Stop buying stuff

Yeah that’s really it, you can stop reading now if you want

OK, but seriously:

This article is part one of two on my thoughts on why I believe the best approach to consumption is simply to buy as little as possible, buying almost nothing new, and thinking hard before buying anything used, considering the necessity, potential downsides and actual joy utility of any purchase before making it.

This part will focus on why I avoid buying new goods as much as possible.
I have for a number of years felt that buying new goods is usually both morally and fiscally unjustifiable.
There are a number of reasons for this, the moral ones being:

• Purchasing new goods directly materially supports the seller and manufacturer, almost everything produced in the 21st century is a product of human rights abuses, adversarial labour relations, and a culture that prioritises short term profit above all.
• Almost everything produced in the modern world represents an unnecessary and frivolous waste of often scant natural resources, this is especially true in the fields of electronics¹ and fashion.
• We are continually encouraged to stop thinking in terms of need and instead think in terms of (usually artificial) want², once this pattern is noticed and understood continuing to submit to it without trying to resist is, to me, knowingly committing an immoral act.
• Worse than that, it is knowingly and deliberately allowing yourself to be debased, taken advantage of, in exchange for a fleeting hit of dopamine: it is psychologically as well as morally harmful.
• Harm reductionist approaches to unnecessary consumption are at best imperfect partial solutions, at worst they are actively worse than regular consumerism, creating a false sense of agency while wasting even more resources than the thing they are intended to improve on. For example, cloth tote bags³

Aside from all the waste produced, the buy new, buy now, buy constantly structure of modern consumer culture produces a number of negative effects on the products themselves:

• In a short-termist consumer economy, mean quality is low, things are not built to last, issues with items often only emerge after they have been purchased and are outside the return window

• Goods that should be durable and repairable often aren’t:

  • Either by simple fact of being so poorly made as not being able to take repairing (clothes made of plastic stitched together by children, shoes that are glued together)
  • Because future durability is not considered past the warranty period, design flaws are not discovered or addressed, which leads to stuff breaking when it shouldn’t, even when you stump up for a premium item, you are rolling the dice on longevity, regardless of apparent build quality.
  • Increasingly because they are explicitly anti repair, repurpose & reuse (Computers that have no replaceable components, coffee machines that implement DRM via chipped or uniquely shaped pods, cars that require software tools to service mechanical parts, the entire field of IOT cloud connected abominations)

• Regardless of the good intentions or market position of any individual company or brand, the structural incentive is for quality to trend down to the point of maximum margin, as time goes by, the quality floor lowers, the average product trends toward it, and the cycle speeds up. Companies that buck this trend are living on borrowed time, or living in a niche so small that no competitor is interested in or capable of unseating them.

• Because of this continuous downward spiral, the more you buy, the more you will have to buy in the future, as you have no idea what a product’s longevity will be most of the time. Buying new almost always costs more than buying used, meaning you cannot buy the same tier of item for the money, all else being equal, this will reduce the time until the item needs to be replaced, if you replace it with another new item, the cycle repeats, in a shorter timeframe, and so on.

For these reasons and others, it doesn’t make fiscal sense to buy new, most of the time, for most items.
There are some exceptions, mostly consumables or products where hygiene is very important:

• Food
• Toiletries, sanitary products, medicines, etc.
• Socks and Underwear (I’m weird, but not wearing used boxers weird)
• Other practical necessities, replacing broken or consumable items that cannot be reasonably bought used, clothes pegs, for example.

But in general, I advocate buying everything else used, and I’m happy to say that my experience doing so has been overwhelmingly positive:

• The goods I end up buying are better, a tier above what I’d get for the same money new
• They generally last longer, as they are usually old enough that I can avoid known problematic goods if I do my research
• I am giving money to another human being or a small business that wasn’t involved in initial manufacture, rather than a mega corporation
• The more involved buying process of sifting through listings and picking through second hand shops tends to lead to better choices and fewer purchases than the frictionless process of buying new.

I think the last part is the most important.

The best approach is just making as few unnecessary purchases as possible, and making the best possible purchases where they are necessary. Am I perfectly consistent in doing so? No, absolutely not, but I’m getting better, and the longer I practice this approach the more convinced I become that its the only sane way to engage with the modern consumer economy.

This leads us onto part two