The concept:
Do not exchange money for anything (with the exception of fresh fruit and vegetables and these should be seasonal and local, where possible) for an entire month.
The reason:
I really like to buy things. You would think that because I'm not too keen on useless things, and because I don't really like crowds of people, that I wouldn't be that keen on shopping. You would be wrong. Here in the UK I can literally spend an entire day shopping from the comfort of my laptop screen; cramming my imagination full of the fashion delights that cascade off my Pinterest page, trawling eBay to see if I can hunt any of last season's releases down at a fraction of the cost, emailing my friends to determine the most pretentious books of the century and then buying them at ridiculously low prices from Amazon (feeling guilty but so ebullient that I no longer live in a country where literature is held at ransom for those who can afford $AUD30 for a novel) or sifting through the treasure trove that is the Oxfam online shopping section only to dump the entire contents of my shopping basket at the end of a four hour expedition because I could probably get it cheaper on eBay if I had the patience (screw the charity). And I do have the patience. I have infinite patience for online shopping. Especially when I should be doing something else (like my PhD).
I've always been able to justify my obsession with owning certain pieces of clothing by equating it to art collectors spending a fortune on a piece I don't understand. Whether or not this justification holds up to some sort of moral code is another issue. But I very rarely buy new clothing; 90% of my wardrobe has been purchased second-hand with the exception of gifts or my annual splurge at Cue when I return to Australia. So as far as addictions go, it's a pretty friendly one. But not all of my money goes on clothing. So where does it go?
Food would be one answer and it's a healthy answer. But the way we eat has become a bit of a mystery to me. At a dinner the other night one of the Fellows of my college, who is an expert in primates here at Cambridge University, took exception to my veganism and started lecturing the room about how we would never have evolved from our primitive ancestors if we had not eaten meat. My tutor, a geologist, tried to argue against this for some strange reason. I think they both entirely missed the point. There is no doubt that we would never have evolved to where we are today without eating meat but that's because it provided vital nutrients that we could not get elsewhere. If the world's population, right now, just ate to survive then perhaps I would revisit my philosophy. But we do not. We have attached all sorts of other emotional, psychological, creative and even sexual characteristics to the intension of food. If we ate only to survive then Domino's would go out of business very quickly.
The way we eat then, of course, translates into the way we shop. Being vegan, and someone who isn't keen on processed foods, most of my trolley is dried beans, fresh fruit and vegetables and gin. But, after discovering Waitrose sold organic dried mango that didn't use the nasty sulfide-filled preservative that triggers my migraines, I started doing all of my shopping there. And it was so lovely! Compared to the supermarkets in Australia, and compared to the gigantic, fluoro-lit Tescos here in the UK, Waitrose is just fairyland. Except now I was going shopping just for the sake of going shopping. On Sunday mornings I would drive out to Trumpington, line up with all the other white middle-class people to get coffee, sit in the Waitrose cafe, read The Times (please don't tell my friends I enjoy it) and then finally pick up a few grocery items all of which I could have purchased at the local supermarket around the corner. When I realised I was doing this I started trying to make the visit worthwhile by slowly browsing every aisle to see what delights Waitrose could provide for me. I even applied for the Waitrose customer card (you get free coffee!). Suddenly I was putting things in my trolley that I didn't go there to buy. A part of me started to get a bit wary.
A few months ago my relationship with my partner of three and a half years ended. We were living together in a flat so both had to look for a new place to live. During the moving out process we had to split our belongings which wasn't too difficult since we had basically moved to the UK with nothing and he had this annoying (and, turns out, really useful) habit of keeping receipts for everything we bought here. What we weren't expecting was the sheer volume of food we had collected. We had eaten our way through most of the contents of the fridge and freezer in the lead up to the move but the kitchen cupboards were still full. And so was the coat cupboard where we also stored food. Oh, and there was also food behind the lounge room door. Yes, over a period of two years of living in that flat, we had hoarded a ridiculous amount of dried and canned goods.
Some of the food had to be thrown out because it was past its use-by date. I had a really hard time trying to come to terms with why I would purchase something and then not use it. The sheer waste of energy that went into the growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, shipping, stocking and then buying of the items really annoyed me. If a piece of clothing has been in my cupboard unworn for too long it goes on eBay. So why hadn't I used this food?
I think most of it had to do with the fact that we weren't really planning meals around what we had but rather what we felt like which normally meant the purchasing of more goods that would get stacked on top of the old, hiding them from view. I think also that people shop for the sake of shopping. More than once I've seen a Facebook post about how someone's outing that day was to 'go shopping'. We should buy because we need. It shouldn't really be a form of entertainment.
I think the last straw was on Saturday when I drove to Milton Keynes to Ikea to buy a mirror. (I say I drove, but this is a lie. I was going to drive but it turns out I was a little too hungover so I sat in the passenger seat drifting in and out of sleep while my friend kept himself entertained by seeing how close to the speed of sound my car could approach.) We arrived, drove around for about 8 minutes trying to find a parking spot, parked underneath a set of stairs on top of some lovely cement pavement that was definitely not meant for parking (not the most patient of people, my friend) and headed inside.
Our first plan was to get my friend food (or, as he describes it, eat breakfast with every animal in it). This plan was foiled when we saw that everyone in England was in the line for food. So we ditched the food plan, despite my terrible need for coffee, and went straight for the furniture. Except this was made extremely difficult by me freaking out because apparently the rest of Britain had also decided to join England in Ikea Milton Keynes. There were people everywhere. If you, like the rest of Britain, were in Ikea Milton Keynes on Saturday and saw a very pale, tired woman following a hipster in a chequered shirt around at an alarmingly close distance of about 4mm, looking absolutely petrified of being swallowed by the Ikea crowd, that was me.
It has since been explained to me that Ikea on a Saturday is a day out. My initial reaction was something along the lines of: 'WTF, people! Bletchley Park is right next door! No, they probably don't have Swedish meatballs in dodgy looking sauce but that's probably not a bad thing.' And then I thought: Um, I was there too.
Then I was reading some back issues of Peppermint and Frankie (because I'm in the UK it takes a while for me to get these lovely Australian magazines!) and saw that they were talking about something called Buy Nothing New Month. The idea behind BNNM is that you buy essentials like food, medicine and hygienic goods but try to get everything else some other way whether it be by buying it second-hand, borrowing it, swapping etc etc. Except, because they were back issues of the magazines, I'd miss the boat by a few months. But it got me thinking about thinking about buying!
The final motivation for all of this was my good friend Dave and an interview with Toby Ord on BBC Radio 4 (~28 minutes into that clip). As a PhD student at Cambridge my salary is pitiful for the amount of stress it causes. Or so I think. But really, compared to the things people do just to earn a small wage in some parts of the world, I have it pretty damn good. I've always thought that I don't have enough money to set aside for charity because I need all of what I earn to survive. But, given that I went to two formal dinners last week and went clubbing three times last month despite the fact that I was literally a decade older than everyone in the aforementioned clubs and didn't know any of the music, I think the Cambridge bubble might be distorting my perspective a little. And after reading that the Oxbridge system probably gives us a little too much of an allowance for frivolous spending, I thought it was probably time to shock my system back into reality.
Given that I already try to buy most non-consumable goods second-hand, except when it comes to full-length mirrors apparently, I didn't really think the Buy Nothing New experience would be that much of a change for me. I would have to forgo small things like magazines and coffee in town on Saturday morning but just being too busy does that. What I really wanted to do was get out of the habit of shopping for the sake of shopping, bargain hunting for the sake of bargain hunting and to use up the dried and canned goods I had hoarded over the past couple of years. And to really look at why I buy and whether it is necessary. And I want to create bonds with people by begging and borrowing. And I want to create dialogue about this.
If you are concerned about me, don't be. I'm not going to starve. I have a good collection of dried goods to get me through a month. I hope. And I have allowed myself the luxury of buying fresh fruit and vegetables but I am going to try to buy local and seasonal and to buy it from the local markets instead of the supermarkets. February is probably not the best time of year for anything but never mind. I can always make nettle soup if I get desperate. And I do have an allotment although I think there is only leeks and parsley growing on it at the moment. I also have lovely friends who will feed me. And hopefully wash my clothes for me in exchange for sexual favours because I forgot to buy washing powder last night on my final night of spending.
Yes, I had a final night of spending. Yes, it's kind of cheating. But I didn't go crazy (on account of having to cycle it home). The contents of my shopping basket were:
Hygiene:
Do not exchange money for anything (with the exception of fresh fruit and vegetables and these should be seasonal and local, where possible) for an entire month.
The reason:
I really like to buy things. You would think that because I'm not too keen on useless things, and because I don't really like crowds of people, that I wouldn't be that keen on shopping. You would be wrong. Here in the UK I can literally spend an entire day shopping from the comfort of my laptop screen; cramming my imagination full of the fashion delights that cascade off my Pinterest page, trawling eBay to see if I can hunt any of last season's releases down at a fraction of the cost, emailing my friends to determine the most pretentious books of the century and then buying them at ridiculously low prices from Amazon (feeling guilty but so ebullient that I no longer live in a country where literature is held at ransom for those who can afford $AUD30 for a novel) or sifting through the treasure trove that is the Oxfam online shopping section only to dump the entire contents of my shopping basket at the end of a four hour expedition because I could probably get it cheaper on eBay if I had the patience (screw the charity). And I do have the patience. I have infinite patience for online shopping. Especially when I should be doing something else (like my PhD).
I've always been able to justify my obsession with owning certain pieces of clothing by equating it to art collectors spending a fortune on a piece I don't understand. Whether or not this justification holds up to some sort of moral code is another issue. But I very rarely buy new clothing; 90% of my wardrobe has been purchased second-hand with the exception of gifts or my annual splurge at Cue when I return to Australia. So as far as addictions go, it's a pretty friendly one. But not all of my money goes on clothing. So where does it go?
Food would be one answer and it's a healthy answer. But the way we eat has become a bit of a mystery to me. At a dinner the other night one of the Fellows of my college, who is an expert in primates here at Cambridge University, took exception to my veganism and started lecturing the room about how we would never have evolved from our primitive ancestors if we had not eaten meat. My tutor, a geologist, tried to argue against this for some strange reason. I think they both entirely missed the point. There is no doubt that we would never have evolved to where we are today without eating meat but that's because it provided vital nutrients that we could not get elsewhere. If the world's population, right now, just ate to survive then perhaps I would revisit my philosophy. But we do not. We have attached all sorts of other emotional, psychological, creative and even sexual characteristics to the intension of food. If we ate only to survive then Domino's would go out of business very quickly.
The way we eat then, of course, translates into the way we shop. Being vegan, and someone who isn't keen on processed foods, most of my trolley is dried beans, fresh fruit and vegetables and gin. But, after discovering Waitrose sold organic dried mango that didn't use the nasty sulfide-filled preservative that triggers my migraines, I started doing all of my shopping there. And it was so lovely! Compared to the supermarkets in Australia, and compared to the gigantic, fluoro-lit Tescos here in the UK, Waitrose is just fairyland. Except now I was going shopping just for the sake of going shopping. On Sunday mornings I would drive out to Trumpington, line up with all the other white middle-class people to get coffee, sit in the Waitrose cafe, read The Times (please don't tell my friends I enjoy it) and then finally pick up a few grocery items all of which I could have purchased at the local supermarket around the corner. When I realised I was doing this I started trying to make the visit worthwhile by slowly browsing every aisle to see what delights Waitrose could provide for me. I even applied for the Waitrose customer card (you get free coffee!). Suddenly I was putting things in my trolley that I didn't go there to buy. A part of me started to get a bit wary.
A few months ago my relationship with my partner of three and a half years ended. We were living together in a flat so both had to look for a new place to live. During the moving out process we had to split our belongings which wasn't too difficult since we had basically moved to the UK with nothing and he had this annoying (and, turns out, really useful) habit of keeping receipts for everything we bought here. What we weren't expecting was the sheer volume of food we had collected. We had eaten our way through most of the contents of the fridge and freezer in the lead up to the move but the kitchen cupboards were still full. And so was the coat cupboard where we also stored food. Oh, and there was also food behind the lounge room door. Yes, over a period of two years of living in that flat, we had hoarded a ridiculous amount of dried and canned goods.
Some of the food had to be thrown out because it was past its use-by date. I had a really hard time trying to come to terms with why I would purchase something and then not use it. The sheer waste of energy that went into the growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, shipping, stocking and then buying of the items really annoyed me. If a piece of clothing has been in my cupboard unworn for too long it goes on eBay. So why hadn't I used this food?
I think most of it had to do with the fact that we weren't really planning meals around what we had but rather what we felt like which normally meant the purchasing of more goods that would get stacked on top of the old, hiding them from view. I think also that people shop for the sake of shopping. More than once I've seen a Facebook post about how someone's outing that day was to 'go shopping'. We should buy because we need. It shouldn't really be a form of entertainment.
I think the last straw was on Saturday when I drove to Milton Keynes to Ikea to buy a mirror. (I say I drove, but this is a lie. I was going to drive but it turns out I was a little too hungover so I sat in the passenger seat drifting in and out of sleep while my friend kept himself entertained by seeing how close to the speed of sound my car could approach.) We arrived, drove around for about 8 minutes trying to find a parking spot, parked underneath a set of stairs on top of some lovely cement pavement that was definitely not meant for parking (not the most patient of people, my friend) and headed inside.
Our first plan was to get my friend food (or, as he describes it, eat breakfast with every animal in it). This plan was foiled when we saw that everyone in England was in the line for food. So we ditched the food plan, despite my terrible need for coffee, and went straight for the furniture. Except this was made extremely difficult by me freaking out because apparently the rest of Britain had also decided to join England in Ikea Milton Keynes. There were people everywhere. If you, like the rest of Britain, were in Ikea Milton Keynes on Saturday and saw a very pale, tired woman following a hipster in a chequered shirt around at an alarmingly close distance of about 4mm, looking absolutely petrified of being swallowed by the Ikea crowd, that was me.
It has since been explained to me that Ikea on a Saturday is a day out. My initial reaction was something along the lines of: 'WTF, people! Bletchley Park is right next door! No, they probably don't have Swedish meatballs in dodgy looking sauce but that's probably not a bad thing.' And then I thought: Um, I was there too.
Then I was reading some back issues of Peppermint and Frankie (because I'm in the UK it takes a while for me to get these lovely Australian magazines!) and saw that they were talking about something called Buy Nothing New Month. The idea behind BNNM is that you buy essentials like food, medicine and hygienic goods but try to get everything else some other way whether it be by buying it second-hand, borrowing it, swapping etc etc. Except, because they were back issues of the magazines, I'd miss the boat by a few months. But it got me thinking about thinking about buying!
The final motivation for all of this was my good friend Dave and an interview with Toby Ord on BBC Radio 4 (~28 minutes into that clip). As a PhD student at Cambridge my salary is pitiful for the amount of stress it causes. Or so I think. But really, compared to the things people do just to earn a small wage in some parts of the world, I have it pretty damn good. I've always thought that I don't have enough money to set aside for charity because I need all of what I earn to survive. But, given that I went to two formal dinners last week and went clubbing three times last month despite the fact that I was literally a decade older than everyone in the aforementioned clubs and didn't know any of the music, I think the Cambridge bubble might be distorting my perspective a little. And after reading that the Oxbridge system probably gives us a little too much of an allowance for frivolous spending, I thought it was probably time to shock my system back into reality.
Given that I already try to buy most non-consumable goods second-hand, except when it comes to full-length mirrors apparently, I didn't really think the Buy Nothing New experience would be that much of a change for me. I would have to forgo small things like magazines and coffee in town on Saturday morning but just being too busy does that. What I really wanted to do was get out of the habit of shopping for the sake of shopping, bargain hunting for the sake of bargain hunting and to use up the dried and canned goods I had hoarded over the past couple of years. And to really look at why I buy and whether it is necessary. And I want to create bonds with people by begging and borrowing. And I want to create dialogue about this.
If you are concerned about me, don't be. I'm not going to starve. I have a good collection of dried goods to get me through a month. I hope. And I have allowed myself the luxury of buying fresh fruit and vegetables but I am going to try to buy local and seasonal and to buy it from the local markets instead of the supermarkets. February is probably not the best time of year for anything but never mind. I can always make nettle soup if I get desperate. And I do have an allotment although I think there is only leeks and parsley growing on it at the moment. I also have lovely friends who will feed me. And hopefully wash my clothes for me in exchange for sexual favours because I forgot to buy washing powder last night on my final night of spending.
Yes, I had a final night of spending. Yes, it's kind of cheating. But I didn't go crazy (on account of having to cycle it home). The contents of my shopping basket were:
Hygiene:
- 2 x packets of ibuprofen
- toothpaste
- shampoo
- conditioner
- 2 in 1 shampoo and conditioner
- moisturiser
- 2 x packs of toilet paper
- 2 x 1L cartons of soy milk
- 4 x packs of tofu
- 1 x packet of vegetable stock
- cumin seeds
- dried rosemary
- dried parsley
- 5 x packets of gum
The ibuprofen was purchased because I had a cycling accident yesterday and am extremely sore and bruised and my knee is in much need of being less swollen. And the multiple shampoo and conditioner purchases were because I stay at a friend's house a lot and his bathroom supplies consist of a bar of green soap that smells like what pines would smell like if they smelled like nothing and the 40p Sainsbury's Basic Shampoo which, while I appreciate the fact that it is cruelty free, is not something I would even let my dog sniff let alone shampoo with. So these were all purchases I had been intending to make for a while. It wasn't really a pre-February hygiene hoard.
As for the groceries, I don't really drink that much soy milk but like to keep it on hand in case I need it for cooking or baking or I don't feel like I've had enough calcium that day. Same goes for the tofu; I don't use it that much but it's handy to have around. I also promised the 40p-shampoo-loving-hipster friend that I would make him vegan frittata next week. The herbs were something I had also been meaning to purchase for a while.
I did forget washing powder but I somehow bought gum. The gum was a stupid purchase and just reiterated to me how important looking at my buying habits is going to be. And how interesting.
And so it begins. I'm going to try to write regularly about what I am finding difficult and what interesting experiences the experiment has opened up for me. Wish me luck!
I'll be watching for your next update Elise!
ReplyDeleteI've also decided to give something up this month. While it's not as awesome as buying nothing for a month, I'm going without coffee. And I have to start today, Feb 2nd. Coz I caved at 1.50pm yesterday, as I was staring down the barrel of spending 70mins with twenty eight 12-13 year olds on a Friday afternoon.
Good luck!
Caitlin, I know how much you like coffee so I think you going without it is probably just as much of a big deal as me not buying anything! :P
DeleteI assume it's totally OK for you to accept "things that should probably be left in England" from your soon-to-be-exiled friend? I have a bit of washing powder left, not sure if it's enough for a month but it should get you somewhere! I can bring it tonight. xx
ReplyDeleteHalie! That would be wonderful! Thank you! :)
DeleteLove it! I feel inspired to try the same. Good luck Elise!
ReplyDelete