How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love The No Buy
No Buys are a shopping detox. In a No Buy challenge you try to drastically reduce your spending.
No Buys have been on my mind since starting this blog. This blog deals with over-consumption, environmental damage, the unpleasantness of material pleasures, and frugality, and the No Buy challenge has a lot of shared goals: these two articles by frugality bloggers should exemplify. I was, at first, skeptical about such a dramatic change in shopping habits, and with the rhetoric that surrounds a No Buy. It’s no coincidence that the Shopping Addiction subreddit has r/NoBuy as one of its listed sister communities. For those in the throes of shopping dependency, a No Buy is seen as the first step toward sobriety. It’s rehab. And while I have purchased stupid things before, I don’t have a dependency and I don’t need rehab. Dieting is another clear analogue to the No Buy, and I know that diets often trample people’s willpower, thus having the unintended outcome of weight gained rather than lost. Reading the desperate posts on r/NoBuy, some of which seemed to have the same magical thinking regarding a No Buy as some have for magic bullet diets (and the same shame with respect to failure), I was convinced that this practice likely did more harm than good. It’s too drastic a change, too draconian.
But, after reading a recent piece from the New York Times, my skepticism has softened. Instead, I think that No Buys and my Nothing New challenge both work because they change the act of buying things into a game of sorts. Artificial rules around consumption forces one to be mindful about purchases. By increasing mindfulness, we make better purchases and in general decrease our consumption, even if we don’t end up cutting off consumption entirely.
The NYT article is a lifestyle piece that walks through how 2020’s exposure of the iniquities inherent in our over-consuming lifestyle inspired many to adopt various anti-consumption habits. This includes the No Buy, but it also includes intentional living communities with pooled resources, and general ambitions towards frugality. It does a good job, I think, of linking up the various communities—No Buys, used goods, intentional living communes, frugality blogging—inspired by our cultural break up with consumption.
But, more importantly, it made me realize that the No Buy is not a draconian rehab program at all, but the creation of an intimate, personal set of rules to guide you towards a more mindful consumption mentality. Elizabeth Chai, featured in the New York Times, doesn’t starve herself entirely of frivolous purchases: “Despite her buy-nothing pledge, she also still supports small businesses like independent coffee shops through purchases of food and coffee, or through donations.”
And while at first one might say that this breaks the No Buy rules—that Ms. Chai is a professed kosher halal vegan who also eats pork—I don’t think that’s the case! What I realized in reading about Ms. Chai’s No Buy is that No Buys are not, like the 12 steps, a one-size-fits-all plan, but that rather each person who undertakes a No Buy ends up writing their own personal set of rules by which to abide. Here’s a post on r/NoBuy with a No Buyer’s handwritten set of No Buy rules. This set of rules, from the same subreddit, reads like a diary entry—I particularly love how it switches from first and second person, “you” and “we” interchangeably, throughout the post, just like I do when I’m writing in my journal. Ms. Chai best outlines how personal these rules are for No Buyers: “She considered sharing her list of rules. (OK to buy: coffee filters, tech items if something is broken, gifts. Not OK: cookware, storage bins, notebooks.) ‘But that is such a tricky thing because the rules I came up with are very specific to me,’ she said.”
Which leads to our twist ending, or twist beginning, which is that despite my initial hesitancy toward the concept, I have been conducting a No Buy all of this time! I wrote a down a list of rules—nothing new, including no new software, with a weekly consumption diary to keep myself honest—and I have lived by them, just like Ms. Chai.
Yet, shouldn’t we be skeptical of No Buys if they don’t even have an agreed upon definition? We would not allow an alcoholic to define sobriety; why do the same with consumption?
I will say, for those who have a legitimate shopping addiction, who find themselves maxing out credit cards or stealing cash from their partner in order to buy things, that a No Buy should likely be strict. But, for the average shopper, it is this flexibility, and focus on developing rules that are meaningful to the individual, that leads to success. No Buys work because rules force one to “play” a game when one consumes, which prevents you from purchasing mindlessly.
The benefit of mindful consumption I have mentioned before. I think that the New York Times piece further affirms the value of mindfulness, and how the mindfulness developed is more important than the rote rules themselves. For Ms. Chai, limiting what she could buy made her more mindful of the things she already owned. The product of this was a deep contentedness with the objects that composed her life: “Because she certainly doesn’t regret it. ‘I’m looking around and everything is something I want to be in here,’ she said.”
The same has happened to me. I have learned to deeply appreciate my rice cooker and my French press. I have learned that my collection of stuffed animals provided me some joy, but they would likely make the young girl in my apartment complex more happy, so I gave many to her. I no longer need to rely on buying things for a quick dopamine hit. The rules themselves of the Nothing New challenge do not include “appreciate your rice cooker more,” but a second order effect of adhering to this challenge is this contentedness. In the same way that learning meditation is not primarily about learning how to breathe, but about developing mindfulness in daily life, I think that No Buys and Nothing News promote mindfulness in our use of products, and that it is this end that makes them valuable.
I will make another analogy to diet: I have been vegan for nine years. Veganism, of course, means that I do not consume meat or animal products such as eggs and milk. In some ways, my Nothing New challenge reminds me of the personal benefits I have reaped from veganism.
Veganism on its own does not ensure health. Oreos and Monster Energy are vegan, after all. Unlike other diets which are outcomes based, focusing on calories in and calories out, veganism does not define a relationship to macronutrients but a relationship to ingredients, and this relationship is not in itself a guarantee of health.
The rules of veganism on their own have benefits for health. Veganism cuts out some of the worst offenders in American diets, like class 1 carcinogen processed meats, high cholesterol red meat and high-saturated fat butters. Again, it is possible to replace these with a truly heinous diet, but I think that a tangential benefit of veganism, one which mirrors the benefits of the No Buy, may help prevent this. When you adopt a vegan diet, you are forced to think about food in terms of ingredients. A trip to the supermarket is an active journey rather than a passive one, one in which you will review the ingredients of products and think through them and their merits. I have become more mindful in my shopping, and more mindful in my cooking, and because of this I seek out ingredients that are good for my health rather than mindlessly grab high sodium chips, even though that is technically within the rules.
I guess, with veganism and with No Buys, it’s the spirit of the law that matters, and that following the letter of the law helps one to build the mindfulness to follow its spirit, to commit.
And, finally, I want to circle back to the initial conundrum of how personal No Buy rules are. How can we take them seriously as a genre of challenge if they do not have an agreed upon rule book? Well, with veganism there is a lot less set a rule book than one at first thinks. I eat honey and yeast, two items that not everyone considers to be vegan. There is an open debate on the veganism of figs. This leads to much needless sectarian conflict—if one is reducing their consumption of animal products, that is a good thing for the planet, even if exceptions are made for figs or even (gasp) the occasional cheat day.
The No Buy seems similar to me. Of course, a No Buy whose rules allow an exception for buying as much Beanie Babies and Tamagotchis as the No Buyer wants seems suspect to me, like a vegan who makes an exception for unlimited bacon. I don’t think it’s too absurd to disqualify that as a No Buy. But the finer details, whether or not to agree with Ms. Chai and replace a broken laptop, or to see such a purchase as disqualifying, do not seem worth quibling over. The benefit does not reside in the rules as written, after all, but in the personal aspirations that they represent, and the fact that any reduction in consumption will reap benefits for one’s pocket book and the planet.