It’s pretty well known that trend cycles have sped up in how fast they come through. I personally blame this on Covid, but wherever it came from, it’s true.

Trends used to last years — the ice bucket challenge was ‘trending’ for around five years — now a trend is lucky if it lasts a month. With how fast people now consume media and trends, they also buy more.

This also coincided with a rise of ways to make clothes and items faster. Most of these ways involve slavery, child labor and cheap materials, and while it is known that companies like Shein, Temu and AliExpress use these malpractices, most of the time consumers care more about following trends or getting things for cheap than what they are supporting.

Now, everyone who disagrees with what I just said is probably saying something along the lines of, “every company uses malpractices. It should be up to corporations, not me,” and I agree with you; bigger corporations who use these malpractices and contribute to killing the earth are the problem.

However, how you spend your money and where you shop is political, and just because you can’t fix the whole problem doesn’t mean you should add to it.

The other part of the conversation is the access to sustainable options. Sustainability is a spectrum, and the average person cannot spend $200 on jeans to get them ethically made. Most of the time when people are talking about underconsumption, they often go too far with this, saying you should never buy from normal stores and always seek out the most sustainable option when that is not accessible for most people.

The way sustainability is generally presented to the public is classist — if you can’t afford to spend $200 on a clothing item, buy what you can. If you can afford to do those things and blatantly don’t, it becomes an ethical issue. Ethics will always take the back burner when just trying to survive.

People buying more, combined with a rise in faster, cheaper ways to create items, has led to a new ‘trend’ of underconsumption — like having the same hat for years and not buying a new one because the old one still works.

In a lot of ways, this trend is amazing. Not only does it help consumers save money and think more ethically about how they shop, it is also a massive push against the way corporations make items and poison the planet.

The only thing that is somewhat worrisome to me is how it is a trend.

As I said earlier, trends leave quite quickly, and if this trend continues on the path that other ones do, it will be gone in the next few months.

That completely goes against what underconsumption is. Moving on to the next new thing is in a lot of ways the antithesis of sustainability.

You don’t need the next water bottle. The hype will be gone in a month, and I know your current water bottle functions just fine.

You don’t need it.

So maybe in the future, think a bit about if you need it and what you are supporting before you tap your card.