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Each time I craved it, I had to stand in the moment, pay attention to what had triggered the craving, and change my reaction.
The toughest part of not being allowed to buy anything new wasn’t that I couldn’t buy anything new—it was having to physically confront my triggers and change my reaction to them.
Whenever I made a discovery like that, I felt as though Andrew was holding up a mirror in front of me. Through our conversations, he helped me see things about myself that were probably painfully obvious to everyone around me but that I had never noticed before.
They told me I “deserved” it. “You work so hard!” they said. “And you only live once!” I hated the acronym for that truism: YOLO. I’d watched too many friends swipe their credit cards and go deep into debt on that rationale.
Why do we encourage each other to spend money, when we should all be saving more?
One lesson I’ve learned countless times over the years is that whenever you let go of something negative in your life, you make room for something positive.
Even doing something as simple as choosing not to finish a book I didn’t like gave me more time to read books I loved. And putting less energy into the friendships with people who didn’t understand me gave me more energy to put into the friendships with people who did.
Over the years, I have come to believe there are two types of friends in this world: the friend who will save you from going home with the random person you met at the bar, and the friend who will celebrate your sexual escapade over Bloody Marys the next morning. The one who will never miss a scheduled date to go to the gym, and the one who will congratulate you for eating two cheeseburgers, an order of fries, and a milkshake after a bad day. The one who will stop you from spending $300 on a bag you don’t need, and the one who will drive you to the nearest store to buy it.
So, yes, I knew how quickly a small slip could turn into a full-on relapse. I also knew the biggest problem wasn’t always the relapse itself, but the things I told myself about the relapse.
Who are you buying this for: the person you are, or the person you want to be? This should’ve been the question I’d asked before buying each and every one of them. This should’ve been the question I’d asked before buying anything.
All of these discoveries could have been boiled down to two questions: If it didn’t feel good, why would I do it? And what did I really want right now? To feel good—or at least, to feel better.
I did have the time, I had just chosen to spend it doing other things. I still don’t understand why we are always so quick to push off the things we actually enjoy doing for the things that take just a little less effort. It wasn’t until I started asking myself what I wanted right now—to feel better—that I stopped making excuses and allocated more time to reading.
What I couldn’t live with was losing hours, days, and weeks of my life to things that didn’t matter.
Advertisements and marketing campaigns had conditioned me to believe everything was now or never. It never occurred to me to wait until I actually needed something. The truth, I was learning, was that we couldn’t actually discover what we needed until we lived without it.
I wish I could say this didn’t feel as revelatory as it did. With these new numbers in hand, I literally fantasized about screaming my discovery from the rooftops of stores and shopping malls. If you’re wondering why you can’t save money, stop buying stuff you don’t need! And trust me, you probably don’t need anything in here! This should have been obvious.
However, I had also always been stuck in the consumerism cycle. I thought I needed to earn more money each year, so I could have more of what I wanted. That cycle meant I was constantly spending the extra money I was earning, rather than saving it, and I still wanted more on top of that. But the ban proved another theory: When you want less, you consume less—and you also need less money.
To help the plan feel like it could become a reality, I decided that every day I would tell one person I was going to quit. My reasoning: The more people I told, the more clients I could potentially get, and the more people I would have to stay accountable to. I did not want to back out of this.
She showed me it was possible to experience all of those things—to be challenged, to learn, to grow—in one position, and I would experience it again every day after I left.
The other reason I was so drawn to the idea of moving back was because smaller cities naturally come with slower lifestyles, and are filled with communities of people who are grateful for all the little things life has to offer.
I wanted to be surrounded by those who valued living over working, spending time outdoors over spending time online, and doing things for themselves over paying for every possible convenience.
In challenging myself to not shop for an entire year, I was setting myself up either for failure or for the most prosperous year of my life, and I’m happy to say it was the latter. Throughout the entire journey, I was forced to slow down, discover my triggers to spend and to overconsume, and face and change my bad habits. I gave up the things marketers try to convince us we should want in life: the newest and greatest of everything, anything that can fix our problems, and whatever is in style. I exchanged it all for basic necessities and, after a year of not being able to buy anything new,
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The ban uncovered the truth, which was that when you decide to want less, you can buy less and, ultimately, need less money.
If I had simply stopped shopping for a year, I might have learned a lot about myself as a consumer. And if I had simply decluttered my home, I might have learned a lot about my interests. But doing both challenges at the same time was important, because it forced me to stop living on autopilot and start questioning my decisions. Who was I? What was I already good at? What did I care about? What did I really want in this life? Family history showed that if I was lucky, I would get 85 years on this planet. What did I want to do with them?
When I started this challenge, it was about the spending; the money. That’s where this story began, and where many of my stories had begun. And the same way sobriety helped me save money every year, the shopping ban had, in fact, done the same. But looking back, it was never really about the money. The best gift the ban had given me was the tools to take control of my life and get a fresh start as my real self. It challenged me. It turned my life upside down. It helped me save $17,000 in a single year. And then it saved me.
But something I had learned time and time again was that every small change you make pays compound interest. It helps you make another change, another mind-set shift, another decision to live a new way. If I put makeup on again in the future, it wouldn’t be to stop people from seeing the real me—it would simply be for me.
As an example, I went through five sticks of deodorant, four tubes of toothpaste, two bottles of shampoo and two of conditioner. Knowing this about myself isn’t necessarily earth-shattering, but it does prevent me from ever thinking I should stockpile toiletries again.
One of the greatest lessons I learned during these years is that whenever you’re thinking of binging, it’s usually because some part of you or your life feels like it’s lacking—and nothing you drink, eat, or buy can fix it. I know, because I’ve tried it all and none of it worked. Instead, you have to simplify, strip things away, and figure out what’s really going on. Falling into the cycle of wanting more, consuming more, and needing even more won’t help.
More was never the answer. The answer, it turned out, was always less.
My hope is that this book and our community will inspire thousands of more mindful decisions to be made in the future. But it all starts with you answering one question: What do you really want?
