Trend-driven consumerism is an environmental threat. We need to fight the system that drives us to buy.
This year Earth Overshoot Day — the date each year when humanity has used more from the planet than it can regenerate in 12 months — fell on July 30, six days later than last year.
That sounds like progress. It isn’t. The date moved because researchers revised their estimate of how much carbon the ocean absorbs, not because we consumed less. Strip out the accounting change and the underlying trend went the other way. By the actual measure, 2026 is the deepest ecological overshoot ever recorded.
I recognize the maneuver, because I run it on myself constantly.
My bedroom overflows with Jellycats. My organizer is bursting with beauty products, many still sealed. My closet holds clothes I have never worn. The Jellycats have mostly migrated under my bed, where they serve as expensive chew toys for my dog. And I have already moved on — I collect NeeDoh squishies now.
Every purchase came with a story about why it wasn’t really a purchase. It was on sale. It was self-care. It was the last one. I was, at every step, a person making a reasonable decision. Only in aggregate does it look like what it is.
Photo: Logan Hana Higase-Chen
The aggregate is the part nobody shows you.
The idea for this piece arrived in the form of an empty shelf. I went to a bookstore looking for a new NeeDoh and found bare pegs. My parents, humoring what I was treating as a genuine crisis, stopped at a Target on their way home. My dad sent me a photo: an entire wall, cleared out.
My first thought was that TikTokers had bought everything. All those people with the restock hauls and the unboxing videos, sweeping shelves bare, leaving nothing for the children the toys are actually made for. They have a shopping problem.
My second thought took longer to arrive. I looked at the pile of Jellycats. I looked at the growing pile of NeeDohs.
I have a shopping problem.
Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok launched as places to talk to your friends. They have become the most efficient sales channels ever built, and the transition happened without anyone announcing it. Scroll for 90 seconds and you will pass a restock video, an unboxing, a haul. The algorithm doesn’t reward the person who explains why she doesn’t need the thing. It rewards volume — the biggest haul, the fastest turnaround, the fullest cart. Brands ship free product to influencers, influencers generate demand, demand generates the next shipment. There is no exit.
The result is that we no longer buy what we need. We buy what is trending, which means we buy something engineered to stop trending. Trend-driven consumption is excessive and obsolescent at once: quick to buy, quick to trash.
The numbers behind “quick to trash” are worse than most people assume. The EPA’s most recent full accounting found that Americans generated 292.4 million tons of municipal solid waste in a single year — 4.9 pounds per person per day, or roughly 1,800 pounds each. That figure covers everything in the bin, not just shopping. But shopping is the part we choose, purchase by purchase, and it is the part growing fastest. Apparel consumption alone is projected to rise 63% by 2030, with emissions from textile manufacturing climbing about 60% over the same period. Less than 1% of clothing gets recycled into new clothing.
None of this is a secret. That is what makes it strange. We know, and we buy anyway, because knowing happens in one part of the brain and the checkout button lives in another — one tap away, saved card, no friction, no pause.
So I want to be careful about what I’m actually asking.
The easy ending here is a pledge. I put down my credit card, I empty my cart, I say “not today” to the next micro-trend, and I invite you to join me. I am making that pledge. I mean it.
But I don’t think personal restraint is a serious answer to a system built by people whose full-time job is defeating personal restraint. I am a competitive figure skater. Discipline is, professionally speaking, my entire personality. It took a photograph of an empty Target wall to help me notice what was happening in my own bedroom. If discipline alone were enough, I wouldn’t have the piles.
What actually helps is friction, and friction can be designed. Platforms could stop merging the feed and the storefront. They could stop optimizing for haul content. Disclosure rules for gifted product could have teeth. Right now every design decision runs one direction, and we call the outcome a personal failing.
In the meantime there are smaller counterweights. De-influencers, who post about what not to buy. Project Pan, which asks you to finish a product before replacing it. “Underconsumption core,” which is just the ordinary thrift my grandmother wouldn’t have thought worth a hashtag.
Earth Overshoot Day exists to make an abstraction legible: Here’s the day the budget ran out. My version is less rigorous. It’s a pile of stuffed animals under a bed, being slowly destroyed by a dog.
Both are ways of finally seeing the total.
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