Yahoo Lifestyle We have enough stuff. No-buy 2025 offers other ways to fill the void.
Stephanie Noble was easily influenced. The 38-year-old would turn to her phone to relax and scroll. When she saw influencers exclaim that they couldn’t live without a product, Noble decided she needed that product, too. Within seconds of being on Instagram and TikTok, she would have a confirmation email and a tracking number.
“I would do no critical thinking,” she remembers. “I would just click ‘checkout.’”
Six months ago, Noble took stock of the boxes filling her Salt Lake City home, many of them unopened. Lip glosses had accumulated like bottles in a spice drawer. Pants and vests with their tags still attached lay next to towering piles of skin-care products, including some duplicates - products she had purchased, forgotten about and bought again. Looking at the piles of stuff, she didn’t feel that her life had been filled with the ease and beauty that the influencers had promised. She felt disgust.
“What is the point of all of this?” she wondered. She thought about not only the money but also the waste, the carbon emissions, the weirdness of pursuing some kind of dream life by buying stuff recommended by strangers. “This isn’t who I am,” she thought. “It’s not what I value.”
That day, Noble embarked on a no-buy year, a self-imposed austerity measure that, along with its cousins low-buy and low-spend, has been in the zeitgeist for years. But the challenge has increasingly found purchase on social media, tucked between influencers touting sponsored content and directing followers to check out links in their bios. No-buy doesn’t mean abstaining from all purchases, but rather picking specific categories to avoid. For Noble, the rules are: No new clothing. No new shoes, accessories or jewelry. No new makeup or skin care, unless she is out of every product in that category.
More than six months have passed since Noble began her experiment. She hasn’t purchased anything on her no-buy list. She has so much excess that she hasn’t run out of makeup or skin care. Consuming content from influencers is “almost like you’re buying the lifestyle that they’re selling to you,” she said. “I kind of fell for that a lot.”
She is done falling for it.
“There is something more in this piling high than the quantity of products: the manifest presence of surplus, the magical, definitive negation of scarcity,” French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in his 1970 book, “The Consumer Society.” Since Baudrillard published those words, online shopping has removed the brakes from spending so that you move at crushing speed toward a purchase: Websites remember your credit card information, delivery is free, a convenient button urges one click to buy. The entire universe of shopping malls sits tidily in our pockets, thanks to our phones - only the scent of Cinnabon is missing. Since launching a shopping function last year, TikTok, once a thrilling mishmash of the fun and absurd, has homogenized, taking on a strange, sickly feeling of a 24/7 home shopping network with an endless parade of hosts holding up wares to the camera and speaking in the fluent patter of salespeople. Online shopping sales soared during the pandemic - on a line graph, the jump looks like the spike of a high heel you ordered online during a prolonged daydream - and they are now at an all-time high.
The result, no-buyers point out, is carbon emissions, clutter and credit card debt. The answer, they say, is to stop buying more stuff. In a 2020 article in Nature, researchers from the University of New South Wales agreed. “Long-term and concurrent human and planetary wellbeing will not be achieved in the Anthropocene if affluent overconsumption continues,” they argued. The researchers considered solutions as seismic as eco-anarchism, and changes as small as not buying so much stuff.
The no-buy conversation feels like a kind of counterprogramming against the overwhelming force of overt and covert advertising. On social media, it is a conversation dominated by women. Creators document their no-buy and low-buy years, sharing their tips and their savings. They subvert the aesthetic demands of social media by making content about “underconsumption core” (buying less stuff), and participate in the “pan project” (using makeup until you hit the metal pan that holds it). They recite in the world-weary tone of a parent talking to a teen: “You don’t need this lip gloss. You don’t need these shoes. You don’t need 12 water bottles.”
No-buy isn’t a new idea, but its renewed popularity feels like a quiet backlash against hyper-consumerism and an attempt to assert control in an uncertain economy, when the average credit card balance is the highest it has been among Americans in a decade. “We’re truly living in unprecedented times where it is so easy to get new stuff into our homes,” said Melissa Welch, a professional home organizer in Omaha whose clients are often overwhelmed by their own belongings. “It’s something we’ve never really been taught how to resist.” Despite the ease of online ordering, she said, shopping for stuff is time-intensive, and filling our homes with new things can make our lives worse.
“Consuming the way we consume is a full-time job in itself. You don’t notice until you stop because it’s so incredibly normalized,” said Aja Barber, the author of “Consumed.” The same people who say thrifting takes too much time, she noted, spend their evenings scrolling through thousands of products on the H&M website, deliberating over their digital shopping cart.
Shoppers believe that the online marketplace is convenient and somehow thriftier, Barber said, “when in actuality we’re donating a large portion of our salary and a large portion of our time on Earth to it.”
Buying can be seamless. Breaking the habit of buying things can be treacherous. Noble, a substance-use disorder counselor, said she used the skills she practiced in her own early recovery to get through the first days of her no-buy period. She put a “Days since I bought” counter on her phone and focused on exercise, journaling and spending time with other people. Slowly, she said, the desire to buy stuff evaporated. Welch prepared for her no-buy year by deleting her credit card information from online stores she frequented, removing all shopping apps and unsubscribing from marketing emails. She paid attention to accounts on social media that pushed shopping links, and unfollowed them.
The process is plodding and agonizing, but the results, believers say, are transformative. Angela Szot, a 32-year-old baker in Atlanta, said she paid off $35,000 of debt in a year and a half through a combination of downsizing her apartment and doing a prolonged no-buy period. Her spending habits, while not exorbitant, were constant: endless tchotchkes from Target and HomeGoods. Instead of decorating her apartment, she wanted to focus on saving for her dream home.
“I didn’t want to live in this pattern anymore - just paying the minimum payment, and then it’s building so much awful interest,” she said. She got a smaller apartment and made a list of no-buy rules. Through not buying things, she said, “your whole mindset changes: I go into Target now and I’m like, ‘This is all awful! None of this is good-quality. None of this makes me feel serotonin.’”
This is the no-buy gamble: that you might flip an internal switch that makes not buying feel more satisfying than buying. “Being able to walk past those things gives me more serotonin than buying it now,” Szot said. “It makes me feel so powerful.”
Every no-buyer has a different set of rules: Szot’s rules allow her small pleasures, such as a single candle at a time and takeout once a week. Welch, the organizer, believes “that everything we need has already been produced and is somewhere on Earth.” During her no-buy year, she will focus on thrifting needed items, including clothing and shoes for her toddlers.
Barber worries that no-buy sets people up to fail. “I just know that cold turkey doesn’t work for everyone,” she said. “I tell people to make achievable goals.” She recommends starting off with a month of low-buy, or trying to buy more than half of clothing secondhand. No-buy lacks the realism of a budget - it risks being something closer to an abstinence-only education. There are other pitfalls of no-buy: squelching small joys, cementing the feeling that poverty is your own fault, the unexpected purchases that come up when caring for other people.
But acolytes argue that the extreme nature of no-buy is a match for the extreme nature of consumer culture. We are not merely keeping up with the Joneses - the Joneses have crawled into bed with us and are telling us that we would feel better if we upgraded to Brooklinen sheets and installed blackout curtains. Thaddea Ampadu, a 24-year-old in Chicago, grew up in a low-income home and credits unfettered internet access with her long-held goal of being “this high-rise-living corporate baddie with the latest designer items.” As a consultant, she made enough money to buy everything she wanted: luxe winter coats, splashy trips, generous gifts for her younger siblings. She just didn’t make enough money to do that while living independently of her parents and saving for the future.
This month, she completed a low-buy year - no clothes, no makeup, fewer meals out. She saved enough to move out of her parents’ home and to max out her individual retirement account.
“The biggest thing I have taken away is that I do not have to live the life that I see online. I am just a regular person. I don’t have to curate my life for an audience,” she said. She likened watching a TikTok video and then buying everything in it to going to Ikea for a lamp and buying everything in the showroom. The people on her “For You” page look like her: young, ambitious, trendy. Because of that, it feels as if she might be one or two purchases away from having their lives. But it’s an illusion, Ampadu said.
“They’re doing it for their audience. They’re getting paid to do it,” she said. “Whereas I don’t have an audience. I’m not getting paid to do it. At the end of the day, I’m the one whose pockets are hurting.”
When Noble thinks about buying something but doesn’t do it, she sometimes takes the money she would have spent and transfers it into her savings account. Watching it grow has been a pleasure, she said, bolstered by feeling less anxiety and more gratitude for the things she already owns.
Not buying “makes you so mindful and aware of how much abundance you have in your life,” said Barber. “It’s amazing how you get out of the habit of consuming when you’re living your life using the things you already have.”
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