Consumerism & Blogging

It's been a hot minute since I've sat down and written a blog post. The letter to the Ted was something I had written months ago, so it's been about a month since I actually written anything. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the main one is that I've become slightly disillusioned with the world of blogging and social media. I kind of hinted to this in a tweet earlier this month. I was watching YouTube videos before class one day, and I realized I had watched multiple hauls from the same person within the span of a month. These hauls weren't small either, and while I completely understand that some of the clothes were sent to the person from companies, there is still an impact even if money is not being spent by the specific person. The clothes weren't even from high-quality stores, so you kinda knew that they would fall apart within a couple of months.

I've found this isn't a problem only within the YouTuber community either but also with bloggers. How often do you see someone posting repeats of articles of clothing? Posts about sales go up every week, and people are doing "mini-hauls" on their Snapchats and Instagram stories every day. I mean, honestly, how much clothing do you need?

I've been stirring over this problem for weeks now, and it's conveniently come at a time where I am moving out of my dorm and back home while my parents are also cleaning out our house in hopes to move somewhere smaller in the next couple of years. (I am the youngest, so there are no more kids back at home.) Y'all, I have so much clothing in my dorm. So much that I have to take most of it back this weekend when I go home, so I can actually bring the rest back when I officially move out in two weeks. Why? I wear the same 7-10 shirts every week, and I wear my Nike shorts and leggings every day to class. I don't need half the clothing I have at school, and I don't really need it in general. I don't wear most of it or even really love it. Why did I even get it in the first place? Because it was "in-style"? Because I thought I could make a blog post out of it?

This has been a hard thought process for someone whose unofficial motto is "Treat yo' self" and is a self-described maximalist. However, I don't think I have to sacrifice all that in order to become more aware of how consumerism affects me and the planet. Yeah, I can still love clothes and shoes and have "stuff," but I need to be and should be more conscious of what exactly I am buying. This video explains why maybe only ever shopping at Target and Old Navy might not be the best ideas.

Being aware of how I am consuming fashion is super important especially because the environment needs all the help it can get right now, and it starts with making smarter decisions about 1. what I am buying, and 2. if I truly love something. Then I should probably get rid of a lot of stuff to make room for quality clothing I actually will wear because dragging dresses back and forth from Georgia to Alabama makes no sense if I don't wear them. (Make sure you donate your clothes, too!)

While this means I should probably not buy as many sorority t-shirts, I am going to spend this summer decluttering and hopefully only buying stuff that makes me completely happy and will last a lot longer than 6 months.

Thanks to Ashley (a fellow Theta!) for being the first one to put these thoughts in my head.

xx, jKm

P.S. Another reason I haven't been blogging is that I've been working on a project that I think will make the blog even better and a better reflection of me. Also, it's Dead Week right now, and school has been killing me.