Buy Nothing Day is this Friday (29 Nov 2024). It’s a holiday I fully intend to celebrate, and not just because I’m on a budget this year. This means I decided to plan ahead, and brainstorm a few ways to spend it. Feel free to borrow or steal them!

1. Do nothing about it. Even though this is clearly an anti-capitalist post, the pressure to “get busy” in celebration of occasions such as Buy Nothing Day is clearly palpable. So let’s start with the most important thing you can do: nothing. Don’t go shopping. Don’t check out the sales. Don’t drive to the mall. Doing nothing is an act of resistance in itself. Use it well.

2. Find an old thing and make it new again. I’ve been good with it this year. iPods. Sports watches. Tools. Paint. After the house move, the pressure to “put my own mark on things” was becoming expensive, but luckily, the pressure to keep my habitat unf*cked usually wins. This means I try to keep using old stuff. The added bonus, in many cases, is that old = un-enshittified!

3. Make a fridge clean-out meal. Listen, I’m pretty sure that our delivery riders will be seeing us again. Just not this Friday. We’ve often found ourselves going from “there’s nothing in the fridge” to “whoa, look at all that food we cooked” within 15-30 minutes. Friday could be the next day when it happens.

4. Spend some time taking control of your tech. You know you’ve been meaning to un-install all the bloatware, un-check all the dialog boxes in privacy controls that make you forfeit your soul to Jeff Bezos, unsubscribe from all the emails. If you go out and buy yourself a new gadget, the list of tech that owns you will grow by that one item. Instead, make sure you know what your existing ones actually do to your life.

5. Get good freebies. Open Culture has documentaries, movies, music. Project Gutenberg has ebooks. Librivox has audiobooks. Archive.org still has plenty of stuff. You could literally spend the whole weekend being entertained by something that’s good and free and that you don’t have to buy.

6. Do a charity shop drop. This used to be the best part of every house move. Clothes, books etc - went to a charity shop, and I had more shelf space, or fewer boxes to pack into the car. Who says you need to wait until a house move to feel all Marie-Kondo like? Do it this Friday.

7. Go to your local library. You don’t need to take a book out. Or a DVD, or anything. You can literally go and make yourself a hot drink and come back. Although, along the way or among the shelves, you’ll probably think of a book you’d like. Or something to do while you’re there. Or an event whose leaflet in the doorway intrigued you. So you’ll ask the librarian. And that’s how it begins.

8. Be your own source of entertainment and fulfilment. This one’s either mega-cerebral (why should anyone allow their self-esteem, life rhythms and personal values to be dictated by techno-feudalist rituals of gratuitous consumption?) or radically basic (why shouldn’t I stay in, put on Kiss FM and play with myself?). You decide.

9. Create stuff. Possibly, this idea ties in with number 8 above. Or idea #3, about the meal. Or anything else you had in mind. I find that shopping sprees are really good at switching off my creative impulse - and that one of the ways in which I sabotage my making, writing or anything else is something along the lines of, “hang on, let me just buy this app which is going to make me more creative.” Balls to the app. Make something.

10. Seize the means of production. Hey, it was never just about the sales. So here’s an idea for those who really want extra credit from this little exercise. Help start a union. Help set up a co-op. Help oppose a crappy / exploitative practice. Become an ally to people who want to live differently. Share your skills which can build something else than an eternity of Black Fridays.

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Yes, this is all coming from a place of privilege. No, I don’t expect everyone to relate to any of this. I am writing it for my benefit as much as yours. I find it’s so easy for anyone to casually slide back into the well-worn grooves of “shop till we drop”, and so this is a reminder that other directions exist.

Have a good Friday when it comes.

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Photo credit: “Drowned shopping cart” by Jules Holleboom is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.