Everything I Learnt on my 2 Month No-Buy
My insights on the psychology of the purchase, and what happens when you finally stop making it.
i. the setup (and the immediate failure)
As a girl who refreshes the Aritzia app at least once a day, scouring for any new arrivals, I have, at multiple points in my life, opened a spreadsheet to understand my own purchasing behavior. Shopping is not just something I like. It is, genuinely, the organizing principle of a significant portion of my brain.
So when I decided to do a two-month no-buy focused on clothing, I knew it was going to be hard. I did not anticipate that it would take me exactly two days to fail.
I initially started on March 9th. Full of intention, and then my bestie girl Amber indicated she wanted to go shopping. It came to no surprise that I said yes before she even finished her sentence.
Amber and I have a very specific dynamic where we walk into stores together….and things just happen. That being said, we obviously left with bags. Following this, I had to make a decision: abandon the whole thing, or restart with the information that I apparently cannot be trusted around my friends and a good sales rack. I restarted March 11th. Made it to May 11th. Two full months, completed, with one lesson already learned before I even really started: how easy it was to fail, and how little it took for me to tap my card.
ii. the girl with no limits
Before this, there were no limits. Genuinely, if I saw something I wanted, I got it. The decision was immediate and the justification came after, if it came at all. That’s not to say I was completely lawless, I did have a system. Before buying anything, I make myself imagine at least three outfits and three real scenarios where I’d actually wear it. For example: a dinner, a workday, a Sunday. Something a little concrete. In theory, great. In practice, what it meant was that I became very, very good at imagining outfits very, very quickly. I could justify a mesh going-out top for a Tuesday morning if you gave me thirty seconds and a little creative license. So, even though the rule existed, and I followed it, I still somehow bought the thing anyway, every time.
iii. what it actually says about us
The fact that even our own self-imposed rules fail us around clothing specifically is genuinely interesting to me. You don’t hear people say “I tried not to buy a new blender for two months and it destroyed me.” Nobody has a complicated relationship with restraint around kitchen appliances. But clothes are identity, as well as the physical, wearable version of how we see ourselves and how we want to be seen.
We don’t buy clothes because we need them. We buy them because of how we think they will make us feel. And “how we think we’ll feel” is almost impossible to argue with, because it lives entirely in our imagination, where the fit is always perfect and the occasion always arrives.
iv. what two months actually taught me
I’m not going to tell you I have the most restraint in the world, and that my version of arm day isnt rooted in carrying bags around the mall, because I don’t, and it is. I went shopping approximately four days after May 11th and felt nothing but joy about it. (Let me know if you want to see a haul LOL). But something did shift.
I started actually seeing what I had. When you’re always looking at what you don’t have yet, your existing wardrobe becomes wallpaper. Somewhere around week five I started pulling things out I’d completely forgotten about. Good things, bought with genuine intention and buried under the next purchase. The no-buy didn’t make me love shopping less, but it made me better at seeing what was already in front of me. I’m also a lot more aware now of the gap between wanting something and wanting what it represents. That gap is where most of the impulse purchases live. Being able to see it, even briefly, even imperfectly, is more useful than any three-outfit rule I ever gave myself.
v. what’s coming next
All of this has made me want to talk about what it actually looks like to build a wardrobe with intention. Not necessarily those capsule wardrobes that were all the rage a few years ago, or some sort of minimalism lecture. But more over, a real conversation about what it means to make additions that actually earn their place; pieces that exist because they fill a genuine gap, not because the algorithm showed them to you at exactly the right moment on exactly the wrong day.
That’s the next one. I think you’re going to like it.
XOXO,
Sarah MOTM