Sustainability: Wanting Less & Being Content With What I Have

Sustainability is quite the buzzword in the blogging community as of late. I am so glad that this is the case, and we are hopefully, as a community, moving on from the excessive content about hauls and spending and purging our closets every few months. I felt a pretty monumental shift within myself in the last year and a half of being much more intentional and mindful about what I am purchasing and most importantly, why I feel the need to purchase it. A little background here, I have always been a spender over a saver, I loved shopping ever since I was a kid. In fact, my dad loves to tell the story of when he would take me to Home Depot with him (a regular Sunday event in our household) I would somehow find something I wanted to buy, usually it was a bright pink roll of tape, or a cute colored flash light. Although I’ve always been a lover of shopping, I do know my limits and my parents were not the type of people to just buy me whatever I wanted, in short, they taught me the value of a dollar.

After I left college and got a job, I had the privilege of living at home and had more disposable income than I would have had I been renting an apartment. During this period of newfound financial freedom, I shopped far too often and bought things I definitely did not need. However, I am also a relatively organized person and bringing this much stuff in your life at once inevitably will bring clutter, so I found myself constantly purging my closet of clothing I just wasn’t wearing.

Part of my mental shift over the last year and a half has been influenced greatly by the surge in the public consciousness around the fashion industry and the toll that fashion consumption takes on the environment. I’ve never been hugely into fast fashion and I never was the type to buy masses of cheap clothes, but even so, buying clothes without an intentionality or awareness behind why you are buying them leads to a slippery slope of over-consumption. I am far from perfect and I am definitely still learning when it comes to being a more conscious and sustainable consumer. However, having a deeper awareness, overall has made my need and want for more things wane. I’ve stopped myself countless times to ask myself, “is this purchase really necessary” and nine times out of ten the answer is no.

I am by no means going to solely dedicate my blog to sustainability, although I commend and love blogs that do, but it is a topic I want to dive deeper into in the coming months.