On April 24, Qiaosun was reading in his “empty” home.
The monthly food costs 20 yuan (about 3 U.S. dollars), the same clothes wear dozens of days, the home is empty… can you afford to live a “no consumption” life?
★ Bartering around for “karma”
When 30-year-old Qiao Sang (pseudonym) announced that she had become a non-consumerist, she stopped wearing makeup and wore the same gray sweatshirt every day, with soft gray sweatpants and white canvas bag at work became her daily routine, eight years in sales, she also always heard from around her “dress too plain, take too little” She has been in sales for eight years, and as a result, she always hears the “euphemistic” protests from her surroundings that she “wears too little and carries too little.
The blanket is used by Qiaosheng to spread the reading corner.
The Xinjing newspaper peeled the onionpeople recorded more than a hundred days of the 90 post-white collar Qiaosang practice “no consumerism”. On the first day, Qiao Sang was worried about food. She took stock of her inventory, with four bags of snail noodles, a dozen cans of cocktails, grains, snack crackers, apples, a few meats and nuts.
Since she couldn’t consume them, Josan planned to barter. She sent photos of the snail powder and cocktails to the community owners group and asked if anyone wanted them, but no one responded. When she woke up in the morning, she ate mixed congee cooked in the rice cooker, and at noon, she stayed in the office alone to eat a cup of homemade soy milk and an apple. In the afternoon, a colleague said she had extra eggs at home, and Josan traded two yoga books for the 12 eggs.
She tried to follow the example of foreign non-consumers by going to the supermarket to seek out excess free food, but her boss wouldn’t let her. She started to go around and “make money”. People who followed her video sent her half a packet of noodles, two sprouted potatoes and three carrots. She cut off the sprouted part of the potatoes and steamed them at high temperature to make mashed potatoes for lunch. Friends later also gave rice.
But the lack of food made Josan hungry, and she convinced herself that it was respectful. Not only did she save on food, but she also cut back on “clothing, housing and transportation. After donating 200 pieces of her own clothes, she wore a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants for dozens of days, and when her clothes smelled, she sprayed some perfume on them. She mustered up the courage to cut off her pigtails and kept her hair length above her earlobes.
In Qiao Sang’s 80-square-meter house, the non-load-bearing walls separating the two bedrooms were knocked down by her, throwing away the shelves and cushions of the sofa, and then the bed frame, mattress and bedpan, now left with a blanket, now leaving only the table and bench for eating. To save money on electricity, Josan rarely turned on the lights, and the house became increasingly empty and gray.
She no longer uses toilet paper and only uses the drying function of the smart toilet. She used tea seed powder instead of detergent, and someone forwarded her a recipe for shampoo made with only soap nuts, brown sugar and stones. To save money on public transportation, she discovered the trick of recharging that could be done for pennies less.
After the first month had passed, Josan had spent only $20.50 on groceries and fruit. Her total cost for the month was $2,884.1, of which dentist visits, broadband and utilities accounted for more than $2,000, and $148 was spent on a brush for her cat.
This month, Josan lost six pounds.
★ Divorce to buy a house empty
The report said that Qiaosheng did not think much about spending money in the past and spent it when she wanted to. When she was a tour guide in Beijing after college, she went to the wholesale market in the early hours of the morning to get socks and trinkets to set up stalls in Beijing’s subway stations. After graduation, she entered a large Internet factory and earned more and more money. She changed her car three times, one time more high-class, and bought clothes, shoes and bags for herself and her family in pounds.
She had used to enjoy life with money. Experienced more than 3,000 yuan a night hotel, Turkey, the Philippines and Japan travel to say go, want to learn to dive to fly to Southeast Asia, want to play gliding to Thailand. She also did a few thousand dollars of fitness cards, bar cards, etc., but she did not have time to spend, the only thing that stuck is to spend more than 20,000 yuan of tuition for yoga.
In the “Double 11” a few years ago, Qiao Sang married, she and her husband all the holidays into a shopping festival, will certainly buy a lot of things, they also like to try the various cuisines, until the two because of differences in buying a house and break up.
Josan said that her ex-husband had a house and the two were financially independent after the license. But one day, Qiaosheng wanted to buy a house for herself in order to try the “empty” lifestyle, and was opposed by her ex-husband who did not want to take on another mortgage. The two divorced after constant bickering, and Josan used her savings to make the down payment.
★ The body protests vomiting and diarrhea
When the New Crown (CCP virus) epidemic hit Hebei earlier this year, it was the second month that Qiaosheng was running a no-consumerism program. Despite her home quarantine and the inability of food sent by friends to arrive, she no longer felt anxious about the lack of things.
That month she spent $188.20 on fruits and vegetables; an inventory of her fridge revealed one potato, six eggs, two bell peppers, a quarter of an onion, a zucchini, two tomatoes, two purple potatoes, one-half of a cabbage and one-half of a curry, “enough for another week,” she said.
One morning in the third month, she suddenly vomited and had diarrhea, accompanied by heartburn. The physician deduced that she had eaten something bad. Josan thought it was her body’s way of warning her to be kinder to herself. She began eating nutritiously, getting ready for bed at 9:30 p.m., and trying to run every day to exercise her heart and lungs.
After 117 days, while accepting moderate consumption, Josan began to rethink the meaning of the house. At first she felt that having a house was the only way to live her life, “but I now think about it the other way around, that this house is instead my bondage.” Practicing non-consumerism, Qiao Sang says, should be about being able to do what you want to do anywhere.
Wu Xiao (pseudonym), 34, is a viewer of Qiao Sang’s “non-consumerism” video. She said Qiaosheng’s non-consumerist life inspired her to take stock of her own “shopaholic” life. She was once yelled at by her husband to “get out” because she was addicted to shopping sites, but when she was packing up, she stopped to look at the clothes on the floor, “What if I die, what are these things left at home?”
To retain the youthful look, Wu Xiao had bought more than 1,000 yuan worth of “child machine”; want a good body, she ruthlessly spent 2,400 yuan to order a treadmill; because of the love of beauty and bought a variety of curling iron, hair straightening comb almost useless; she also bought a large number of pink dolls and crafts, placed in the house dust.
Wu Xiao was determined to change herself. She followed Joe Sang’s method and took inventory of the items in her house, discarding unnecessary things one after another for almost a month before the wooden floor finally showed up in a large area.
On April 24, the books sent to Josan by the netizens set up half a wall of books.
★Half a wall of books at the Wandering Bookstore
After not consuming, Qiaosheng spent the time she saved on reading. At first, the first few books she read were the Keigo Higashino suspense novel series. One day, someone sent her Maugham’s novel “The Moon and Sixpence” and she was hooked. Later, she began to turn to the philosopher Schopenhauer’s “The World as Will and Appearances”.
Josan has more than 100,000 followers on social networking sites. After 116 consecutive days of updating her videos, she announced that she wanted to turn her house into a book transit point, and she made a label “Wandering Bookstore” and put it on the used books sent by her fans. “With so many books, is it another kind of hoarding?”
Qiao Sang plans to try her hand at a “wandering bookstore” and has already had a few people register to borrow books from her.
As the weather warms up, Qiao Sang intends to buy a new mattress, and the books she reads are no longer limited to profound life lessons, and she has started reading “sweet and sweet articles” on her cell phone. On her day off, her cell phone mailbox always prompts a dozen unread new emails, now she can hold herself back, relying on her faith to support herself and not to touch those red dots.
Ding Hong foraging for food in the wild after work. (Taken from Weibo)
The non-consumerism started with a Chinese in New Zealand
Freegans, which started in the late 1980s and is based in the United States, began as a group of non-consumerists who declared war on what they saw as an irrational consumer culture by not shopping, not buying food, not driving, not buying a house, not going to work, and even “eating garbage”.
Ding Hong foraging for food in the wild after work. (Taken from Weibo)
According to Baidu and Xinjing Daily, it is believed that the concept of non-consumerism began in China with Ding Hong, a New Zealand Chinese. She shared a story that went viral: she had only one backpack, didn’t rent an apartment for six years, lived in a company, ate leftovers, showered at the gym, and spent no more than 500 yuan a month on average. This has led to many people following her example.
In the practice of some Chinese non-consumers, the so-called non-consumption is not the same as not spending money at all, but rather advocates not to over-consume, simplify life and leave more energy to focus on the soul. Song Suhong, a professor at Beijing Normal University’s School of Journalism and Communication, says, “The purpose of not spending is not to make oneself a miser, but to say that money should be spent where it should be spent.”
Song referred to Baudrillard’s book “Consumerism,” which states, “We buy a commodity not because we need it, but because of the symbols on it.” He believes that what the non-consumerists are against is the kind of symbol-based consumption that Baudrillard criticizes for the sake of showing off.
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