As much as I’d like to admit that the title of this article is clickbait, it terrifyingly isn’t. According to the 2024 Circularity Gap Report, over a period of just six years, between 2016-2021, globally we consumed nearly 6 billion tonnes of materials—that’s over 75% of the total consumption of the 20th Century. We’ve managed to fit one hundred years of “stuff”  into just under a decade, and unsurprisingly, Earth isn’t equipped to keep up. In fact, we are consuming natural resources at a rate 1.75 times faster than can be regenerated, meaning that if every person on Earth lived akin to the average American, we would need five planets to sustain that global lifestyle.

Few of us are strangers to the worries of overconsumption, but stark figures like this wake you up to the real crisis at hand. It can be easier to bury your head in the sand and feel the problem is bigger than you, and in many ways it is, but collective action has power, and that should never be underestimated. The time for responsible living on a mass scale is past due and a culture shift is necessary for long-term security. 

As a society in 2025, we’re consuming more than ever before, and while fast, cheap buying has been on the rise for decades, we’re buying five times more clothing than we did in the 1980s. We live in a (capitalist-fuelled) more is more mindset, where we are told scarcity should be feared above all. Like that top? Better get it in 5 colours. Found a new favourite shower gel? You should buy three more as a backup, just in case. All of us hoard daily Amazon Prime packages like squirrels storing nuts for a winter that’s never coming, and the impacts of that are being felt around the world on a daily basis.

The rise of social media makes it easier to market goods than ever, with the likes of TikTok shop allowing thoughtless, trend-driven purchasing to become something of an epidemic. Even in tough economic times such as these, there will always be those with deep pockets and money to splurge overconsuming—an average resident within a “high-income” country is estimated to go through 28 tonnes of goods a year. 

We’ve all become used to a lifestyle of overconsumption. Even if we aren’t actively taking part in it, we are witnessing it everywhere, and are taught to covet it. Kardashian and influencer closets flood our Instagram feeds, with Birkins piling high and enough clothes to dress a small town. In pop culture, all of our TV and film idols had walk-in wardrobes bigger than some studio flats, with outfit repeating openly chastised as a capital sin.