Written by Bri LaMere. Graphic by Ananya Panchal.
Over consumption has a broad definition that varies by personal experience, but it describes impulsive purchases of things with little to no value. The reality is, it’s become increasingly more normalized to buy on impulse and keep a collection of stuff. Packed closets with clothes that last three washes and collections of objects with no use other than sentimental value — it seems like we’ve become more impulsive with the objects we buy, and stores have caught on.
When I open the door to my apartment, I see a living room with organized clutter. Everything that makes me happy is in sight: the books I’m reading, my cat, the ten craft projects I’ve been working on at the table. Sometimes when I sit in the collection of clutter I get worried the cat has too many toys or my laundry bin is excessively full. That’s the gray area between over consumption and collecting that doesn’t seem to shrink.
My mom keeps a museum of my paintings (from when I thought it would be my career) in her laundry room. She says they brighten her mood while she completes the boring chore. They make the cement basement less creepy too. My first apartment in college was a studio where I didn’t hang anything on the walls because of how small it already felt. Paintings sat in stacks and the things I brought back to Savannah from the holidays created clutter. I grew into the extra space and felt less pressure now that my collection of belongings aren’t bursting at the seams of my apartment.
The thousand miles of separation between my parents and I from Minnesota to Georgia influenced my interior design choices around my own apartment. When my brother visited, he said my walls were crowded, but it’s my curation of photos, art, display shelves, and posters that form a museum of what I love. What he thinks is “overconsuming” is how I stay sane so far from home. As long as I have room for my things, it doesn’t feel like “too much.”
Dopamine decor references a style of interior design that was popularized on TikTok post-pandemic. According to Evette Annadale from the Interior Design institute, when done successfully, your decor will “celebrate personality, colour, and nostalgia while still feeling calm, expressive, and thoughtfully designed.”
What felt like chaos in a studio apartment feels right in a one-bedroom. My mom’s gnomes would create an army of random themes and colors in my apartment now, but they feel perfectly placed on the shelves around her house. My mom is obsessed with gnome-theme decor and began a collection when I was in high school. Every season has its own gnomes and sometimes there are more when I come home. I remember how her eyes light up when she sees one in a store while running errands. I still give them to her as gifts if I see one she’d like. Gnomes always stick out to me because of how happy they make her. I have a mini elf, Easter bunny, and witch theme gnome that I rotate by season on a shelf in my apartment. They sit in my collection of items from Minnesota that give me a rush of dopamine to walk past. A gnome flag used to sit in my grandma’s yard, so I like to think they remind her of her mom too.
The flag was tattered and has long since been thrown out. But when my mom and her siblings had to empty out my grandparents’ house last spring, she brought eight large storage bins of items and books from her childhood home. Some trinkets and holiday figurines were easy to put in the pile of donations, but birthday cards and checks with their handwriting were different.
I will want to keep every bit of my parents’ handwriting when they’re gone, mostly because of sentimentality, so I put them in a birthday-theme gift bag for my mom and set them aside. Even if they collect dust for years in storage, it’s a piece of them she can hang on to.
