The Year of Less went viral again
On the low/no buy trend in 2025, and my plans to use Amazon less too 🛍️
Welcome to The Lighthouse! A newsletter written by a Canadian author (Cait Flanders, that’s me!) who found herself living in the middle of nowhere in the UK. It’s deeply reflective and also intentionally lighthearted. There’s enough darkness online and in real life. Let’s hangout in the light. 🕯️
Hi friend,
THE YEAR OF LESS went viral again, over the holidays. I didn’t know it was going to happen (part of the definition of a viral moment), but have been through this experience a couple times before, and I started to see the signs in mid-December. An increase in followers on Instagram (1,000+ in a month) and here on Substack (the same). More contact form submissions than usual from my website. Emails from Google saying things like: Your page clicks increased by more than 1,000% over the usual daily average. Texts from my sister telling me she kept seeing posts about it in various Facebook groups. Then a DM on Instagram from someone congratulating me on TYOL being in the top 100 bestsellers on Audible (US). After confirming they were right, I checked Amazon in various countries around the world and discovered this:
Paying down debt and saving more money are common New Year’s resolutions, and versions of shopping bans have become more popular over the years. So there’s been an uptick in sales and online followers in December and January every year since the book came out. But this was different. I haven’t seen numbers like this since 2018, when it was first released (7 years ago this week!). And with the help of friends on Instagram, it didn’t take long to figure out why it had gone viral again…
TikTok. Or social media, more broadly. It seems that low buy/no buy years are trending in 2025, and TYOL keeps coming up in conversations about it. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised more people are thinking about doing their own version of an experiment like this right now. It was just funny timing, because I had also been thinking about doing a shopping-related experiment in 2025…