hello it's seo from tbhstudying and i'm sorry if my voice sounds a little funky. i'm currently
fighting through a cold right now but i really wanted to make this video about the end of my
stationery no buy and get it out before 2021 ends officially, so here we are and i will try
to make it through the video without completely using up my voice. so if you guys didn't know,
i started a no buy in january 2021 and i decided to just go one complete year without buying any
stationery at all unless it was completely necessary and the reasons why i started this
are mainly because i wanted to be more conscious about my spending habits and be more aware of what
exactly i was spending my money on and i also wanted to spend more time really appreciating
and using the stationery that i already have. this was largely motivated by how much consumerism i
was noticing within the study community and i, as part of the study community and i guess as
an "influencer," i really wanted to promote sort of this anti-consumerist message to both you guys
and sort of re-evaluate my own consumerism and my own capitalistic habits within my space on
the internet. i do have a video going into more detail about why i started it and the original
statistics of my spending habits and i will leave the link down below if you're interested,
but otherwise let's begin with breaking down the statistics of how much stationery i used up
over the course of the year. i really wanted to track how much stationery i used up and
keep a tally of how much i'm using up versus how much i still have so i have all the nitty gritty
statistics right here and i'm really excited to share them with you guys. over 2021, i used up
about 39% of my collection and i have 61% of my original collection left. out of the categories,
i completely used up all of my correction tapes and all of my tape rollers and aside from those
categories, the kinds of stationery that i tended to use up the most were black pens,
colored pens, and multi pens. out of my original collection of black pens, i used
about 78% and for colored pens, i used up about 73% and for multi pens, i used up about 67%.
in fourth place after that were the amount of stickers i had and for that, i used up about 57%.
the categories that i had a harder time using up were washi tapes, brush pens, and highlighters.
so for washi tape, i used up around 10%. for brush pens, i used about 11% and for highlighters,
i used up 15-19%. i'm technically counting it as 15% because this highlighter in particular has
two highlighters together in it. i've used up the purple side but i haven't used up the green side
yet so once i use up the green side of this highlighter, we will be at 19% for
highlighters but it's somewhere between 15% and 19% and essentially those are the categories
that i tended to use up the least. i've tried my best to collect all the stationery empties that
i've had throughout the year and i do have half of the stationery empties i have here
at home and half the stationery empties are at college and i just forgot to bring them,
so i will go through the empties that i have in a later video and give you more details about that.
but overall, those are the stats on what exactly i used up. in regards of money i actually spent,
i did have to spend some money on stationery items that were necessary for my education.
i think i spoke about this in my pencil case video - it was one of the no buy updates that
i made - but i had to buy a lab notebook and i had to buy some lab pens as they were required by the
research lab that i work in. so for that i spent in total $15.24 on two composition notebooks,
the lab pens, i also purchased refills for my stapler and i also purchased sharpie s gel pens
after i used up all of the black pens that i had, so i'm counting this as exception to my no buy
because they were necessary for my education and i didn't have any replacements within my collection
that i could use. overall, $15 for the entire year, i'm not really too mad at that. i think
the most expensive thing out of the four things that i got were probably the lab journal because
it was a very specific formatting of journaling, like i'm sure if you've worked in a research lab,
you know the kind of book that i'm talking about, but otherwise, i'm really satisfied with the
progress that i made during this year. i am also planning on doing a stationery declutter video
before 2021 ends in order to re-evaluate the collection that i have. now that i know and
have a better sense of what i genuinely use up and what i don't use up, i think i will be
able to declutter my collection with a little bit more thought and a little bit more care,
so like the stationery empties video, i will film it and post it in a later video. overall,
i think my no buy for 2021 was really illuminating in that it really forced me to re-evaluate what i
spend my time actually using what i genuinely use on a day-to-day basis and what are things that
i necessarily don't need. for example, i know that i'm much more likely to go through black
pens. i feel more comfortable buying more black pens because i know i'll be able to use them up
but i no longer feel as comfortable buying multiple washi tapes or highlighters because i
know those will take me far longer to use. i also think this gave me a better sort of gauge of time,
and by that, i mean i understand how long it really takes to use up certain stationery items
and how many uses i need to go through one of them. and now when i buy things, i'm much more
likely to think about, "okay how long is this going to last me and do i realistically need
to buy this much or this little." so i think having that better gauge and that better sense
of time management in regards to the products that i have has made me a better consumer. and finally,
i think the most important lesson that i learned from this no buy was to really re-evaluate how
deeply rooted consumerism is within the study community and in honesty, how deeply capitalism
runs in every other facet of my life. a large part of the reason why i have so much stationery
is because i'm on social media and i see all these different people using fancy stationery,
fancy notebooks, fancy pens and because they sort of exude this sense of success and productivity.
i feel like if i buy that fancy stationery too, i will become a better student, a better artist,
or a better journaler. but the reality is the items that we have don't define our skills. having
a certain kind of pen isn't going to necessarily make you a better student, but the amount of time
you spend studying and really focusing on your goals will make you a better student and i think
that's a misconception that a lot of people within the study community have and that a lot of people
tend to think that if they have fancy stationery, if they have mildliners, if they have certain
pens, it will make them a better student. and sure, you can make the argument that having better
materials will motivate you to work more but as a college student, i learned the hard way that
having better materials doesn't automatically guarantee you an A unless you actually study.
i think that the structures of the capitalist system that we currently live in are designed
to highlight these inadequacies or these vacuums or these absences that we feel within ourselves
and then tricks us into thinking that if we buy something we will be able to fill that vacuum and
remove that inadequacy from our lives. but the problem is that marketing continuously tricks
us into thinking that we have more and more inadequacies when in reality, we really just
need to step back and spend some time focusing on ourselves instead of spending money on ourselves,
and this is applicable to a lot of other realms outside of stationery in the study community.
i feel like this is most obvious within the beauty industry because a lot of advertising
marketing tends to target women and make them feel like they have something wrong with their bodies
or their image or their appearance and they market all of these items to you targeting
wrinkles or fine lines or pores or texture and things like that, but no matter how much
we buy at the end of the day, it isn't going to change who we are fundamentally as a person
so if i want to be a better student, buying pens won't make me a better student. instead, spending
time studying and figuring out the best study method for myself will make me a better student.
i don't know if that made sense to you guys but essentially what i'm trying to point out is that
you don't need to spend money in order to become a better student. what you need to do is spend your
time and your own energy into improving yourself. it's also made me realize how much of an influence
i have as a person with the social media following because i can totally see why people would look
at my content and my photos and think, "oh if i have that kind of desk, if i have that kind of
office space, if i have the kind of materials that she's using, i will also be successful."
but that's kind of a message that i no longer want to support so from here on out, i'm gonna try and
focus on creating content that genuinely focuses on studying and methods to improve your studying
and just other aspects of my life that reveal sort of the less edited and the less filtered
and the less perfect parts of my life in order to sort of dispel the social media illusion
that i've inadvertently created online. so that's another thing that i am trying to do from here on
out. what am i gonna do now? the short answer is that i'm not gonna go on another no buy
because quite frankly this was a terrible year. i wanted to buy so many things but i couldn't buy
them and it was terrible and i felt like shit and it was just a bad experience all around
but i did learn valuable lessons from it. however in 2022, i am going to set aside a designated
budget and select certain items to review for my channel because i know that some of you
guys really value my input on certain stationery items and hopefully, by reviewing some of these,
i can help you guys save money and pick the items that will genuinely work for you instead of buying
things based on hype on tiktok or instagram or whatever. so i am going to make a designated
budget and this is related to something bigger that i'm planning for 2022 that i'm planning
to announce in a different video but that is my plan for now. i will continue to declutter and
sort of curate my stationery collection and whatever i declutter i will be giving away,
mostly because i don't feel comfortable selling you stationery. i don't know, that just makes
me feel icky and i feel like the stationery will be better used if given away to a good home where
someone will actually use them instead of sitting here in my shelves collecting dust for all
eternity and finally, i think i will become more mindful about what i spend my money on and what i
choose to bring into my life. i'm not a minimalist by any means. i feel like you could probably tell
from my background in my room. i enjoy having things but essentially by being more mindful,
i want to carefully curate the things that i bring into my life so that i can get things and have
things that i will genuinely use every single day and i will have items that have good uses within
my life. so that was my 2021 no buy! thank you so much for watching! i know that some of you
guys also went on a new buy with me so i would love to hear how your no buying went and if you
are interested in starting a no buy for yourself next year, let me know down in the comments below,
so thank you so much for watching and i will see you in the next video. bye!