The Nothing New Challenge: 6-Month Review
This week, I released my 26th weekly consumption diary, meaning I have been writing this blog and doing my “nothing new” challenge for 26 weeks, half of the 52 that make up a year. I think half of a year is sufficiently portentous, and that I should opine a bit on the challenge, and what I currently make of it.
When I started this project, I wanted to become a more frugal person and I wanted to lessen my environmental impact. These are long term goals I have had. Additionally, I had started finding consumerism, and modern capitalism in general, more unappealing. Let me review the challenge then on these terms.
Frugality
It’s hard to judge here, since I never recorded a baseline. Additionally, since lockdown, I have generally been a more frugal person, having largely traded take-out for cooking at home and clamping down on travel, which was always my largest excess.
With lock down ending, I’ve already set up five trips. Since trips were never a regulated part of the challenge, this doesn’t go against the letter of the law, but it definitely isn’t frugal. Then again, prior to lock down, I used to travel at least twice a month. Likely I’m going to end up at a similar clip.
But there are some areas I’ve improved greatly! My best example here would be buying software. I used to buy a lot of unnecessary software, mostly video games, and since starting the Nothing New challenge, which specifically mentioned software as being non-exempt, I really haven’t had this problem. I haven’t purchased a video game since this all began. Additionally, books were another problem where I would always buy more books than I would read. I have not purchased a physical book since starting the challenge, and all of my literary consumption has been through audiobooks on Audible (a service which, despite being owned by the richest person on earth, I enjoy greatly).
Environmentalism
I think I have genuinely been more environmental thanks to this challenge.
With personal consumption, I think there are a few broad categories with major environmental impact: Food, transit, shipping, fashion.
Since I am a vegan, food doesn’t really apply here. Since I don’t own a car, transit has been no challenge. Additionally, I’m a big bus + train fan, and particular now that I’m no longer in the Midwest, I think my personal travel will be quite environmentally friendly. Of the aforementioned five trips, only one of them is by plane, and given that’s a work trip and I work in healthcare, a field with true human impact, I wouldn’t put it in the same category as a trip to Cabos.
But the challenge never purported to limit the above items. Shipping and fashion, however, would be limited by this challenge. And I think it has done well: I don’t use Amazon as much any longer. And as for fashion, I have gotten my shoes, and some wonderful tops, secondhand.
Now, the only two infractions I have made in the nothing new challenge have been for fashion and shipping. I bought a charger for my toothbrush with rush shipping, but I think that’s worth exempting given how much I love my toothbrush and the vital nature of oral hygiene. And I bought a few hundred dollars of clothes. These clothes are to make me look nice when I go on my work trip, and I bought them all from the bargain rack. Here, I may have rescued some of these clothes from heading to a landfill, though that’s tough to say, since some companies simply sell their clothes to discount merchants like my old employer TJ Maxx.
It’s likely impossible to do an actual environmental calculus on one’s personal expenditure, or it may take a few hours to do so. I think I’ll say this: I bought used clothes for the first time in my adult life because of this challenge, and I think that’s a clear good start.
Consumerism
I started this challenge in part because I didn’t want to have so much dopamine wrapped up in clicking a button on Amazon and waiting for something new to arrive at my door. I can safely say that this small-scale shopping detox hasn’t worked that well. Certainly, I don’t buy as much, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t window shop, or that I’m divorced from a mindset that tells me to buy things just to feel something. I mostly have moved this part of my brain over to Door Dash, or buying Amtrak tickets.
This blog has certainly made me more chatty about consumerism and what it’s like to live in products. But it hasn’t necessarily made me happier, so I don’t think that reducing consumption is some lifehack to feeling better about life. I don’t know if it’s worth doing, but that might just be my arch-skepticism, a feature apparent in this blog, speaking.