Constant exposure

Bleary-eyed one Sunday morning, I swipe up on the targeted ad, you know, just to see. Under two minutes later, I’ve double-clicked on Apple Pay and a pair of earrings that I absolutely do not need is on its way to me. I haven’t even brushed my teeth yet. Did that really just happen?

Where once we may have only been exposed to such advertising during the hour we sat down to watch TV in the evening, and then had to travel to a brick-and-mortar shop to part with physical cash, now it can feel like we’re never given a break from temptation. We’re bombarded at virtually all times of the day via the integration of shopping into our phones, while content creators devise seamless ways to weave products into the carefully constructed narratives of their aspirational lives.

This, combined with ‘one-click buy’ technology, enables us to purchase effortlessly, often before our brain’s rational side can stop us. When we spend money, swiftly and indirectly though our devices, it doesn’t really feel like spending at all and, in the case of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services, sometimes (in the moment) it isn’t. We don’t see the funds coming out of our account then and there, so we can kick the can down the road for future us to contend with. There’s also the flash sales and pop-ups telling us items are about to sell out, not to mention a new gamified version of shopping, in which gambling-style spinning wheels offering coupons and rewards flash up. But, if we enjoy our purchases and eventually pay them off, is it such a problem if we indulge just a little? After all, in doing so, we’re contributing to the economy… right?

This ‘f*ck it, it’s funny’ attitude towards spending is one I see play out in my own behaviour (last week I regaled friends withhow I saved a fortune at a sample sale) and across social media. Last year’s ‘Girl Math’ trend saw posts like, ‘I bought this purse for £38, which means it was £30 – round down, not up.’ And other users refer to ‘blackout shopping’ – the intention to shop for one thing but leaving with far more. Associated videos have titles like, ‘When you blackout while shopping and your total is £300.’ But, with 88% of online shoppers reporting feeling financial strain, 41% of new customers to debt solutions service MoneyPlus grappling with BNPL debt, and data from March last year by personal finance company Credit Karma finding that Gen Z’s credit card debt is growing at a faster pace than any other generation, are we actually joking about something that’s far more sinister?

What you see is not what you get

They were the boots that broke the camel’s back. More specifically, the Chloé Susanna boots. You remember the ones: Western- style ankle boots with three brushed brass buckles, a Cuban heel and a dusting of tiny gold rock studs. They were the footwear to covet for multiple seasons, the high street churning out endless dupes. The genuine article? That would set you back £1,000 – or around 1,800 Canadian dollars, which is what Christina Mychas spent on a pair in 2018. ‘They were more than what I was paying in my rent at the time, but I kept them anyway,’ she tells me from her home in Toronto.

As a pharmacist, Christina was, in her own words, earning ‘good money’, yet was in a ‘boatload’ of debt – $120,000 (around £66,700) at one point. She describes being ‘constantly’ stressed about her finances, which she would then deal with by going shopping to ‘self-soothe’. It spiralled, she explains, when she started an Instagram page to share her fashion looks. ‘I found myself shopping all the time because I wanted to be a successful Instagrammer,’ she says, citing always needing something new to post as a driving factor. ‘But the life that I was projecting wasn’t aligning with my reality.’

The casual nature of haul videos has normalised this overspending, leading us to think, ‘Well, if they can afford it, then surely so can I.’ But what we see in a short clip doesn’t tell the full story: Christina’s followers didn’t have a clue that she was drowning in debt, and while we spend money, Lucy earns it – she told me she’s earned £11,000 in a month before. Lucy admits she doesn’t even like shopping and her hauls consist predominantly of items gifted to her, or ones she’s being paid to promote – the latter coming with brands telling her what she must say and on which platform. When her videos go live, each garment will be shoppable via an affiliate link, through which Lucy will earn a cut. This will be signified with an ‘ad’ disclaimer in the caption copy or a hashtag such as #Gifted, but how much do we really pay attention to those? That said, we can’t lay all the blame for our changing shopping habits on influencers. After all, it’s a simple evolution of how the fashion industry has always worked – stylists and celebrities swearing clothes from the brands they’ve got lucrative sponsorship deals with. But, given the hurdles to purchase are now so low, just how cautious should we be when it comes to social media shopping?

The perfect storm

There’s the woman with a second bedroom filled with clothes, all with the tags still on. Another who earns nearly £100,000 but is swimming in debt because of the clothes she keeps buying; and the one who keeps ordering and returning things online because she lives for the ‘rush’ of tracking and receiving packages. I spoke to several women who described the same pattern of buying first, thinking later and allowing their spending to spiral, admitting that the temporary high of clicking ‘add to basket’ strongly outweighs the financial rationale of stepping away. The thread tying most of them together is the feeling that shopping has become a plaster for their deeper mental health issues. Many of them addressed concerns of loneliness, depression or anxiety. One woman on a shopping addiction forum shared that the activity masks her ‘fears and insecurities as a dark-skin Black, above average size woman’ and makes her feel she can ‘look good to feel accepted’. Another admitted that ‘Sometimes, the only reason I don’t kill myself is because there are things arriving in the mail that I like.’

‘Ordinary shopping habits can be a bit impulsive as our brain produces dopamine in response to certain behaviours, but with addiction you do it repeatedly to seek out that high,’ says Lee Fernandes, a mental health and addiction specialist at UK Addiction Treatment’s London clinic. The prefrontal cortex is essentially ‘hijacked by the limbic system’, reducing our self-regulation and encouraging us to continue the behaviour despite the consequences – that’s where it becomes an addiction. A feedback loop is created, a reward circuit in which the more you buy, the more you need to buy to get the same level of hit, and the more your brain seeks out that hit, as your emotions override any logical thinking. It’s a similar case with drugs, the misuse of which can result in eventually needing more of the substance each time.

When a shopping habit becomes so extreme that a person will continue to the detriment of their finances, mental health or relationships, it’s referred to as shopping addiction, compulsive buying disorder or oniomania by psychologists. Shopping addiction is not included in the list of addictions forming the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – the DSM – the tool that psychiatrists and doctors use to assess someone, although in the US, experts are increasingly starting to refer to compulsive buying disorder as a behavioural addiction.

US-based financial therapist Carrie Rattle runs a programme to help women escape financial difficulty and describes over-shopping as ‘the new alcohol issue’. She believes our tendency to minimise its severity is having serious ramifications. ‘Over-shopping is referred to as “the smiled-upon addiction”, because we tend to dismiss it as this cutesy thing – “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping” – but ultimately, what happens is your world shrinks because shopping becomes a coping mechanism for emotions that you cannot bear,’ she explains. ‘Only 50% of my clients have debt.’ Many of her clients engage in financial infidelity – hiding their debt from their partners – or get into arguments over their spending. Others find themselves ignoring their loved ones because they’re so fixated on shopping. She tells me of one client who found herself online shopping while herhusband was being carried out of their house on a stretcher by paramedics. Rattle describes the convergence of the social media boom with the advance in neuro-marketing techniques, as well as the rise of a cashless society as ‘the perfect storm’ leading to this growth in behaviours.

Sharmin Attaran is a professor of marketing and the director of the Digital Marketing programme at Bryant University in the US. She explains that operant conditioning – a process in which rewards and punishments influence our behaviour – is a key part of our approach to shopping. ‘Our behaviours are reinforced through a reward, whether that be social media validation or an exclusive deal. This will increase the probability that the behaviour is going to be repeated.’ Dr Attaran says that while the act of parting with our money usually ‘triggers the portion of our brain associated with pain, if we “miss out” on a sale, we feel as if we’ve penalised ourselves, so we act quickly and without a second thought’. Likewise, if the payment process is made easier that pain is reduced, and we develop a disassociation. ‘All of it combines to completely change our spending habits,’ she says.

Add this to the increasing speed of the trend cycle, a process that has multiplied from two major seasons a year to near-constant ‘drops’ promoted by fast fashion brands, alongside micro trends that live and die on social media (see: Cottagecore or Brat Summer) and we are fending off temptation like Mickey Mouse walking past an apple pie cooling on a windowsill.

Value over values

A swirl of colours dominates the coastline: magentas, acid yellows and varying shades of blue, all marbling together, incongruous to the natural environment. A gargantuan pile of unwanted clothes lies dumped on a Ghanaian beach and as the crashing of waves packs it tightly together, a new landmass of polyester, harsh chemical dyes and microplastics forms: a menace to local water and wildlife alike. This image I come across in a newspaper shows the end point for discarded fast fashion and is a stark visual reminder that a minuscule 1% of our unwanted garments are recycled into new clothes – usually after an average of seven wears. The rest head to landfill. With most fast fashion made out of fabrics originating from ground oil (nylon, acrylic, spandex), these items could take 200 years to decompose. As data suggests global textile production has almost doubled in recent decades, I think back to the mountains of clothing I’ve seen piled up in bedrooms across TikTok in recent weeks. What does the future hold for them?

It isn’t just worn and discarded items. Investigations have shown that a vast proportion of online returns don’t go back into production, instead heading straight to landfill. When I ask influencer Lucy what she does with her unwanted items, she says that she rarely bothers to return them, instead opting to sell the clothes on Vinted. Does she have any concern about the environmental impact of these hauls? ‘Sometimes,’ she muses, before citing the comparative cost of purchasing sustainable or vintage clothing. ‘I bought two vintage sweatshirts for £100 recently,’ she says, contrasting this with the low cost of shopping online. She insists her videos help people find items at accessible price points and says she doesn’t currently work with luxury brands as they’re unaffordable.

It’s true that vintage and sustainable clothing is often a lot more expensive than fast fashion (and comes in a limited range of sizes), but when I put the idea of the high street democratising trends to Aja Barber, author of Consumed: The need for collective change; colonialism, climate change & consumerism, she’s quick to quash it. ‘There can be no democracy if it requires one person being exploited in wage slavery, or if it adds petrol to a planet on fire,’ she says. But this approach requires considering how the sausage is made – mental gymnastics that people rarely do, especially not in the hot state of making an impulse purchase. Can we judge people who need a smart outfit for a last-minute job interview if they shop at brands that offer competitive prices? Millennials and Gen Z, meanwhile, are facing economic strain far greater than previous generations. For those who came of age in the shadow of the 2008 financial crash and the Covid pandemic, job security and getting on the housing ladder feels increasingly out of reach. Is it any wonder we turn a blind eye to the long-term impact of a quick pick-me-up purchase? After all, we know from the economic ‘lipstick theory’ that spending on small indulgences often spikes during times of economic inclemency, and when everything is so cheap, everything becomes lipstick.

The future self

When I bought those Sunday morning earrings, how far ahead was I thinking? Perhaps to the moment I gleefully unboxed them or the outfits I would pair them with. But certainly no further than that. This is down to our inherent ‘present bias’, or the psychological disconnect between now and our future selves. Samantha Rosenberg, co-founder of investment service Belong and an expert in behavioural finance, tells me how research shows that the mental models we apply when we think about ourselves 10 years from now are the same as us thinking about a total stranger 10 years from now.

It’s very easy to blame any damaging behaviour on our part on canny marketing techniques (‘The shoes stalked me around the internet!’). Or even on the influencers who ‘told’ us we ‘needed it’. But do we really want to put such power in tech’s hands? Especially considering none of these things are going away – if anything, we’re inching ever closer to a Minority Report reality where simply walking past a shop will see us marketed to in new and innovative ways, and our ability to resist these temptations is only going to be challenged further. I’ve recently started to interrogate my click-first-think-later approach to shopping, asking myself if I really want or need something, or if the machine has just subliminally told me that I do. It’s not easy to resist temptation – and as a journalist writing in a magazine that celebrates fashion trends, I’m not oblivious to the conflict here – but getting to know our limits and needs, rather than momentary urges, is key.

Our control is stronger than we might think. We can all pause, curate who we’re influenced by and decide when we want to spend. Shortly after Christina bought the Chloé boots, she came across the ‘no buy challenge’ doing the rounds on social media, where users shared how they were breaking away from impulse shopping. She’d realised that if she had to move home or had an emergency, she wouldn’t be able to cover the cost. She now spends a chunk of her spare time teaching her 180,800 TikTok followers how to shop their own wardrobes and has been debt-free since 2022, ironically thanks to bolstering her salary with her influencing income.

While we might convince ourselves that little treats or short, sharp hits of dopamine are what we need in the moment, the longer-term impact is only making us feel worse. It’s within our gift to shunt ourselves out of this ‘blackout’ and into a cold state of rationality, where we can step back into the light and consider what it is we really need.