The underconsumption core movement has reached the productivity world, and it’s a relief.
The cultural current that made people start showing off their half-empty makeup bags and decade-old sneakers has finally reached the planning community, bringing uncomfortable questions about our relationship with productivity tools along with it. Planner overconsumption has quietly driven an entire industry for years, and now people are naming it out loud.
If you’ve ever felt a pang of guilt looking at the stack of barely-used notebooks on your shelf, or caught yourself adding another Notion template to a folder you haven’t opened since March, you already know what I’m talking about. The planning world developed its own version of haul culture somewhere along the way, and January became its Black Friday. New year, new system, new chance to finally become the organized person you’ve always wanted to be—even though the system was never really the problem.
The underconsumption core movement that exploded on TikTok in mid-2024 started with fashion and beauty—people proudly displaying their single tube of mascara used down to the last scrape, their sneakers held together with determination and shoe glue. But the philosophy underneath was always bigger than lipstick. It was about pushing back against the constant pressure to acquire, upgrade, and optimize through purchasing—pressure that’s been absolutely relentless in the productivity space.
The Planner Haul Culture Nobody Talks About
Walk into any Target or craft store in December, and you’ll see it: an entire ecosystem designed around the premise that this year’s planner will be different. Gorgeous displays, endless options, and an intoxicating promise—buy the right system and you’ll finally get your life together.
Planning influencer culture amplified this a hundredfold. “Plan with me” videos became their own genre, featuring meticulous weekly spreads decorated with washi tape, color-coded stickers, and handwriting so perfect it looks typeset. The comments sections overflow with questions about supplies: which pens, which highlighters, which planner inserts will create that same aesthetic perfection. Planner haul culture emerged as creators unboxed stacks of new systems, compared layouts, and built entire content calendars around the pursuit of the perfect setup.
None of this is inherently bad—aesthetic journaling can be genuinely meditative, and finding the right tools does matter. But somewhere along the way, the acquisition became the hobby, and a lot of people started feeling like they were failing at planning because their spreads didn’t look like the ones getting thousands of likes. The bar kept rising while the actual goal (getting organized, remembering things, living your life) got buried under layers of perfectionistic pressure.
There’s a meme that circulates in crafting communities: “Buying craft supplies and actually crafting are two different hobbies.” The planning world has its own version of this truth. Researching planners, watching comparison videos, building Pinterest boards of spread inspiration, collecting stickers and stamps and specialized pens—these activities scratch a different itch than actually sitting down and planning your week. They feel productive and promise future productivity, but they can become an elaborate form of procrastination dressed up as preparation.
What Planner Overconsumption Actually Looks Like
Overconsumption in plannertok and the broader productivity community doesn’t always look like excess. Often it masquerades as optimization or “investing in yourself.” The language around planning tools has become so aspirational that spending $60 on a planner feels like self-care rather than consumption.
Planner overconsumption shows up in different forms depending on your poison. For paper planner enthusiasts, it might be the drawer full of dated planners abandoned by February, or the collection of inserts and accessories for systems you no longer use. Maybe it’s the washi tape collection that could decorate a small apartment, purchased for spreads you never quite got around to making. For digital planners, it’s the graveyard of Notion templates downloaded with enthusiasm and never configured, the productivity apps with expired free trials, the GoodNotes planners gathering dust in your iPad. It’s the subscription to a task management tool you forgot to cancel, quietly billing you for organization you’re not actually using.
The pattern often follows a predictable arc. You discover a new system—through a YouTube video, a friend’s recommendation, or the algorithm serving you exactly what you didn’t know you wanted. The research phase begins: reading reviews, watching setup tutorials, comparing this system to the one you already have. You convince yourself that the current system’s limitations are holding you back. The new planner arrives, and for a few weeks, maybe even a couple of months, everything feels different. The pages are fresh, the layouts make sense, the act of planning feels exciting again. Then, gradually, the novelty fades. The pages start to stay blank. The guilt creeps in. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you start wondering if maybe a different system would work better.
A recent Salon piece captured this phenomenon perfectly, describing the “rabbit hole” of planner research—watching comparison videos, agonizing over layouts, second-guessing every choice. One woman interviewed described buying two planners and returning one, repeatedly, because she couldn’t commit. The search for the perfect system becomes its own infinite loop, and the industry is happy to keep feeding it, releasing new designs, new features, new reasons why this year’s version is the one that will finally work.
The pressure isn’t just commercial—it’s psychological. Planning culture has absorbed the language of self-improvement and wellness, so failing to use your planner feels like failing at personal growth. Those blank pages aren’t just wasted paper; they’re evidence of broken promises to yourself. No wonder people keep buying new systems, hoping a fresh start will provide the motivation that the old one couldn’t sustain.
The Underconsumption Core Shift
Underconsumption core is the TikTok-born movement that emerged as a direct response to haul culture and influencer-driven consumption. Instead of showing off new purchases, creators showcase items they’ve used completely, possessions they’ve owned for years, modest collections of everyday essentials. The aesthetic celebrates utility over novelty, worn-in comfort over shiny newness.
What makes underconsumption core different from minimalism—a movement that’s been around for decades—is its specific framing. Minimalism often became its own form of consumerism, with carefully curated “capsule wardrobes” and expensive “investment pieces” and a particular aesthetic that still required significant purchasing to achieve. Underconsumption core is messier, more lived-in, more honest about the fact that most people can’t afford to replace everything they own with the “perfect” version. The goal is rejecting the pressure to constantly upgrade, not achieving a particular look.
The movement gained traction partly because of economic reality. Gen Z and millennials are facing housing costs, student debt, and inflation that make the constant consumption cycle feel not just wasteful but impossible. When you’re watching grocery prices climb and rent eat an ever-larger chunk of your paycheck, the influencer pushing a $200 planner system starts to look less aspirational and more delusional. Economic pressure forced people to scrutinize their spending—and once you start scrutinizing, you start questioning why you were buying all this stuff in the first place.
Cultural pendulums swing this way. Grunge and punk emerged as direct rejections of 1980s excess—the big hair, the conspicuous consumption, the gleaming surfaces. When the gap between the aspirational lifestyle and lived reality gets wide enough, the aesthetic itself starts to curdle. We’re in a similar moment now. The Instagram-perfect influencer life that dominated the 2010s has collided with a decade of economic precarity, a pandemic, climate disasters, and political upheaval that’s made all that curated abundance look not just unattainable but tone-deaf.
The shift runs deeper than personal finance. There’s a growing discomfort with the aesthetics of abundance when the news is full of suffering. Watching haul videos against a backdrop of ICE raids tearing families apart, communities facing devastation from climate disasters, and inequality yawning wider every year—it starts to feel obscene. The decadence that influencer culture normalized is harder to stomach when you’re paying attention to what’s happening beyond your feed. “Treat yourself” hits different when you’re aware of how many people can’t afford to treat themselves to basic necessities.
This isn’t about guilt as a lifestyle or performing austerity for social media points. The endless consumption treadmill was always a distraction, and now we’re too tired and too aware to keep running. The fast fashion backlash, the deinfluencing movement, underconsumption core—these aren’t separate trends. They’re symptoms of a broader awakening to the fact that we were sold a lifestyle that benefits corporations, not people—and the planning industry, with its annual upgrade cycles and endless accessories, is part of that same machine.
But the movement also tapped into something beyond economics and politics: exhaustion with the performance of having it all together. There’s real relief in seeing someone’s beat-up wallet or half-empty shelf and thinking “oh, that’s allowed.” The pressure to constantly curate and upgrade and optimize is tiring, and underconsumption core gave people permission to step off that treadmill without feeling like failures.
Applied to planning, this shift means something specific: using the planner you have instead of researching the one you might buy, letting your spreads be functional rather than Instagram-worthy, recognizing that the notebook with the weird binding that you got as a gift three years ago will work just as well as the $45 system you’ve been eyeing. Shop your closet, but for your productivity stack.
Why This Matters More Than Aesthetics
The conversation about planner overconsumption goes beyond planners themselves. It touches the broader way we’ve been taught to solve problems through purchasing, and how that plays out in our relationship with productivity and self-improvement.
Planning culture promised that the right system would finally make us organized, focused, successful. It positioned tools as solutions to what are often systemic or psychological challenges—trouble focusing means you need a better task management app, feeling overwhelmed means your planner layout isn’t optimized. The message, delivered through thousands of “plan with me” videos and product reviews and affiliate links, was that organization was something you could buy.
But organization isn’t a product—it’s a practice. No planner, no matter how thoughtfully designed, beautifully bound, or perfectly suited to your “planning personality,” can do the work for you. The dopamine hit of setting up a new system, writing in fresh pages, organizing your color-coded tabs is real, but it’s also temporary. When it fades, the solution presented by planning culture is to try a different system, chase a different high.
The underconsumption core approach to planning starts from a different premise: the tool you already have might be enough. Maybe the “perfect” system is simply the one you’ll actually use, even if it’s just a plain notebook and a pen—and maybe the pursuit of optimization is itself getting in the way of actually planning your life.
This isn’t about deprivation or making do with inadequate tools. The real issue is recognizing when the search for better tools has become a substitute for the thing the tools are supposed to help you do—and breaking the cycle of new year, new planner, abandoned by March, repeat.
Finding Your Own Enough
I’m not going to tell you to throw away your planners or cancel your stationery subscriptions. That would be its own form of prescriptive nonsense, and the whole point of underconsumption core is rejecting the idea that there’s one right way to consume (or not consume).
But the cultural permission to step off the optimization treadmill feels new. For years, the message in planning communities has been more, better, optimized. The underconsumption core shift offers a different possibility—that what you have might actually be working, that “good enough” is a legitimate goal, that you don’t need to keep chasing the perfect system to be a person who has their life together.
If you’re reading this in January, surrounded by the annual barrage of “new year, new planner” content, maybe this is your permission slip to skip it this year. Use the planner you have. Finish the notebook before buying another one. Let your spreads be messy and functional rather than Pinterest-perfect. Stop watching comparison videos that make you second-guess a system that was working fine until you saw something shinier.
This doesn’t mean you can never buy another planner or that wanting nice tools is somehow morally suspect. The point isn’t asceticism for its own sake. The point is breaking the link between “I want to be more organized” and “I need to buy something to make that happen.” Sometimes you do need a new tool. But more often, you need to actually use the one you have—which is harder and less exciting than researching its replacement, but also the only thing that actually works.
The fancy system will still be there next year if you decide you need it.
The zeitgeist is shifting. Planner overconsumption is starting to look less like self-investment and more like what it often is: a very pretty trap. Recognizing that the problem was never the planner itself is its own kind of freedom. The problem was believing that the right planner would solve something it was never designed to fix.
I’d love to hear about your relationship with planning tools—whether you’ve felt the pull of planning culture’s constant upgrade cycle, whether you’re sitting on a stack of notebooks you’ve never filled, and whether the underconsumption core shift resonates with your experience.
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