I, a student, am stopping shopping

When I suggested giving up shopping for a year my mother slowly nodded.

I have a lot of ideas that don’t make it through the day. “I’m going to be a minimalist.” “I’ll stop using my phone.” They are all well intended for self-improvement and self-care - but unfortunately, most of them are not self-aware. I like lots of things and I like my phone. But this idea was different, I knew as I told my mum. I actually wanted to do it.

Giving up clothes shopping was the solution to other, at first seemingly unrelated, problems. I wanted to spend less while saving more, correct the part of my brain that relates a good day with a good outfit and have something to talk about at family gatherings - other than why I still don’t have a boyfriend. With this, I could subvert spendy student expectations while deflecting questions about my actual life. It was perfect.

As always, the idea came from something I read. Ann Patchett’s New Yorker piece was a pithy, reflective, personal article on her experience with quickly consumed fashion. A cycle that left her restless. Yet reading her account of a falling bank balance and its failure to makes her feel better, I felt attacked.

“Shopping felt like winning a game no one else was playing.”

The narrative surrounding students is preceded by pound signs. It is concerned with whether we spend too much or too little while eating avocado toast and binge drinking our lives away. Changes to student loan repayments, which began from earning £21,000 and have risen to £27,000, force us to revisit the question; how much are students actually worth? Is it as much as we spend?

The student loan just dropped, to my friend's delight, but I didn’t really need it because student or not, I save a lot. Saving isn’t very ‘uni’. If a student misses drinks or an outing, if you are the cheapskate on the next round, you’re nobody's mate. I’m not saying you have to spend to make friends, but, to no one's surprise, there exists a culture where spending more than you have is common, and expected. Everyone is in their overdraft, everyone is waiting for payday. I’ve been moving more towards this as each term passes and I wanted a change,

I briefly, and incorrectly, diagnosed myself a shopping addict. If I was sad, I wanted to shop, happy, shop, excited - you get the idea. Buying things gave me the false feeling that I was achieving something. But I wasn’t addicted, I was just enjoying it because shopping felt like winning a game no one else was playing. The cheaper the deal, the better the find the better I felt. Finding a velvet blazer on sale kept me happy for a month.

Reflecting on this got me thinking - maybe stopping shopping would make me more consistently happy? Living a life that didn’t revolve around the next Zara sale sounded more stable. I started on March 28th and if I quit, I’ll tell you why. If I succeed, I’ll let you know how. I love to shop but it’s not working anymore. So unless I’m gifted or given it my current wardrobe is the lot. Wish me luck.