Thrifted table lamps. A battered water bottle from college. A winter coat that re-emerges every season.
If there’s a trend that sums up America’s rising malaise with high inflation and a persistent cost-of-living crisis: it’s underconsumption – intentionally buying less and making items last as long as possible. The growing movement couldn’t come at a better time – a recent survey, from career platform Resume Now, found that 92 percent of Americans cut back their spending in 2025.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when so many people became obsessed with buying and using less but sometime late in the pandemic, dedicated social media accounts and hashtags like “underconsumption core” and “underconsumption queen” began to proliferate in the thousands. Underconsumption, and its cousins – anti-consumerism, minimalism, sustainability – are catching fire across the Internet with dedicated blogs and Reddit threads (one popular one has 700,000 weekly visitors.)
It may be a reaction to the explosion in online shopping when everyone was staying home – e-commerce sales grew 41 percent in 2020, the Census Bureau noted. Or it could be backlash to influencer culture with its endless streams of matching workout gear, bedazzled Stanley Cups and dedicated gift wrapping rooms.
“Capitalism wins when we are individualistic, separated and not part of a community,” explained one underconsumption fan, shelbizlee, in a recent TikTok reel. “Think about how many things you use in your home you literally use only once a day, once a week, once a month, once a year, that you could share with your neighbors – but we don’t because the solution to our problems has been sold to us as, ‘Just go buy it.’”
Circling back
The U.S. is awash in “stuff” – one in 10 Americans has a storage unit, it was revealed this week.The average American will own 256 pairs of shoes in their lifetime, according to shoe brand Kuru. U.S. consumers collectively buy and throw away 400 million tubes of toothpaste each year. To top it off, life insurer Ladder found that consumers spend $18,000 a year on things they don’t need.
All those purchases contribute to the 292.4 million tons of waste the Environmental Protection Agency says the U.S. generates annually. And all that waste is pushing waste-conscious consumers toward “circular economy” principles – keep as many products as possible in the loop for as long as possible.
Instead buying something and throwing it away in a short space of time, items are repeatedly reused, repaired if they break, or recycled. The concept encourages buying second-hand and making use of products-as-a-service: the latter has exploded in the digital age for everything from expensive baby products to
Some underconsumption devotees have gone circular with their wardrobe, doing their part to buck the American tendency to wear a piece of clothing 75 percent less often than the rest of the world. It’s common to see underconsumption core focused on wearing thrift-store finds and hand-me-downs, and sewing pants, shirts, skirts and dresses back to life.
For others, underconsumption is tied purely to financial goals. Some 83 percent of Americans overspend, according to Nerdwallet, and U.S. adults had a combined consumer debt of $18.8 trillion at the end of the year, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported.
It’s easy to understand why – the $284 billion U.S. ad industry is designed to make us buy by leveraging human emotions. Targeted advertising – that hits your phone, TV and laptops and is specifically tailored to who you are and what you search for online – has put this process in overdrive, particularly when we are stressed or feeling bad about ourselves.
“Items branded with self-care or success marketing can help induce the spending of impulse purchases,” John Donikian, vice president of mortgage lender Best Interest Financial, told The Independent in an email.
Breaking free
So how can you jump on the underconsumption train? The idea seems simple – just buy less. Not so fast, says Andrew Latham, a certified financial planner and director of content at personal finance site SuperMoney.
“It can be hard to go from overconsumption to underconsumption,” Latham told The Independent in an email. “For many, overconsumption is also stress relief, a form of reward, a fix for boredom and can be part of their identity. It is often tied to emotional facets and rewards and, as such, is hard to step away from.”
It requires a shift in thinking, Donikian adds. “The first step is to understand your consumption is habitual and not needs-based,” he said.
Emotion- or impulse-driven spending can lead to buying things you don’t need, so a first step is to write down where you are spending money each month. Consider your frame of mind when you made the purchase. Do you spend more on groceries when hungry? Do you shop online when you feel frustrated about work or a relationship?
Convenience often goes hand-in-hand with overconsumption. You may not need a pair of shoes but if you see the ad on Instagram, and your credit card is linked to the online store, you may end up with them anyway, faster than you think.
Try to get to the bottom of that feeling that a certain purchase can make you feel more complete.
“Before you buy it, that $3,000 couch can seem like the missing piece that will pull your whole living room – and life – together,” Latham said. “Two weeks after delivery, it’s just where you sit.”
But if you view underconsumption as restrictive, it will not set you up for success. Rather, try to see the process as a freeing one.
“It sounds like deprivation, but it’s not,” Latham said. “A family that keeps their car payment under $350 instead of stretching for a $60,000 SUV [with $750 monthly payments] isn’t suffering. They are freeing up $400 a month for stuff that actually moves the needle for them.”
The other benefit? More space – both mentally and physically.
“The more clutter you have, the lower people report life satisfaction, the greater the stress,” DePaul University Professor of Psychology Dr. Joseph Ferrari explained in a February 2023 podcast. “So here we are living in this consumer culture – buy more and more and more … You’re actually not living a good, complete life because you’ll be less satisfied.”
People might be surprised by how little difference they feel in their standard of living, even if they stop spending hundreds of dollars each month.
“It’s usually pretty easy to save a chunk of cash every month without hurting your quality of life much at all,” Latham said. “I’ve seen people cut $600 to $800 a month and feel zero difference day to day … The quality of life doesn’t suffer because the purchases were never improving it in the first place.”
Finding a way to live with less, can leave you with a whole lot more in the long run. Just ask Reddit user, jackpineseeds, whose underconsumption resulted in a big win.
“After 7 long years of being in debt I am happy to announce that my wife and I will be paying off $75,000 worth of debt this October,” they wrote in a Reddit post three years ago. “Here’s to living mindfully and with the purpose of being happy with what we have, and experiencing the beauty around us.”
