At the end of last year, Americans’ credit card debt had ballooned to a staggering $1.13 trillion. While the majority of the debt is due to rising interest rates and the overall cost of living, an estimated 7% of Americans are impulse buyers, racking up large amounts of credit card debt through hundreds of unnecessary purchases.
The temptation to buy is endless: spend just five minutes scrolling through influencer content on social media and you’ll be bombarded with pricey products in the form of subscriptions, skincare products, exercise equipment, and anything else you can imagine.
From everyday ads to shopping videos to the popular “daily spending” videos, influencers are encouraging their audiences to make one purchase after another. Not surprisingly, purchases of personal care products and clothing are on the rise, but the majority of this spending is considered non-essential. Americans are overspending, falling victim to overconsumption and perpetuating the cycle of waste.
Social media unashamedly promotes materialism. There are advertisements all over the social platforms. Not only do influencers sing the praises of the brands they sponsor, but there are also advertisements on each strategically placed item, branded and posed for the camera.
Lifestyle influencer platforms often focus on strategies for happiness and health, showcasing an ideal life that involves expensive clothes, beautiful food and little else besides exercising every day. The message is that money can buy love and happiness. To have it all, you just have to spend it all.
A college degree still matters. Young conservatives like me are told not to go to college. That’s shortsighted.
Influencers create a false sense of reality
Of course, we know that this lifestyle isn’t realistic, but it’s very easy to believe that an influencer’s day-to-day life is an honest and accurate representation of a creator’s daily life.
What many consumers, myself included, often fail to realize is that social media is a business. According to a study conducted by Later, 94% of influencers make money through brand partnerships, where brands pay influencers to promote their products to their audience.
Many influencers make a large portion of their revenue through their Amazon storefronts, where they link to the products they display and encourage their audience to shop from them – no one knows if the content creator actually likes or uses the products.
Influencers capitalize on their audience’s impulse buying habits and associate the amount of stuff they own with their viewers’ seemingly perfect lives. Lifestyle influencers love to show off thousands of beauty products, dozens of Amazon packages on their doorsteps, and color-coded refrigerators full of food as the secret to a romantic life. Their content is based on the idea that their happiness, or at least the illusion of happiness, is found through stuff. Want to be as organized as me? Buy these products through the link in my profile!
Never mind that most of the lifestyles portrayed online are impossible to achieve (and often staged), we still get jealous of the wealth and fame influencers flaunt.
Content creators constantly urge us to buy more and more. Recent studies have found that social media use is correlated with materialism and fuels the desire for more possessions. However, contrary to popular belief, having more “stuff” has been shown to negatively impact overall life satisfaction.
No Instagram, no TikTok, and I wasn’t allowed to have a smartphone until I was 16. I can’t thank my parents enough.
Overconsumption of products sold on social media is not only dangerous to your wallet, but it also has a negative impact on the environment.
The lifestyles promoted by internet celebrities are incredibly wasteful. Their fridge and pantry restocking videos feature dozens of single-use plastic items — individually wrapped snacks, bottled water, soft drinks in aluminum cans — neatly arranged in organized acrylic containers. This amount of waste is hard to justify, especially as they prioritize aesthetics over practicality.
Influencers are promoting fast fashion that harms the environment
To make matters worse, social media has fueled the rise of fast fashion – cheap, mass-produced clothing that prioritizes fashion over quality, resulting in staggering amounts of textile waste and water pollution from dyes, and a 400% increase in global clothing consumption in the past 20 years.
Additionally, there have been accusations of labor law violations and identity theft by major fast fashion retailers such as Shein and Temu.
Influencers’ main goal is to make money, not to help their audience make smart purchases.
Most of us aren’t getting paid to follow a 17-step skincare routine. Influencers are. Their job is to advertise glamorously. And you don’t need most or all of the products they claim to use.
We need to think about where and why we spend our money. If you’re going to emulate that 45-second video of you getting out of bed in the morning, you might want to put your wallet away.
You will be happier and the planet will be happier too.
Kristin Shukler is a USA TODAY Opinion intern and a junior at the University of Virginia studying English and French, where she writes for the Jefferson Independent and performs with the University of Virginia Chorus.
