overconsumptioncore.
What sneakers are we buying this fall? What specific pair of jeans are we wearing this season? What bag are we getting for school? What’s on our Christmas list this year? What are we wearing for New Year's Eve? How do we feel about loafers? We look so cute, but what do we call this aesthetic?
Who is we?
Why are we wearing the same thing?
Are we trying to match?
More than ever, TikTok feels like a monolith of overconsumption. The platform, more effective than others due to its ultra-personalized content feed and real-time trend awareness, profits off of both sponsored and unconscious creator marketing. As a collective, TikTok’s users not only source but determine the timeline of most microtrends, and therefore many consumers turn to the app to blatantly beg for insight into TikTok’s next hyperfixation.
“Our” communal shopping list is both vague and limitless. Each “it product” must have a degree of exclusivity–whether through price, style, or availability, because if too many people buy everyone’s favorite thing, it will officially be overdone. And this expands across anything and everything money can buy: clothes, shoes, accessories, makeup, home decor, lifestyle items, subscriptions, and even classes. This creates a universal and constant feeling of inadequacy tempered by the entirely false notion that just one more “perfect” purchase could be enough if we could just agree on what it is.
This issue has grown far beyond simply asking the void for recommendations. We now have an incurable urge to consume in excess. Most likely, each person who makes an embarrassingly desperate What sneakers are we wearing next? post already owns at least one decent pair of sneakers. But TikTok has normalized overconsumption to the point that this behavior is necessary for social conformity. Much of TikTok’s audience relies entirely on fashion trends to justify a simple (and almost always unnecessary) purchase. And, of course, the process is cyclical. Once a trend dies down, people become unsatisfied with what they own because they don’t honestly like any of it. They then beg for what’s coming next, intentionally rushing consumer trend cycles to stay ahead of it all,reinforcing TikTok’s overwhelming aesthetic monoculture.
It is undeniably difficult to grasp the true personal value–or lack thereof–of a trendy item because everything looks cool while it’s in style. Just ask this summer’s leopard-print sequin shorts, last year’s denim maxi skirt, or that one quilted bag sitting in the back of every girl’s closet. For even the casual social media user, cultivating a true individual style is much easier said than done when every piece of content seems to be driving us toward the same ever-changing list of products.
Most obviously, our generation’s lack of self-identity is a personal problem, one that primarily impacts our bank accounts. But on a larger scale, the resulting overconsumption is detrimental to our environment as textile production generates 10% of global carbon emissions and 20% of global wastewater production. Since 2000, clothing production and sales have doubled while the average number of times a garment is worn has decreased by 36%. Human culture and nature has gone far beyond need, and the social pressure to purchase in excess through TikTok microtrends is directly increasing waste production.
Much of Gen-Z has a love-hate relationship with TikTok, particularly as a perpetrator of personal style. As the primary platform of “what other people are doing,” it’s comforting to feel socially and culturally aware. But we need to remember that we don’t need most items we see advertised on social media, and we certainly don’t need a slightly different variation of the Adidas Samba, another expensive lip treatment, or a pair of even shorter Uggs. It’s exhausting, overwhelming, expensive, and now we all own the same things. Maybe this year, we can all agree to put self-identity at the top of our Christmas lists, and maybe this year, we can fully enjoy our clothes and possessions for more than one season.
