Few people would call themselves a shopaholic. After all, every purchase comes with a perfectly reasonable explanation.
It starts the same way every time: one skincare video, then another, and suddenly you’re mentally rearranging your bathroom to make room for products you didn’t know existed eight minutes ago.
Somewhere between the hours of mindless scrolling, a familiar feeling takes over. You suddenly feel like you’re not living up to your full potential solely because you don’t own a specific shade of blush or a pastel colored tumbler.
CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC
Every scroll is a store’s display window, and every creator is a friendly face telling you what you’re missing out on. Every moment spent on your phone is equivalent to going window shopping. But somewhere along the way, our algorithms developed a conscience.
The same creators who once convinced us that happiness lived inside a lip oil have started to backtrack. Now they’re urging us to buy less.
Welcome to the era of deinfluencing: social media’s latest movement, where creators publicly discourage purchases rather than encourage them. After years of relentless hauls, affiliate links, and so-called things you absolutely need, watching someone tell you to hold back almost feels… refreshing.
Almost.
Because here’s the catch: even anti-consumerism has become content.
WHEN PRODUCTS BECOME IDENTITIES
For years, the internet operated on a simple premise: buy this product, and you’ll inherit this lifestyle. French philosopher Guy Debord once described modern life as a society of the spectacle, a world where images become far more influential than lived experience itself. Social media has accelerated that idea beyond anything he could’ve imagined. We no longer consume products first. We consume carefully edited images of the lives those products supposedly create.
The public figures are marketed as aspirational, the looks and lifestyle as completely achievable. We bought the skincare to buy the glowing skin, yes, but we also bought it to feel disciplined, capable, and organized. We weren’t just purchasing items. We were purchasing versions of ourselves that we hoped would feel like our ideal selves.
The algorithm doesn’t sell products. It sells identities, then quietly convinces you the product is how you get there. We’re all still chasing that green scarf high, purchasing items in hopes they’ll magically bridge the gap between who we are and who we wanna be.
Long before TikTok Shop existed, Jean Baudrillard argued in The Consumer Society that we consume symbols just as much as we consume products. A handbag can signify status, a serum discipline, an oversized green juice an impossibly organized life. Modern consumers rarely buy objects for their practical purpose alone.
Instead, we buy what those objects represent to the world: taste, status, discipline, beauty, belonging. The lip oil isn’t just lip oil anymore. It’s evidence that you’re the kind of person who has a carefully curated morning routine.
The reality, however, is much heavier. Our vanities are overflowing with half-used serums that didn’t cure our insecurities (or our skin for that matter). Our closets are packed with fast-fashion pieces meant for a single Instagram photo, destined to be forgotten by next month. The constant urge to accumulate has turned shopping from an occasional joy into an exhausting chore centered around keeping up with others.
The irony is difficult to ignore. The more we want, the more we’re wanting.
Perhaps that’s how trends have multiplied so aggressively. The speed with which these aesthetics arrive is matched only by the speed with which they disappear. What felt essential in January becomes painfully dated by summer, making desire feel less like a personal instinct and more like a subscription service that automatically renews.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: how much of what we want is actually ours?
THE ILLUSION OF A CHOICE
The algorithm is remarkably good at manufacturing familiarity. See something often enough and it begins to feel inevitable. It’s increasingly difficult to tell the difference between wanting something and simply being shown it enough times that wanting it begins to feel like your own idea.
Algorithms don’t force us to buy anything. They simply narrow the field of imagination until one option begins to feel inevitable. What looks like personal taste often begins as nothing more than repeated exposure.
The greatest trick consumer culture ever pulled wasn’t convincing us to spend. It was convincing us we arrived at the decision all on our own. That’s what makes deinfluencing so fascinating. At its best, it’s less about telling people what not to buy than reminding them they have a choice at all. It asks us to pause before confusing aspiration with necessity, or convenience with identity.
Maybe the goal was never to stop shopping altogether. Fashion and beauty, after all, have always been about pleasure, experimentation, and self-expression. The point is simply to become harder to persuade.
Because in an economy built on manufactured desire, perhaps the real luxury isn’t owning less.
It’s wanting less.
