(No. 14) Entering a low-buy year
(No. 14) Entering a low-buy year
How-to guide + strategy for understanding spending habits, rediscovering beauty, and untangling self-esteem
As heard in A Christmas Carol last night at the Goodman Theater, “It’s the time of year when want is keenly felt and abundance rejoices.” And in this spirit…
Next year will be hard. I don’t have a problem with overspending but I do spend compulsively to escape and validate myself, and with every beautiful, chic, transporting item, my anxiety grows.
Low-buy year is an alteration of a no-buy year, with similar tenants. Unnecessary purchases are limited or restricted completely. My no-buy attempt for 2023 failed hilariously in January over a pair of white Hoth-like snow boots, but, alas, we try again. This year is different. I’ve identified what I want to get out of it and, most importantly, I’ve prepared. I’ll tell you how.
To be clear, there are very real and brutal restrictions on personal budgets for many reasons and I’m privileged to focus on purchasing less not by necessity, but by desire.
The two main pain points with my current spending are:
My compulsion to purchase items that transport or validate me
My self-esteem is wrapped around the items I own
Why am I spending compulsively?
As is, I wait 24 hours to purchase something I’ve seen to dampen the now-or-never effect. It’s crucial for the way I shop—which is almost exclusively second-hand, so the selection is unique and limited by default, feeding a perpetual fear response. I’m not spending to feel the satisfaction of purchasing or acquiring, but I’m compelled by what the item offers. It becomes all-encompassing.
I want to live a futuristic but rural landscape where my bed is built into a pocket in the wall, so I’ll need a handmade fur shawl or Robert Sonneman lamp. In the Schitt’s Creek world, I’ll wear a Dries Van Noten gown and Proenza Schouler jacket. A pair of cork boots or trail runners and I’d be out west again, in dry air, wafting pine needles and sage.
My attention is strapped to my surroundings, constantly fixating on aesthetics as both a cause and effect of anxiety. My aesthetic prowess is a dedicated weapon, but the only moving and changeable item in a still-life is my gaze. I want to deeply accept that I can decide what is beautiful or immersive.
I also compulsively spend to uphold authenticity—to live more sustainably, more thoughtfully, old-fashioned, fashionable, to be seen as chic, a leader, a personal brand.
Everything can be replaced and made better. A wooden trash bin for the plastic with dovetail joints and 500-grit sandpaper. Natural fiber clothing and handmade wool stockings. Now to herd sheep, sheer the wool, spin the fiber. A refurbished film camera. Wireless headphones. Electronic composter. Influence and redefine. Influence and redefine.
It’s an exhausting spiral that serves the ego and makes me feel responsible for everything I see, touch, ingest, feel, and become. For a person to become a brand, they must become finite, one flavor, reproducible. This is the opposite of a person—this is an item.
The things I acquire to authenticate myself and my beliefs encase me in a box. I stack the pretty things around me so high I can’t move, paralyzed by my dazzling definition of myself, I’m petrified into an object.
Replacing with the ‘real thing’ doesn’t make anything real except the anxiety that caused me to think too hard and too long about things I can’t change.
A lover of beautiful things
My other, bigger, badder problem is an unquenchable thirst for beauty and attraction. I resonate with how the Hidden Brain episode, “The Mystery of Beauty,” describes beauty:
“And if we think about the words that sometimes we use for attractive people that are similar to beauty, we use words like glamorous and charming and enthralling, enchanting. These are all magic words. There's a sense in which that there's something magical about this, this, this experience.”
My self-esteem has become synonymous with the creation of this magic. In my fashion and my taste, I weave enchantment, mystery, and otherwordly personality, hoping that my mind will follow and my daily life will etherealize into something better than the present.
I feel at peace with the reality of my hair, face, and body, but fashion and furnishings can be upgraded and rotated, higher quality, more flattering, and more magical.
I’ve conflated my image as my experience. I can’t deal with a JCPenny blouse but I’d feel completely comfortable in a (second-hand) number from Loewe or Christopher John Rogers. Context and slight aesthetics, but I’m suffocated by that small gap.
Fashion is increasingly ironic because nothing is quite as fashion as camp. But enhancing my style with context and irony and meaning doesn’t enhance my worldview. I can’t have a good experience of life if I’m cynical about my tank.
Ali Rothberg writes for Form,
“While theoretically promoting inclusivity and creativity in the fashion realm, [ironic fashion] loses its potential for good in its promotion of cynicism, as well as intellectual and economic elitism…
And while many of us welcome this opportunity to excuse a wardrobe disaster as deliberate… this need to be ostensibly ‘in the know’ is telling of the problem with ironic fashion — it is not as inclusive as it appears.”
I’m not different than anyone else because I’m wearing designer pants on the bus. I’m signaling community to a niche subsection of people, but even if I wasn’t, I’d still be in the same carpeted seat on my way to work.
Contextual beauty has infected my self-esteem so that I only feel successful, powerful, and attractive through physical items. Although I can love and adore their mystique, the Tacchini sofa or Hans Agne Jakobsson lamp can’t make my lounge session any more glamorous.
The runway and the gallery are products of art, but I’m not a product, I’m a lens, I’m alive. It only serves to grow the industry to have consumers captive to their egos. I want to be happier, less focused on myself, and more open to digging deeper, past my aesthetic surroundings, to the systems and beliefs that make the neighborhood and the people in my life tick.
My deep appreciation for beauty, materiality, and magic is searching for something more concrete to grasp.
More on beauty attraction and embodiment in the video above.
A low-buy year guide to success
Let’s get into it.
Any time of limited spending has the potential to improve a mindset or achieve a goal. I’m committing to a year to give my brain the time it needs to recalibrate some deep orientations.
First, I set intentions.
My clutter is usually sentimental, ‘I’m keeping this because it’s a gift or a memory,’ or anticipatory, ‘I might need this someday.’ These are past and future, not now, and I’m remembering this intention going forward for anything additional I might purchase. Some other intentions are:
Feel abundance
Saving for a future house or homestead
Target a real source of happiness
Anti-anxiety
Healthier self-esteem
Then, I set guidelines.
For my guidelines, I’m following a Green-Yellow-Red light system that I credit to this video by Grace Nevitt. The list below is very personal to me so I’d advise you to craft your own over days or even weeks to get a realistic sense of what you could manage.
Lastly, I set failsafe strategies.
I listed immaterial strategies to feel more confident and valuable in lieu of beautiful gorgeous luxury products. Here is my non-official list of ways to embody, not own, chicness:
Carry a water bottle
Be an observer, not a participant, in stressful situations
Lint roll your clothing
Ask people questions
Smile and wave at people you know
Turn off a show or movie halfway if you’re not interested
Speak slowly and somewhat loudly
Not too loudly
Increase your vocabulary
Gesture often with your hands
Spice up your email signature
Prioritize fresh air
Trust your decisions
Accept that sometimes those decisions were bad
Walk slowly and without your phone
Say things like “I’m so chic today”
Ultimately, I want to live thoughtfully… so desperately that I’ve gone through painstaking efforts to spell it out here, to you, but also to myself.
If you’re also struggling with compulsive, emotional, or displaced spending habits, you might benefit from tighter guidelines than these, maybe even a booklet by a small creator similar to the below.
To reiterate, I’m able to do this because I have everything I need to live and be comfortable already.1 And that comfort isn’t because I earned it, but because the socio-political landscape in my community keeps my demographic in power. I can donate, volunteer, and advocate for disenfranchised communities, but if I don’t also accept and feel abundance in my situation, I’ll be a never-ending vat of take and self-focus.
Maybe at the end of 2024, I’ll have less anxiety. Maybe I’ll feel desirable and magical for my soul and mind and see beauty in mundane rooms.
Maybe I’ll believe myself when I think:
Material items will not make me beautiful, because beauty standards are fake, and real beauty is not a material item.
I can be desirable, successful, and happy with everything I already own.
Conceiving of myself, or anyone, as a personal brand is impossible, egoizing, and counterintuitive to the human experience.
I am not responsible for the aesthetics of the world around me.
I can live in beautiful and authentic ways that are immaterial.
Okay. Be well.
[Fin]
If you’re looking to donate this holiday season, check out this post on what shelters typically need the most and/or this article on choosing a destination for charitable giving.