The intent of my off consumption experiment is to spend an year without buying anything that is not a necessity.
Even though I have written down rather elaborate rules for what is allowed and what isn’t during my year of being off consumption, I have deliberately avoided defining what is a necessity. This is because one of the most interesting aspects of the experiment for me is to discover what I think of as a necessity and how it changes with context.
Perhaps the only fool-proof approach to discover what I think of as a necessity is to record and study what I actually buy, and how it changes over time.