@JennyZee

…mindfully consumed something?

It is a harder question than it sounds.

For me, it was today at 12:35 p.m. My lunch. Not because it was especially healthy or memorable or intentional, but because I noticed it. I ate without doing anything else at the same time. No scrolling. No background noise. Just lunch.

One of my unofficial New Year’s goals this year has been to be more mindful about consumption. And I mean all of it. Not just food, which feels like the easiest and most socially acceptable place to start, but the content I consume, the things I buy, the ideas I absorb, the constant intake that fills our days without us ever really agreeing to it.

The shows. The clothes. The products. The endless stream of information and recommendation and suggestion.

Like most people, I consume content constantly. It is easy. It is digestible. It is designed to slide perfectly into the empty spaces of your day. It is also, for the most part, free. Or at least it appears to be.

And that is where I started to get stuck.

Because is it actually free?

Somewhere near the end of most influencer content, I feel the urge to buy something I did not know I needed five minutes earlier. Sometimes it is subtle. Sometimes it is blatant. But it is almost always there. The cost of free content is not money upfront. It is attention. It is desire. It is the slow erosion of satisfaction with what you already have.

So I started asking myself how this works so well. How, in the era of the influencer, our time and money are being monopolized in a way that feels like our own idea. The producer’s number one priority is making sure you feel like the choice was yours.

It’s how we end up thinking, very naturally, that we need this new version of eye patches, which obviously go with this buttery soft workout set, which we will wear to this new class, while sipping from our life changing water bottle.

It sounds ridiculous when written out. And yet it works.

It works because we want to be happier, cooler, richer, more put together versions of ourselves. And when we see curated, beautiful people telling us that this is the answer, we believe them. Or at least we want to.

I recently watched an influencer talk about needing better storage. Not because they had too much stuff, of course, but because they needed a place for all their things. And I could not stop thinking about how often the solution is never less. It is always better containers. Better systems. Better organization. Rarely do we stop to ask whether the problem is the volume itself.

How many black handbags is enough?

How many pairs of light wash baggy 90s jeans?

How many skincare products must we try before we are allowed to feel done?

This is not a critique from the outside. This is me, sitting very much in the center of the storm. We are being taught, explicitly and implicitly, that consumption equals happiness. That newness equals progress. That if something feels off, the answer is probably something you can buy.

Even people who position themselves as anti-consumer still participate in the same cycle. Thrifting is better than new, yes, but the rhythm often remains unchanged. The intake is constant. The churn continues.

Their job is to influence. To monetize that influence, they have to sell something.

And they cannot sell the same thing over and over.

So each piece of content becomes a moving billboard.

A ritual.
A routine.
A lifestyle moment.
Everything linked.
Everything optimized.

Consumption is the easiest way to fill a void. It works immediately and then leaves you feeling oddly worse a few hours later, which of course sends you back for more.

Novelty has a short shelf life. Your favorite coffee becomes routine. Your go-to lunch becomes boring. The thing that once felt special now needs upgrading. Suddenly you are chasing new again, not because you want it, but because the old thing stopped working.

So eventually, you stop.

I stopped. Because:

I’m just not in a place financially to keep up.

I got extremely tired of trying to optimize my life to perfection, which, as I’m sure most people are aware, is simply not possible.

The continued pursuit of the “optimal solution” often leads to the realization that you’re currently not in it, and that gets equated to something less than desirable, which creates this idea that your life just isn’t all that great. Which is not true.

You stop trying to optimize everything. You stop min-maxing your morning coffee, your lunch break, your evening TV choice, while also scrolling on your phone and cleaning your house and answering texts and half-listening to a podcast. You stop stacking experiences like they are going to run out.

And you pause.

You realize there is no rush. There never was. The urgency was manufactured, sometimes to sell you a product, sometimes to sell you the idea that your life is scarce.

But your life is not scarce. It is your entire supply.

Once that clicks, something strange happens. You do not need to fill every moment anymore.

You can unload the dishwasher without scrolling.
You can eat dinner without the perfect show on.
You can go a day without buying something, food, skincare, a new wallet, whatever today’s temptation happens to be.

You stop consuming for the sake of filling space and start creating space instead.

Space to hear the clink of dishes.
Space to notice how long a meal actually lasts when you are present for it.
Space to think about the effort it took to prepare something instead of how aesthetic it looks on camera.

We have been taught that optimization is the goal, that a perfectly optimized life leaves room for more. But more room usually just means more consumption.

Slowing down, I am realizing, is not the opposite of optimization. It might actually be the truest version of it.

Not optimization as compression. Not squeezing everything into the smallest possible space to make room for more.

But optimization as arrangement. Taking inventory of what already exists and placing it in a way that maximizes enjoyment rather than output.

The coffee does not need to be faster. It needs to be long enough for you to notice the day beginning. The commute does not need to disappear. It needs to feel inhabitable.
The evening does not need to be filled. It needs to be lived.

Once I started thinking this way, something softened. Life did not need to be improved. It needed to be arranged.

It takes time. But there will come a moment when you’re in Target, and you see the cutest bag you’ve encountered in months, and you think this is so cute, I love it, and then you put it down and walk away. You already have bags. You like them. That’s it.

(Yesterday it was a gingham blue and white bag with cherries on it. It was genuinely adorable. It stayed at Target.)

TL;DR:
I slowed down, stopped consuming out of habit, and realized my life isn’t lacking.