In 2024, we saw increased aesthetics all over social media, with many pushing their single-tone lifestyles. With this increase, you also see many owning excessive amounts of things that you only need one of, a Stanley as an example. These people often own upwards of 10 Stanleys for different occasions or seasons. As a textbook definition, overconsumption is when people use up resources faster than they can produce. There are many reasons for overconsumption, some simply taking more than we can reproduce, like food or natural resources.
If you were to go on TikTok any time in 2024, you would likely see at least one video of a person restocking their children’s bathrooms or a video that reorganizes an excessive amount of makeup products. These videos encourage their lifestyles, showing a glamorous life with excessive items. This links people using only what they need as if their lifestyles are less fancy or as aesthetic.
A good example of overconsumption would be Christmas. Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, Americans produce 25% more waste than they do throughout the rest of the year. As well as that, each week during that time, 1 million extra tons of waste go into landfills per week. One driver of the increase is wanting to fit into the social norms. When people see others online buying tons of items and gifts for Christmas, they will want to do that as well because they think that to fit in, they have to buy more items than they need or have to.
These influencers push an impossible-to-sustain lifestyle with detrimental effects on the environment, filling landfills with perfectly usable products, sometimes still completely sealed or fresh. With the promotion of this lifestyle, entering 2025, you see influencers starting “Project Pan 2025,” where these same influencers that bought excessive amounts of products in the past refuse to buy another one of the same product without finishing the original. This is a complete reverse from what you would’ve seen in 2024, though it is a small help in reducing the amount of overconsumption you see.
Fast fashion does not help with overconsumption either. Fast fashion is mass-producing the latest trendy clothing at cheap prices but the clothing’s quality is terrible. An article released 2 years ago in 2023 reveals that we now consume 400% more clothing than we did 20 years ago. Fast fashion brands like Shein promote their cheap prices without telling their customers how easily their clothes will ruin increase the amount of money people spend on clothing and how much of that clothing ends up in landfills. This is another form of overconsumption, while it may have died down recently, it is still an active problem.
A combination of different things drives overconsumption, some more complex than others. While people do small things to help get rid of how much of a problem overconsumption is, there are bigger problems at hand that drive it.
