The Year of Less is a self-help memoir that documents Cait Flanders’ life for the first 12 months of her two-year shopping ban. At every stage, she learned that the less she consumed, the more fulfilled she felt. But the challenge became a lifeline when, in the course of the year, she found herself in situations that turned her life upside-down. Read our author Q&A below, and enter for a chance to win the book here! —Vita Daily
Hi Cait! What, in a nutshell, is your new book about?
The book documents the first year of a two-period period of my life where I chose to not buy anything I didn’t need. So that means I was still buying things like groceries and toiletries as I needed them. But I wasn’t buying things like clothes, shoes, accessories, magazines, electronics, things for around the house, etc. When I started the year, it was meant to be more of an experiment to see if I could spend less, save more and become a more mindful consumer. As time went on, however, it quickly became so much more than that, and I realized I was going to be changing habits I’d spent years perfecting, and learning about why I had always turned to not only shopping but also things like drinking and eating. I wrote the book hoping that it might start a conversation around consumption tendencies, as a whole.
What’s spurred/motivated you to implement this self-imposed shopping ban?
Similar to most of the big changes I’ve made in my financial life, it started by tracking my spending. At the beginning of every month, I would write a budget that included saving 20 per cent of my income. But at the end of the month, I found myself justifying why I had spent the majority of my income on various things and only saved maybe 5 per cent of my income. I didn’t feel good about this, yet I continued to repeat it every month for 12 months in a row. After a year, I realized I wasn’t happy with where my money was going, and I also wasn’t any closer to doing any of the things I wanted to. I decided there had to be another way, and thought opting out from buying stuff for a year might be the solution.
What was the easiest thing about this personal challenge? And the hardest?
The easiest thing for me was not buying things like clothes and shoes, because I quickly realized I actually didn’t care about either, so I never thought about buying them or felt like I was depriving myself. The hardest part was changing habits around the things I did buy a lot. And I should say that the hard part wasn’t NOT shopping or being able to "buy new things". It was having to almost press pause, listen to the stories I was telling myself to try and justify each purchase, and literally change the story and then change my reaction to being in that situation. I’ve been asked a lot of questions that then make assumptions around the stereotype that women are shopaholics, and that’s not what this is about. You could apply this same "pause/pay attention/change reaction" method to anything that people might have the tendency to consume or binge consume, and it’s NOT easy to do if you have had a habit around it for years.
The most important lesson you learned?
At the same time that I decided to not shop, I also decluttered and got rid of 70 per cent of my belongings throughout the year. In slowly doing that, I realized that in my early 20s, I had purchased a lot of things for a more aspirational version of myself. So I had bought clothes I wanted a more grown-up or professional Cait to wear, books I wanted the more interesting version of myself to read and so on. But I didn’t use or wear any of it because the real me didn’t want to. By letting go of those things, and ultimately letting go of that "ideal" version of myself, I learned how to accept myself for who I was-and now only buy things for the real me.
What’s your plan going forward?
I feel like the shopping ban has almost become a way of life. I buy things when I need them! And I really want to make sure I say that buying stuff isn’t bad and spending money isn’t bad. It just feels a lot better when you get to a place where you are only buying things that the real you is actually going to use. So that’s where I am at still to this day. Now, I’ve been thinking a lot more about how we consume information, like media and social media, and the impact that has on our happiness and our lives. I don’t really know what the future holds with that yet, but I want to continue having conversations around being a more mindful consumer-of everything.
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