This year of being in some form of lockdown gave me more time to explore and learn new things and one of those things was the art of buying secondhand/pre-loved. In this blog-post I share my learnings on the benefits, the watch-outs and the philosophy and skills required for leading a fulfilling pre-loved life.
The benefits of secondhand
Buying secondhand is not just about one benefit for me, it’s multiple. Here are a few:
- You get to lower your environmental footprint: both by reducing buying new stuff, but also by saving something from going to landfill where it would stay and rot over perhaps thousands of years depending on what material it is
- You get to save money: many items can be found for free if you have the patience! Or for heavy discounts versus full retail price
- You get to acquire truly unique items: some of the pieces you find secondhand are vintage or have quite a convoluted special journey behind them, making them different from the mass-market stuff you can buy at IKEA or Target that everyone has and is boring
- You get to know your neighbors more and engage with and understand your community better: if you pickup locally for secondhand stuff as I do, you get to chat to neighbors, find out who has kids, who has pets, what they do for a living, basically you get to connect – something we hardly ever have the opportunity for in our modern lives
- It’s fun going on a scavenger hunt: the buying process is a lot more fun than parsing through 10,000 sometimes mixed and confusing reviews on Amazon, clicking a button and then getting stuff delivered to your door in onerous amounts of packaging, and then having to go to Whole Foods to return it if it didn’t fit or meet expectations and spending time breaking down cardboard boxes
- It’s a spiritual experience: this is one of the biggest benefits and I’ll deep dive into this in a separate section below!
With all that said, of course there are watch-outs…
Watch-outs for secondhand
- You can’t always judge or trust the quality or condition of an item: this makes it a good idea for certain items where quality is more obvious e.g. clothes (it either looks worn out or not, and you can see if buttons are missing etc.) than others where it is subtle or would require extensive use to ascertain e.g. a laptop. If you are a pro though and can ascertain quality more easily than me on some of the more technical items – all power to you, I salute you and wish to learn from you
- For some items hygiene matters and is not guaranteed with secondhand items: anything involving fabrics must be fully machine-washable for me to buy secondhand. So this means I buy clothes secondhand, but would not buy cushions, pillows, upholstery etc. secondhand because you can’t wash that stuff. I don’t buy soft furnishings secondhand to avoid the bedbugs risk.
- You have to have a longer, slower buying cycle: on the flipside to the thrill of the scavenger hunt, you can’t get things as conveniently and quickly as from Amazon. So if you want something you may have to exercise your patience and wait for it to come on the secondhand market, or you have to start accumulating stuff more in advance e.g. if you’re having a baby, you don’t want to wait to 2 weeks before delivery to collect mostly secondhand stuff.
Each person has their own risk tolerances and time to do all this so I want to avoid making any “universal” recommendations – my concern in this blog post is more to make a case for considering secondhand in those categories where your risk tolerance and time allows.
The myth of new items being “clean”
Some of the perceived disadvantages of secondhand are not so big when you really think it through versus new products. I think people think that anything new is clean, but think about the long and complex supply-chain to get most products to you.
The parts of most items have passed through many factories, trucks, boats, and different hands (during manufacturing, shelf-stacking etc.) that you should be sanitizing anything that is “new” as much as anything that is old. It’s nuts to think that because something looks new it is clean. You have to wash new clothes before you wear them. You have to wash new dishes before you eat in them. You have to wipe down a new table before you use it. And you have to do the same with secondhand items so it’s not really more work if your secondhand item is not a fixer-upper. It’s just standard hygiene practices that you follow for all items that are new to your household.
The unwokeness of the obsession with “new”
To me, it seems that the obsession with new items is like the obsession with virginity. It’s outdated, based on a fictional scientifically meaningless concept, losing popularity very fast – and unfortunately more common among brown cultures which tend to lag behind in progressive thinking. Many brown people unfortunately blindly follow mainstream western consumerist thinking, rather than looking to the more progressive western thinking that comes out of places like Berkeley, California (my spiritual home) or having confidence in their own Eastern philosophies which emphasized connectedness and the community over ego and materialism.
Some people associate buying secondhand with poverty, and with having lower “status” than people who purchase firsthand. When this thinking occurs in brown communities, in part this stems from the more rampant poverty in brown countries where reuse is actually very common among lower socio-economic classes and moving up in society is associated with breaking out of hand-me-downs and secondhand. But this is a sad and environmentally destructive way to define progress. Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with being financially conscious – many people in America with mountains of credit card debt would do well to be more financially conscious. There’s also nothing wrong with being poor or having less means – it’s not a reflection of that person’s worth. Extreme poverty is a reflection of a societal failing, not a personal one (in most cases).
And finally buying secondhand is not just about money or being cheap — it’s about a host of other benefits as we discussed in the section above, and indeed money may be the least important driver for it. I’ve found that many very well-off people in California are big fans of hand-me-downs and secondhand because they have progressed to higher tiers of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from status and caring what other people think (just look at the dress code in San Francisco among the tech ‘elite’ – ain’t nobody dressing to impress around here) to self-actualization. More progressive people are more mindful of their ecological footprint and impact on the wider world – they have progressed to being less focused on themselves and more focused on the earth, which leads me to the next section…
The Spirituality of Secondhand
Buying secondhand to me is a tribute to the connectedness of all beings, the circularity of life. It’s about joining hands in a circle, rather than making my own line. It’s about community versus individualism. It’s about acceptance versus criticism. Sometimes buying firsthand is about convenience, hygiene or finding the right fit, but when it’s a blanket philosophy across your whole life that you’d never consider a pre-owned item – that to me is about arrogance and ego: an arrogance that what someone else had isn’t good enough for you. An arrogance that you must be the first. And an arrogance of possessiveness. Rather than recognizing items as flowing through a series of lives benefiting multiple beings, and acknowledging the transience of all things and experiences, you hog it and try to possess it just for yourself. At this point, you can really see the parallels between the obsession with virginity in brown cultures and the same philosophy permeating the attitude to buying secondhand items. To both I say – ick. More ick than the truth: the water we drink is secondhand dinosaur pee. The way of the earth is to recycle and reuse every molecule: cycles not lines.
Tactical Recommendations
- Join your neighborhood’s Buy Nothing group on Facebook: give on it, and receive on it what you need. Try not to hoard just because stuff is free!
- Join your neighborhood’s Virtual Yard Sale groups on Facebook
- Attend yard sales, garage sales and estate sales for fun (you never know what treasures you can find!) or when you are looking to furnish a new room or place
- Look on Craigslist when you need something and look for a few days before you jump on Amazon or head to your nearest big-box retailer
- Join the NextDoor app — now on this one, a word of caution, many people have noticed racist behavior on this app and taken it as a cue to boycott the app. I haven’t noticed racism on it where I live (which is a very ethnically diverse neighborhood so may be that’s why?), and I mostly go on the “For Sale” section, not the other sections on neighborhood activity. If you have moral issues with using this app, do the other stuff instead
- Share and borrow items from friends and neighbors. It baffles me how much of a consumerist society we’ve built up that everyone apparently needs their own lawnmower and garden equipment that they use like once every three months….
- Check out your library’s local tool and book library — we’ve borrowed gardening tools from it for de-weeding etc. and found it to be much better use of space too to not have our own sitting around idle for most of the year. Same goes with books – why buy hard copies of books you read once?
Got tips? You probably do…comment them on this post!
I suspect I am still a novice on my secondhand journey. When I started talking to people about secondhand, I realized how many of my friends were already living this life. It’s just not something any of us had noticed about each other. “Remember that beautiful dress I wore at the London Fashion Week party back in 2013?” a friend mentioned to me on this topic, “It was from a charity shop, I still wear it and everyone compliments me on it”. I had never known…so it’s all around us already, we need to break down any remaining stigma and take secondhand on the same journey of stigma to pride as we have done with many other issues as we build a progressive, kinder and less destructive society.
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