The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life Is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store

by Cait Flanders

I shared what insight I had, but felt that was all I could contribute. While my friends were moving on to the next stages of their lives, I was still working on myself.

All I knew was that I seemingly had everything I wanted in my home, in my career, and in my life, and it never felt like enough. I was never satisfied. I always wanted more. But since more of anything wasn’t filling me up, maybe it was time to challenge myself to go after less.

One glance in any corner of my apartment showed me I had more than I needed, and I didn’t appreciate any of it.

It’s only with this information that you can see the full picture and understand why the year of less was so important. It challenged me. It turned my life upside down. And then it saved me.

One thing debt and clutter have in common is that as soon as you start letting it pile up, it can be harder and harder to see your way around it.

Changing a habit and routine you’ve spent a decade perfecting is never easy. All I had done was lay the track that would help me get to where I wanted to go. The real work was waiting around the first bend in the road.

I read somewhere that people attempt to quit things up to a dozen times before they finally quit for good.

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.

Yes, you only live once. And you should enjoy it. But not if it means breaking your budget or going into debt for it. There’s nothing fun about debt, and there is certainly no acronym to change that.

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.

I have always said that personal finance is personal, and what works for one person won’t always work for another, and that’s true of most everything.

And then I took her beating afterward, because I felt I deserved that too. This is how and why the cycle of abuse and self-loathing continued for so many years. I always trusted her, because she was me.

But slipping up didn’t make me a bad person. I was not bad. What I did wasn’t bad. I had just slipped up. And I knew I didn’t want to relapse and repeat the cycle of self-loathing. It always led to trouble. The only way to stop it would be to remove the thing shame feeds on: secrecy.

The fact that I was able to see what I had done, know the action didn’t align with what I wanted, and change my reaction showed how much progress I had made.

They would always make little digs at my intentions that would try to put cracks in the tiny bit of willpower I was still standing on, because people will always make comments when you decide to live a countercultural lifestyle.

There were always going to be outside influences at play. But I could change my reactions to them—and that change had to start within.

The difference between us was that he actually solved the problem. I just purchased things with the intention to solve it one day, and one day didn’t come very often.

That’s the curse of being the eldest, especially by eight and ten years: you have to carry the weight of your younger siblings’ problems, as well as your own. They come to you for a reason. You don’t want to shelter them, but you do want to protect them. You want to protect them from the confusion and the pain, so you carry theirs and yours. Only, nobody knows you have your own confusion and pain. Nobody knows you’re hurting at all.

I valued convenience over the experience of doing anything for myself.

But I was too busy to let my parents pass down their knowledge to me. I was too busy to spend more quality time with them. I was too busy to create those memories.

I was never “too busy.” All I had done in the past was choose what I wanted to be busy doing. I had prioritized television over people and, in turn, lost precious time with them.

My life was enough of a mess. I did not need to make it worse by living in one too.

Who are you buying this for: the person you are, or the person you want to be?

Why stay in the continuous loop of talking about living with addiction when you could simply go out and live?

I don’t think either of their decisions was right or wrong, so long as it was right for them.

“Living one day at a time / Enjoying one moment at a time.”

Who was I to say a practice that had been helping people since 1935 should be altered for me?

I didn’t have faith in much, but the little bit I did have left was sitting on my shoulder, encouraging me to live one day at a time and enjoy one moment at a time.

I was just tired of being in pain. Pain—both emotional and physical—was exhausting.

Once upon a time, drinking had felt like the eraser for all pain, the same way spending money had felt like the path to a bigger and better life. I wasn’t in the habit of doing either now, and I was better for it. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t give in to other cravings.

On the one hand, I could argue that I was perhaps weak or still had yet to be cured of feeling like I could get through tough situations without the help of a substance. But on the other hand, this was the first time I had been aware of what I was doing while I was doing it.

It wasn’t until I was sober and had to feel my way through every minute of discomfort that I realized why I had been shoving these things down my throat for all those years.

I simply wanted to feel better. It seemed the healthiest thing I could do was be aware of how foods made me feel, and eat less of what made me feel sick and more of what gave me good energy.

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.

Not surprisingly, I experienced many of the same physical reactions to the television ban as I had with the shopping and takeout coffee ban.

What I couldn’t live with was losing hours, days, and weeks of my life to things that didn’t matter.

Because I was only allowed to buy one new sweatshirt, as an example, it had to be the best. Not the best brand or the most expensive or the highest quality. It had to be the best for me.

In the end, a maroon-colored zip-up finally crossed off all the boxes. It was the first one I could see myself wearing often, the first one I could imagine spending money on, and it took me nine months to find it. There was nothing impulsive about that decision.

Knowing I could purchase only one of each of those things made the decisions so much more difficult—and so much more meaningful.

It dawned on me that I had never shopped like this before. I had never truly felt a need for something, because I had always purchased things to fill future needs that might come up.

The truth, I was learning, was that we couldn’t actually discover what we needed until we lived without it.

Of course, things don’t always go to plan, which I have learned can sometimes be a good thing.

Stretch goals were something I had first learned about through reading personal finance blogs. People set them to challenge themselves to accomplish something even faster than they thought they could—by stretching their limits, so to speak.

But the ban proved another theory: When you want less, you consume less—and you also need less money.

Aside from being proud of her, I was jealous of her courage. Quitting to go out on her own felt fearless and heroic. She knew exactly what she wanted and she was going for it.

I had never stopped to ask myself what I really wanted, probably because I’d never been in a position where I could afford to.

If you want more stuff, you need to earn more money. If you want less, you need less—and are then able to calculate how much money you actually need to earn. I could afford to earn less than my current salary, and I was willing to risk that if it meant I could create a job I actually wanted.

My apartment didn’t look as tidy as it had in the pictures I’d shared on my blog in October, but I didn’t mind. I was inspired. And I hadn’t been this motivated in months.

With the end in sight, I stopped giving my computer screen the middle finger while cursing out loud and crying. I couldn’t control my parents’ divorce and my family’s future, but I could control this—and it felt good to finally have something to look forward to.