Why I'm taking a break from Buy Nothing
Discovering life (and thrifting) again outside the Facebook trap
I joked the other day with a couple of friends that I’m “over a week clean from Buy Nothing,” since Oct. 1. This is temporary sobriety. I’ll go back, probably. But for now, the break is much needed and giving me back my life.
There wasn’t a specific moment when my neighborhood Buy Nothing group on Facebook ceased to be a place of near-constant delight. It snuck up on me.
I marked one year in the group in mid-August, and during that year, I traded hundreds of items, maybe close to 1,000. Goodies I scored from Buy Nothing are all over the house: this desk I’m writing at; most of my clothes; lamps and candles; half of my kids’ toys; the onion basket in the kitchen; the step-stool in the bathroom; the hanging plant in the living room; the list goes on and on. And I’m grateful for all the stuff that’s gone, too — so much!
Since I didn’t keep a spreadsheet or a diary, it’s impossible to convey the magnitude of my Year of Buying Nothing. This list is a taste. I’ve always been a scrapper and thrifter, but it was Buy Nothing that took it to the next level and made me want to start this newsletter about everyday, alleyway thrifting.
Beyond the material gratification, the group connected me to the community, to reality, to human contact. Meghan Gunn’s essay “How a ‘Buy Nothing’ Group Kept Me Human” perfectly defines this feeling of connection. Like Gunn, I moved in the midst of the pandemic, and the aggravated loneliness and isolation in a new city left me untethered.
Buy Nothing, Gunn writes, “has become a lens for me to understand the fabric of my new home despite moving during a pandemic. It’s difficult to establish a sense of belonging when it feels like there’s little to belong to; Buy Nothing, at least, showed proof of life.”
But, Buy Nothing also became an obsession for me. Then an unhealthy one. It was my therapy, until it wasn’t.
I set my Facebook alerts for the Buy Nothing group at the highest level, and since the group has well over seven thousand members, I was getting alerts at strobe-light frequency. Every time anyone so much as commented on a post, a red circle would pop up in the upper righthand corner of my screen like a shot of dopamine. As a result, I was also spending more time in general ensnared in the Facebook distraction machine, getting caught up in other people’s drama and problems — which is perfectly fine in moderation, but I wasting away this one wild and precious life tapping Like, Heart, Care, Angry and Ha-ha reacts while I waited for responses to my Buy Nothing posts and comments.
And for what? Scoring a half-broken coffee grinder I didn’t really need? Increasingly, I was commenting “Interested!” on Buy Nothing stuff without really thinking through whether it was something I truly needed or wanted.
The dirty secret of free stuff in the year 2022 is that a lot of it is garbage. We are inundated with products that were made to break. When an appliance or piece of clothing or electronic device inevitably stops working as well as it should, it feels good and righteous to give it away to someone we envision “needs” it and will take the time to fix it.
This is wishful thinking, for the majority of stuff. On the worst days, Buy Nothing felt like a churning merry-go-round of the same crap traveling from group member to group member. We were overly optimistic, hoping maybe the next person would be the one to treasure what we had let collect dust.
The whole point of Buy Nothing is to keep stuff out of the landfill, but sometimes it felt merciful to throw some of that shit out.
The vibe was changing, too. It’s possible the group is just growing too big too fast, with so many thousands of members. A crew of saint-like volunteer moderators keep it running smoothly, but the knit of an online community starts to unravel the bigger it gets. Just before my self-imposed break from Buy Nothing, the moderators alerted everyone that a member named Becky had been trespassing and sneaking into people’s homes during pickups. Becky was blocked and banned. The whole situation was unsettling.
So what is life like without Buy Nothing?
Well, much more peaceful now that I’m not running around town doing pickups and my brain isn’t constantly doping itself on Facebook alerts. I have more time. I’ve been reading: “Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor,” by Kim Kelly, and “Hysterical,” by Elissa Bassist; next up is Ronnie Spector’s memoir, “Be My Baby.” My email inbox is less chaotic and more organized. I’m less distracted around my kids.
Also, it turns out that even without Buy Nothing I’m still finding goodies on the curb. On a family walk last week we came across a bunch of curbside treasures and loaded up the stroller. The best freebie was a Marble Run set, which Ben has been helping the kids build in the living room. Every time they put it up, the run is just a little riskier and longer, teetering on a tabletop to a chair to an extended traintrack. Engineering!
As an alternative to Buy Nothing and Marketplace, I’ve been spending a bit more time on Craigslist, that old standby. It was my go-to for nearly two decades, for pretty much everything (I even got a boyfriend off Craigslist — true story).
Nowadays you can practically hear the tumbleweeds blowing around Craigslist, as people have switched to Marketplace and a proliferation of other online forums for buying and selling stuff.
Still, I have successfully given away a few things via the CL free section in recent weeks.
I received this email in response to one of my CL ads:
Hi! I certainly do have a use for an air mattress, for visiting family & guests, so if it is still available, I'd be very happy to be able to drop by to pick it up. I would just need an address to pop into my GPS to find you, and a mutually convenient time. Since I work nights, I could come over from working downtown in the mornings, getting out at 7am; if the air mattress were, say, in a plastic bag with "CHUCK" on it, I could pick it up from somewhere on the property without disturbing you. Otherwise, it's a bit more of a drive, but an evening after suppertime could be made to work.
You can e-mail me back, but a phone call and/or text would be better. I work overnights and only see e-mail at night, ~12:30am to 6:45am, so my cell phone is a faster way to reach me and take care of anything we need. I'm writing, and not calling or texting now, because it's the middle of the night -- and I don't want to be rude :) . For my part, while I usually sleep roughly 9am to 5 or 6pm, text messages won't generally wake me, and phone calls usually will (different ringtones); if you want to reply, then reach me however you need to :) .
Either way, thank you for offering things on the Craig's List, and have a blessed life!
-- Chuck =)
I mean…!
When would you ever get this detailed and polite of a message via Facebook Marketplace? Over on Marketplace, it’s all “Is this item available?” followed by ghosting and/or a scam.
Chuck got the air mattress, right on time, and even “sent up a prayer” to my mom when I told him it had been her air mattress. (She’s alive, but I can see how my wording confused him.)
Thank you for offering things on the Craig’s List. No, thank YOU, Chuck. My pleasure.
So, in conclusion, the Buy Nothing-free life is going well. When I return, I hope I can maintain some perspective and not get all obsessed again. It might help to try the Buy Nothing app I keep hearing about, instead of that old Facebook trap. We’ll see. (Let me know if you’ve tried the app, or similar!)
In the meantime, I have marbles to run and Craigslist heros like Chuck to encounter.