Making the Internet My Accountability Partner

Featured Photo by Johanne Pold Jacobsen on Unsplash

We have officially entered the black Friday-Christmas-end of year sale season and I once again have noticed my desire to shop and purchase things has drastically increased. I feel like every year this urge is directed towards some new category. This year I feel strong compulsions to buy makeup. I’m sure part of it is, with the holiday season in full swing, I’ve had more family and social engagements, where I want to wear makeup. So I’ve had an increase in the amount of joy my makeup brings me because I’ve been using it more. And as Hannah Louise Poston said many times on her YouTube channel, we often fall into this fallacy of believing that owning more of a thing that brings us joy will increase our joy. However, often the truth is that it increases our stress levels.

I know that is certainly the truth for me. I have taken immense pride in recent months of culling my makeup collection to just the items that I use regularly enough for the joy-stress balance to be favorable. So now the question becomes how do I navigate through these urges. I know realistically I need to monitor my internet usage. Obviously, I need to really prohibit myself from browsing makeup sites, just to browse. On top of that, certain types of social media and content can often trigger my urge to want things. I think this experiment of being more mindful of my internet usage in one particular category can be a really useful step in my journey to be less reliant on technology for entertainment.

I also want to add one additional step to really focus on ingraining my makeup habits into my mind and heart to prevent future urges to shop. For the month of December I want to track how often I use each of my makeup products. I currently own:

1 primer

2 foundations

1 color corrector

1 concealer

1 Blush

1 Highlighter

1 Setting Spray

2 Eyeliners

2 Eyeshadow Singles

2 Eyeshadow Palettes

2 Lash Primers

1 Mascara

11 Lip Color Products

6 Lip Balms

I will break down each individual product, how long I’ve had them, and how tempting each category is to me (in terms of new purchases) in a post later this week. I think it could be really insightful to see the numbers of how long a product has lasted me and that could really temper my urge for more, especially as I take that knowledge to look into the future of how long will I have that new product and will I be tempted to buy more before that time is up.