The average person sees about 5,000 ads per day and 5.3 trillion display ads are shown online every year. Total U.S. credit card debt stands at a staggering $1.26 trillion. The typical consumer spends about $254 per month on impulse buys, for a total of $3,045 annually.
Clearly, as a nation, we have an overconsumption problem. We scatter our money hither and yon partly because we live in the richest country in history. But it also has much to do with the modern advertising industry, which uses advanced psychology to manipulate people.
This consumerist economy flips the usual business/customer dynamic on its head. As YouTuber, early retiree, and frugality proponent Gabe Bult has explained, in the modern attention economy, people are the products. Technology companies–from TV networks to social media giants–sell individuals’ information and attention to other companies who want to display ads to a large audience. The “free” websites we use aren’t really free; we’re paying for them through our attention and the money we end up spending as a result of advertisements.
Everyone Isn’t ‘Buying In’
But a portion of the American population has started pushing back against the never-ending buying-frenzy. These people are exhausted by ads bludgeoning them to buy, disgusted with the heaps of items cascading across the living room and kitchen counter, and sickened by the bloated feeling of having spent too much money and accumulated too much stuff for too little return in happiness and wellbeing.
“More people are realizing they spend many hours a day as captives to advertisers, and the psychological manipulation in all those messages is taking a toll,” Robbie Hyman, author of the forthcoming book “The Money Savvy Teen,” told The Epoch Times. “Many of us are deciding we’d rather just go back to being productive and saving the fruits of what we produce.”
While much of social media is dominated by salesmen disguised as “influencers” and advertisements disguised as “content,” a portion has taken a very different turn, a portion in which you can hear the voices of quiet resistance to the consumerist economy. “Underconsumption core” is a trending lifestyle hashtag, with many millions of shares on TikTok and other platforms, and “Buy Nothing” groups—which try to reduce consumerism by sharing goods within communities—proliferate on Facebook. There’s even a designated app for such groups.
To really initiate a consumption reset, some especially ambitious folks have attempted an entire year of buying no—or very few—unnecessary items, with some surprising results. Angela Szot, for example, paid off over $19,000 in debt on a $45,000 salary by participating in a “no-buy year.” Another woman, Mia Westrap, a Ph.D. student in the U.K., said of her no-buy year, “I’ve never once in my life finished a month with a positive number—but this year I’ve finally managed to save. It’s like a weight off my shoulders that I didn’t realize I had and I just feel so much lighter. I didn’t realize how high stakes it was that I had absolutely nothing to fall back on in an emergency.”
These trends and stories represent a growing movement of people slashing their way out of the jungle of consumerism to breathe the open air of … living a more reasonable life.
“Humans are not, by nature, ‘consumers.’ We’re producers,” Hyman said. “We build things. Treating consumerism as a lifestyle or a pastime is a very new idea in human history, and it became possible only because we’ve gotten so efficient at producing things.”
According to Hyman, the underconsumption trend is really just a return to normality. “This underconsumption trend simply reflects humans reverting to our nature. We feel more comfortable making things than mindlessly walking through stores or scrolling through websites looking for things to buy.”
Underconsumption champions minimalism, frugality, mending, and making do, in an effort to correct the normalization of perpetual buying that has come to define American society. It manifests in TikTok videos where users display items they’ve had for a long time, or possessions they’ve repaired, or their methods for getting by with less. It showcases a lifestyle of “just enough” instead of “just one more.”
Writing for The Conversation, professors of retail management Omar Fares and Seung Hawn Lee described the trend: “Instead of showcasing large hauls of clothing, makeup or over-flowing fridge shelves, users are posting videos showing thrift store purchases, modest wardrobes and practical, well-used everyday items.”
“The rise of this trend can be linked to several challenges facing young people today, including increasing economic pressures, environmental concerns and social pressures, all of which are particularly affecting Gen Z and younger Millennials.”
Other Rationales
Other motives include the desire to minimize one’s environmental impact, conserve resources, reduce waste, and simply achieve greater wellbeing. Many people who embrace underconsumption realize the degree to which they had become enslaved to the consumerist machine. They discover greater freedom and a renewed clarity about what really brings happiness and fulfillment (hint: not stuff).
Another motive has to do with freedom. Many Americans no longer want to feel manipulated and programmed by corporations and advertising agencies to boost corporate profits while undermining their own financial situation. If “programmed” seems too strong a word, consider what marketing consultant and economist Victor Lebow said in 1955:
“Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption a way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions in consumption. … We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-growing rate.”
The reality is that our post-industrial world is too efficient at producing goods. The only way to keep the model profitable is to convince people to buy things they don’t need. This describes pretty well the aim of modern advertising agencies, and it’s well-known that they make use of manipulative psychological tools to achieve this end.
Underconsumption is about more than just saving money. It’s about reorienting our lives around more important things than the latest gadget or fashion trend. It’s about refusing to participate in a system that capitalizes on our insecurities and irrational desires for its own profit. It’s about living more simply and more sanely by putting away the credit card and appreciating what we already have.
