for the sake of purchasing.
And it is an identity because it turns into a self-perception as to how we can become and remain happy.
Mending desires and identity is hard. (I don’t agree with everything Mark Manson puts out, but his work on Motivation shows how desires, identity, and actions interplay with one another).
As such, the goal of not being a consumerist is ill-defined, and likely cannot be benchmarked. I won’t know if it has happened.
So, that brings me to the goal, and the first purpose of this blog. I am going to change my habits! And to attain that goal, I am going to do the following: I am going to only buy used goods from December 2020 through December 2021. Everything used. Nothing New. That’s the goal. That’s the title of the blog.
Of course, this goal will not resolve the core issue of desiring to make purchases for the sake of purchases. I could go thrifting tomorrow and buy useless stuff to my heart’s content. But it makes it alot harder, and it at least assuages some of the benefits above, such as the issue of environmentalism and economic injustice. Substituting a nebulous goal for something a tad off center, but actionable, is always a winning move in my mind.
A Set of Rules:
I will have both strict and optional rules for this challenge.
Strict Rules.
I will record all purchases in this Substack as a weekly consumption diary. The format will delineate between physical exempt goods, digital exempt goods, physical watched goods, digital watched goods, and used goods in the restricted class.
I will prioritize purchasing from other people via Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, and then small businesses, and as a last resort large businesses. I hope to do this for all classes of goods.
The following classes of goods are EXEMPT from this challenge. Food, coffee, utilities, Internet, pens and pencils and paper (I’m a writer and drawing is a hobby of mine), cleaning supplies and kitchen supplies, rent, prescriptions, repairs. I will still record them for the sake of posterity.
The following classes of goods are WATCHED. This means I have to report them whenever I make a purchase, and I will try to purchase them sparingly. I will also write justifications for them in my consumption diary.
In-App Purchases and Paid Apps: Most digital entertainment is in the Restricted category. I use a set of productivity apps and education apps. I may decide to purchase the premium versions of certain applications. For example, I have considered buying the premium version of a speed reading app for some time. Since digital media cannot come used, and these purchases are often a few cents, I have decided to leave them merely as watch. Additionally, buying a new app on my phone that is not free out of the gate does not feel like it’s worth banning entirely. The catch here is that they need to be educational or related to productivity: no buying resin on Genshin Impact.
Travel and Experiences: Experiences are slightly better than objects, but I think they still can come in consumerist flavors. The mere act of renting an Airbnb gives me consumerist pleasure long before I actually go there. As such, I want to limit what I spend on experiences too. The adage that millennials prefer experiences to goods is true, and I think a welcome edit to the consumerist script, but it is still expenditure that often feels synthetic for me, a purchase qua purchase. Travel, experiences, all will be on watch. Museum tickets, movie tickets, concert tickets all belong in this category.
Used Books. I’m a big bibliophile, and a thing I noticed when packing to move across the country is the enormous number of books I own but will likely never reread. Since buying these books, even used, prevents someone else from reading them, I aim to get my books from my local library as often as possible.
All other goods are RESTRICTED. I will not buy them new. A few musings follow.
Digital video games. As I don’t own a console, I will not be able to purchase used games, and so digital video games are out of the question. The one exception to this is my Humble Choice subscription. Since I purchased it at a special rate, and it gives me twelve new games each month, and proceeds go to charity, I am going to make an exception for this. However, I will neither buy from the Humble Store nor Steam.
All Other Digital Entertainment. I will not rent movies or purchase audiobooks. Buying apps and certain in-app purchases delineated in Watched are exceptions to this.
Furniture and Appliances. Since I am moving across the country, this will likely be the first major hurdle.
I will start with the following items. I currently own these things. Since I am moving across the country, it is rather minimal.
Two laptops (a Dell Gaming Laptop and a Lenovo Thinkpad)
One smartphone (a Motorola w/ two Moto Mods, projector and speaker).
An Xbox Controller.
A rice cooker.
A French press.
Clothes.
My diary.
Some art supplies.
Some mugs.
A number of stuffed animals.
A very nice projector.
A rather bulky Steam library.
An Audible library with 57 titles.
Notice: no furniture, few appliances.
I will also have the following digital subscriptions. Digital subscriptions and digital entertainment are a complicated part of this project, because they cannot be purchased new. That being said, I will not purchase any new prescriptions atop of these. Additionally, I will be cancelling a subscription to Audible.
A Netflix subscription through my parents.
An Amazon Prime membership.
A subscription to Humble Choice.
Optional Rules.
I will try to sell or donate my own goods that I am no longer using. The nice thing about a Substack recording my purchases is that I will be able to quickly review the items that I have purchased and whether or not I have used them. Indeed, I will also allow followers of this Substack to have first dibs. Since you know how much I’ve paid for a given good, I won’t be able to low ball you. (I list this rule as optional because there is not a set time limit as to when I will
I will try to post in this Substack to build a personal identity around Nothing New. I will both report my personal purchases but also my personal thoughts. My reasoning for this is based on something I read in Nir Eyal’s Indistractable, and it traces back to what I mentioned about habits, desires, and identity. One of Eyal’s major insights is that how one identifies oneself, how one defines oneself, can have a great impact on our habits. “I shouldn’t give into distraction,” is a weak sentiment that often doesn’t get results, whereas saying “I do not give into distraction; I am an Indistractable person.” This insight has worked for me, and changing my self-perception to be an Indistractable person has indeed helped me to not give into the temptations of social media. I am hoping that by writing about anti-consumerism, I can do something similar: build an identity around buying nothing new and thereby dampening the consumerist desires I outlined above.
I will try to build community on this Substack where possible. I think that the goal of consuming less is noble within itself, and so building a community around this habit would be useful. Because there is no one to keep us accountable for making silly purchases for the sake of brief feelings, it is easy to make them.
A Larger Aspiration: Like most good things, this came to me in a dream, this last point at least. I had a dream where there was a yellow website called Nothing New, which I had founded in this dream, which provided a community home for people interested in buying less and resisting the gravity of consumerism. The final point above, about building a community, is my ultimate desire. But, I have never built a community, and there is no bible on how to do it. So instead I am going to focus on something that I do know, which is how to budget, and how to write, and how to adopt new habits.
But at the end of the day, I want to make this strange yellow website from my dream into a reality and this is the way I might begin it. As such, I accept this challenge to buy Nothing New.