Underconsumption Core

Picky teas and slabs of beer. Is this it forever?

When I packed my van up for a weekend at a music festival, I didn’t realise what I was doing was highly trendy.

In years gone by I might have expected to spend upwards of £100 on beers at the festival bars over the weekend, and more on festival burritos, festival Diet Cokes, and festival burgers. You know I love a burger van.

This time, however, I’ve finally learned how to superbudget, which is what I call living on the absolute bare minimum. It’s something I’ve been in training for my whole life, and I’m really good at it. We ate sandwiches and Pepperamis, a jar of gherkins (essential vegetable component) and multiple big bags of crisps. These sorts of “picky teas” are well-known in the North as somehow both an immense treat and the answer to being too skint and tired to cook a proper dinner. This peasant’s charcuterie served us well all weekend, and I am smug about it.

Underconsumption core exists because even the most exuberant of haulfluencers are starting to feel the constrictions of what is basically a national money shortage. When Broccoli is £1.20 a head in Lidl (one pound twenty pence!! for broccoli!!), there are many other things that have to get cut from our monthly budgets. Nights out become more infrequent. Takeaways become frozen pizzas. Beer turns into slabs of whatever tinnies are on offer at Tesco. We do what we can to keep ourselves afloat when the weekly shop increases by more than 20% over a year.

There are two reactions to a recession. One is to cut back to the bare bones of your budget, and enact control over your life this way—aka. the Picky Tea scenario. The other is to surrender to the cosmos and treat yourself, in a phenomenon well-known as “The Lipstick Effect”. (Of course this term was invented by a lipstick manufacturer for marketing purposes and picked up by journalists as an actual scientific theory—Leonard Lauder of Estée Lauder, in fact.) We buy small luxuries to make our lives worth living. We treat ourselves so that the daily drudgery of taking your own shitty coffee on the train and not having a pint after work feels less like penury. I bought a red lipstick this morning, because I decided I deserved it. As it happens, it was highly underwhelming and underpigmented. Don’t buy the Pixi +HYDRA LipTreat in Poppy, it is rubbish.

This brings me back to Underconsumption Core. Some darling young people have decided that being poor and acting like it is a core—a style to follow, a statement to make. Rather than take the indignant stance I’ve seen elsewhere that this is cosplaying as poor people, I’m happy for them, because it seems like a really cheap hobby, and it’s teaching others some good habits. They are sharing their minimal make-up bags featuring just foundation, mascara, eyeliner, and lipstick (so, my high school make-up bag,) and their worn-in trainers to show that it’s possible to live on less. The main tenet of Underconsumption Core, however, is to use something up until it is gone. You can make fun of this all you like, but to some this really is a radical notion. That a shower only needs one bottle of shampoo, one conditioner, one shower gel—revolutionary. That a skincare regime can be effective in only three steps rather than 9—unbelievable. The aim is to buy less, with the outcome of being more mindful in your daily life rather than wandering around with your big basking shark mouth open consuming everything in sight.

There’s one drawback to this fad, however, and it’s guilt. The idea of supporting local and independent businesses is engraved on the inside of my skull in florid Copperplate. Every time I avoid going out for drinks, I feel that hot little flush of shame. Every time I buy beer from the supermarket, I know that I shouldn’t be doing it. I should be supporting the good people who make better quality beer who I actually know and love. It’s tough out there for businesses—god knows I know that—but it’s also tough for customers too. Underconsumption Core only exists because people are struggling, no matter their outward optics. So what is going to happen to us all? Is this how we’re all going to live from now on? Surely not. There has to be something better on the horizon. There has to be a time in my future where heading out for a pint doesn’t require forethought. When will I never have to hear the soul-crushing phrase “Cost of Living” again? I honestly don’t expect answers, I just want to say these things out loud. When will things get easier? How much longer?