Breaking the Shopping Addiction: A Marketer’s Journey to Mindful Consumption with Crystal Chen

Dr. Christine Li [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to the Make Time for Success podcast. This is episode number 275. Today I have invited my colleague Crystal Chen to the show to discuss how marketing specifically targets our pain points, the emotions involved in shopping, decluttering, and rebuying, and strategies to regain control over your consumer. Habits. These are topics that I love to talk about, but they go deeper because Crystal Chen is a former product marketer who spent years learning how influence works and then had to unlearn it in her own life. She is the creator of the Slow Buy Club, and she now helps people to break patterns of overconsumption, distraction, and self-sabotage by understanding the psychology behind their choices. Her work blends marketing insight with behavioral change, offering practical tools to help people reclaim their focus, confidence, and agency in how they spend their time and energy. I invite you to enjoy this episode with me now.

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:16]:
Hi, I'm Dr. Christine Li, and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach. I've helped thousands of people move past procrastination and overwhelm so they could begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn powerful strategies for getting your mind, body, and energy to work together so that you can focus on what's really important and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the Make Time for Success podcast.

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:58]:
Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining me on the Make Time for Success podcast. Today I have another segment where I'm inviting someone I've met on TikTok onto the show. These are some of my favorite meetups because I am getting to know the guest at the same time that you are listening to the conversation. Today I'm welcoming Crystal Chen, again from TikTok, but Crystal has a long and deep history in marketing. She has a lot of experience internationally with marketing and with different segments of business, and she is bringing that awareness of what is involved in marketing and purchasing and selling to us, the consumer, the individual who is not necessarily involved at the corporate level. And I was just drawn to her videos on TikTok because, one, because she has a very powerful individual voice and also because she has a very powerful individual story. So we're going to hear both about her past in business, but also what she's doing as an ex-marketer today.

Dr. Christine Li [00:03:17]:
So thank you, Crystal, for being on the show and welcome.

Crystal Chen [00:03:20]:
Oh, thank you so much, Christine, for having me. It's such a treat.

Dr. Christine Li [00:03:24]:
Let's get started by sharing your background and what kind of experiences led you to this moment.

Crystal Chen [00:03:37]:
I've been a marketer for all my career. It was my dream career since I was, I think I was 8 years old. I was flipping through my mom's Vogue magazine and I saw this woman modeling for Giorgio Armani and she was just wearing this like sharp suit. And at that time, you know, they had the shoulder pads and I just thought she was like the slickest looking person ever. I was like, what kind of job do I need to have to get that suit, to wear that suit? I think that might have been the start of the shopaholism. That's why I like to say I'm 20 years a marketer and 20 years a shopaholic. So, doctor was immediately out. There was no way I was going to go into engineering.

Crystal Chen [00:04:16]:
They didn't dress like that. So, I had two career options open for me. It was lawyer and it was marketing lady. And I thought lawyers had to read too much and the words weren't very appealing. So, the words seemed much more exciting in marketing. And it was everywhere on TV. Marketing was the commercials, it was the ads, it was all that. It was my world.

Crystal Chen [00:04:38]:
And I thought there was some nugget of truth to what marketers must be saying. They said it with such conviction. The ads, the language was so polished, so clear, unlike legal. So I was like, there must be something meaningful in this. There must be the truth. And the closer I am to the product, the closer I must be to the truth. So my life has— my career has been about marketing. My life maybe has been about the quest for truth.

Crystal Chen [00:05:05]:
And so I've been 20 years trying to get to the core of what is the truth at the center of all this stuff. And I thought it was about products. That all didn't work out, as you can tell from my current position. Ex-marketer, ex-shopaholic. And there were a lot of things in my family history, I think, you know, that resulted in me hoarding, me going through a lot of toxic decluttering and repurchasing cycles, me trying endlessly to find myself. What I like to joke about is marketers love a girl, always a girl. They love a girl who is on the cusp of self-discovery. And I think I was on the cusp of self-discovery.

Crystal Chen [00:05:42]:
Every month for all of my 20s. So I was the marketer's favorite. And even though I worked in marketing and should have been able to see through it because I was helping to create the persona documents, the problem statements, the positioning maps, articulating the promotion strategy, I should have been able to see through all of it. But I think when you're— maybe let's put it this way— the host making the Kool-Aid, you gotta love drinking the Kool-Aid. Or if you're the scientist designing the maze that the lab rats are running through, you're kind of running through them as well. You're like, wow, I designed a great maze. You get lost in it. And so I was lost for a really long time.

Crystal Chen [00:06:19]:
I knew that I had an issue, but I justified it to myself as I work hard, I'm not in debt, I'm financially literate. I do all the checkboxy things. I know my checking account from my savings account. I put stuff in my 401k. I save 10% of my income. I did all those things. But all the rest of the money went to— well, my first year of working as a corporate girl, it went to Zara. I basically lived in that fitting room.

Crystal Chen [00:06:47]:
I only left when I needed to pee. It was almost a disaster every single time. Sorry if this is TMI, but I just want to give you an idea of the level of shopping addiction and addiction to stuff that I was dealing with.

Dr. Christine Li [00:06:58]:
May I ask a question here?

Crystal Chen [00:07:00]:
Yeah.

Dr. Christine Li [00:07:01]:
First of all, I just want to comment what an 8-year-old you were to really just be thoughtful about what was possible for you. So I just want to just say shout out to the 8-year-old Crystal. And then I wanted to ask, in terms of that first year that you were describing where you were working and then you were shopping, what was the— what was the driving feeling? Let's put it that way. What was— what was motivating you to have, first of all, that much energy that one would feed directly in. And then that's a lot of time, right? Shopping includes a lot of time.

Crystal Chen [00:07:41]:
It is so much time. It really is so much time. The driving feeling was— I would say top 3 feelings: resentment, loneliness, and entitlement. And they fed— it very much fed into itself. So I justified my shopping habits as I worked really hard today, I had to deal with a lot of stakeholders, nothing in my job went the way I wanted it to today, but I kept a smiling face, I gritted my teeth, I was a good corporate girly, and I deserve to have a bomb corporate girly wardrobe to match the amount of suffering I am enduring for this job. That's the entitlement and the resentment. And the loneliness part was because I dedicated myself so hard to my job, and I worked overtime a lot. Nobody asked me to do this, by the way.

Crystal Chen [00:08:31]:
I was just like, I grind, you know, grindset mindset, rise and grind, get all of that. But I was very lonely. I didn't have any friends outside of work, and I believed that my loneliness was a virtue. And so at the end of the day, instead of what I would have loved to do was go out for dinner with friends or volunteer or find some other activities, develop a skill, I didn't do any of that. I just went to the Zara. And it fed that because in the fitting room, I was so many versions of myself. I was a fulfilled and successful person at work who didn't have to deal with all the stakeholders. I was also a person who had all the friends, got invited to all the parties.

Crystal Chen [00:09:12]:
I was a person who was cozy at home reading all the books. Every outfit I tried on, it was that bam, like, hit of here you are, there she is, there she is. And you get addicted to that feeling of there she is over and over and over again. Wow.

Dr. Christine Li [00:09:27]:
Okay. I'm just thinking, what was the impact on me? You know, like the same similar thing, because we've all been affected. We've all been marketed to, and we've all had to spring into other identities or not, but we've all had to do something with that energy that is being communicated across the pages and screens. To us. And you had a very— it had a very powerful impact on you. And it intersected with something you needed, it sounded like, from your description. Yeah.

Crystal Chen [00:10:02]:
The loneliness, which self-perpetuates, right? Because the more time I spend alone in the fitting room, the less opportunity I have to develop actual friendships, which creates this cycle. And it's a very powerful gap that gets created in one's heart. There was a lot of emptiness. It got filled with a lot of clothes. And I think that's something that so many people go through. And honestly, a lot of people know that they are lonely, or they know that they shop because they feel resentful of their current life, or they feel entitled to— do I deserve this, right? I need— I should treat myself. A lot of people, they can identify the script. They know that something's working on them, and yet it feels so hard and impossible to resist because what are the alternatives.

Dr. Christine Li [00:10:49]:
We're not marketed any alternatives.

Crystal Chen [00:10:51]:
Yeah, or not in the ways that we have been, I think, primed to expect to be marketed to. There is another creator— gosh, I forget her name— but she does media literacy and comms for nonprofits. I think she's based out of the UK. She has a British accent, I know that much. And she talks— she did a really great video. Maybe you'll have to link it. I'll send you the link later about let me market friendship to you. Let me sell it to you the way that an advertiser such a viral video, really, really good.

Crystal Chen [00:11:21]:
I love that. People don't do that. Yeah, the closest you get in traditional advertising are like insurance commercials. I think insurance commercials are the closest you get to like the joys of family and friends, but everything else, no, it's about celebrating the individual's self-expression, the individual's unique self-expression, and the I don't know, impact of seeing that message is that you get more and more and more niched down, and you actually, in my experience, get less and less connected with other people.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:54]:
Yes.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:55]:
So then you're also beautifully describing the different levels of pain that the shopping and the outfits were masking or helping. You were trying to solve an inner issue with outward purchases and with the purchasing behavior. So my question is, what was the process that happened to you or that you went through where you realized that the pain was just creating some more pain?

Crystal Chen [00:12:31]:
That's a great question. I think, um, it was getting injured from shopping. And let me explain what I mean by that. It happened last year. Mommy's wrist. Basically, a lot of people get it from holding their child in like awkward positions and having improper form. I got it from holding my phone in like this, you know, Gollum-esque position for too long. And then one day something just snapped like a guitar string.

Crystal Chen [00:13:01]:
And so I was dealing with this pain for— it was incredible pain for about a month. And during that month I was like, I I need to stop. I am just putting things into, taking things out of my shopping cart over and over and over again. I'm going through that dopamine spiral. I'm just, I'm just looping. I'm just looping. I have no way of putting this marketing into my own context. And so that was the shift for me.

Crystal Chen [00:13:25]:
I mean, it was because my wrist got injured, but the mental shift was if I can take the images, the information that I'm seeing online and put it into my own framework in a spreadsheet, Why don't I just quantify it the way that I used to quantify products and features to be prioritized for development at my old job? Why don't I just use the same frameworks that I used to use as a product marketer? Because the insight was, you could think of it this way. Our life is a product, and the things that we buy are like features that we incorporate into our lives. You can have feature bloat, right? Like, you can have too many features in your life, and then you're like, I don't know what to do with all this, and it feels yucky. To use this product to live my life. So I made that analogous leap, and it worked really well. It worked really well. That was when the Slow Buy methodology was born. And for those people listening who aren't familiar with this, it's a 5-question habit that I came up with during this time of being injured and trying to get out of the hellhole spiral that was shopping.

Crystal Chen [00:14:26]:
The first question is you just— can I run through it now, or do you have any questions?

Dr. Christine Li [00:14:30]:
Yes, please. Nope, you're—

Dr. Christine Li [00:14:31]:
we're good.

Dr. Christine Li [00:14:31]:
I'm listening.

Crystal Chen [00:14:33]:
Great. The first question is, how much do I want it? And you just go and gut it. It's 1 through 10. You rate it. I'm also going to get into why each of these questions work, but for now, just the 5 questions. The second question is, how disappointed would I be if it actually sold out? It's important to have these 2 questions together, and you rate that just 1 to 3. 3 being very disappointed, be devastated. I think I would be devastated.

Crystal Chen [00:14:54]:
1 being like, I actually maybe don't care. 2 is somewhat. The third question is, how confident am I in these first 2 scores? And this is an important one because I developed this only after I realized I was bouncing around in my scoring a lot and getting obsessed with scoring things correctly. And I needed to stop that. It was just another version of overshopping. So I was like, OK, just put a confidence number on it and then come back to it in a day or 2. So you rate that -1 or 1. 1 is you're confident.

Crystal Chen [00:15:21]:
-1 is like, I'm not sure. I'm bouncing. OK, then you get some score. You multiply these scores, and you get some minimum score of -30 or maximum positive 30. And my rule for myself was, OK, if it's just 25 and over, let me just buy it. I stop thinking about it. Clearly, it's triggering something I really want it, and I would be really disappointed if it sold out, and I'm pretty certain about it. Just go for it.

Crystal Chen [00:15:44]:
Stop obsessing over it. Stop reliving the feeling of being right because our brains love being right, and that's another— reason that we overshop is we will, you know, go and look at the thing a lot because we're like really confident, we feel good about ourselves, and then we're like, okay, let me like then buy multiple versions. Anyway, two more questions. If you get a score lower than 25, you should either just ditch it because it's not worth your time, but if you have like a lot of angst about it— this is sort of in the 16 to 25 category or in the like negative 16 to negative 30 category— there's some —angst it's creating, then you've got to ask yourself the next two questions. So, the fourth question gets at the heart of identity buying and tries to stop identity marketing, which is the most successful marketing strategy that has ever been invented. And you ask yourself, who is this product about? Man, when I asked this question, I found that I didn't really like the answers so much of the time because it exposed me to how envious I was, how fearful, how jealous, and maybe even how much I didn't love myself in that current moment. But it is such an important question to ask. I found two major patterns.

Crystal Chen [00:16:58]:
So when you ask yourself this question, it's gonna be three people: someone you envy, someone you fear, or someone you love and miss. The other thing is maybe it's something about you that you're lacking in mind, body, or spirit. And the only reason I realized that was because I was obsessed with pens, pants, and perfume, which represented mind, body, and spirit for me. I collected a lot of these things and I was like, these are— this is about something else. Okay, so now you know who it's about, what it's triggering in you. You have identified a person and maybe a relationship that you need to address. If it's someone you love, you probably want to I'll get— so the fifth question is, what's something SMART I can do instead of buying? And SMART here is not a judgmental word. It stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Crystal Chen [00:17:49]:
And it's a principle that's used a lot in like business goal setting, right? You can really see me reverse engineering my corporate girly self into, into slow buying. So for instance, if I wanted to buy a $600 skirt from a cool German designer called Julia Huwer, And when I thought about it, I was like, okay, who is this about? This is about my sister who lives in New York. She is a creative director at a major magazine. She is the coolest person I know. She's so cool. And I haven't talked to her in 3 weeks. Maybe I should just call her. And every time I would follow through on these cool girl items and just call my sister instead, my desire for those cool girl items would go from like like a 9 out of 10 and a 2.5 out of 3 disappointed down to a 1 out of 3 disappointed and a 6 out of 10 want it.

Crystal Chen [00:18:40]:
The desire just shifts, and you do that for everything. So anyway, that's the 5 questions, and I can talk a little bit later about how they combat marketing, these 6 different types of marketing, and gradually make you a stronger, more marketing-proof buyer over time.

Dr. Christine Li [00:18:55]:
I love the, the story about maybe I should just talk to my sister. That's so heartwarming and such a beautiful solution to the do I or don't I question. Right. Do I need this? Is there an actual need? And maybe the need is really not externally driven even, right? That maybe the source of the boredom or the I'm not good enough or I need this is something that we could just heal through a thought or a phone call or a nothing, you know, just letting the moment pass, which is beautiful. And when you were describing the pictures and the rating scales and things like that, I mean, I think there's a— and I think you're indicating that you're a thinker. You're, you're someone who you like to have things be rational and thought through. Does that make sense?

Crystal Chen [00:19:53]:
Yep, makes sense.

Dr. Christine Li [00:19:55]:
And that you needed to have a system to help you support yourself so that you weren't reflexively going to the stores. Absolutely, absolutely.

Crystal Chen [00:20:08]:
Can I lean into that point for just a, just a sec? Of course. I find that when you— this is one of my realizations why I had to get it out of the marketer's context and import it into my own context. And I think this is something you can do at a high-fidelity level with spreadsheets, or you can do it at a low-fidelity level with, like, I don't know, a wishlist. When you put something into your own context, you strip the item of all of the meaning and the value propositions, the positioning, like all this stuff that marketers are putting into it, and you merely put it into your own environment. then you can evaluate it more objectively. Then it has the chance to speak to you on its own remaining merits. If you are using a marketing catalog, going to the site every time you wanna evaluate something, you're gonna see so much information. You're seeing the logo that like, you know, they paid Wieden and Kennedy like $5 million to develop.

Crystal Chen [00:21:05]:
You're, you're seeing, you're seeing the persona document that like a team of overworked probably also shopaholic marketers, have stressed for 15 months on to wordsmith to the nth degree. You're getting all of that. That invisible labor, you can't see it, but it's powerful and it gets to you. So you've got to put it into your own context. You've got to strip it away of marketing context and marketing power. That's the only way you get your power back.

Dr. Christine Li [00:21:34]:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I love it. I love it how you're talking about— marketing messaging and the product, but you're also the way, the way to do that. The only way to do that is if you get closer to yourself, is if you understand yourself better. And it sounds like becoming a mother, having the injury, going through all the pain of shopaholism and the years of that, the consequences of that enabled you to just return to yourself and what you actually want and don't want.

Crystal Chen [00:22:06]:
Absolutely. And one of the things I have wanted for a long time is to write. In case you can't tell from my verboseness, I am a bit of a— I like to fancy myself a writer. I love to write. I don't know that I ever had like a really urgent, painful topic to write about, but then shopaholism became that topic. But the reason I showed up on TikTok was not because one day I was like, you know, I think it would be nice if people knew about it. There was a specific incident. And in writing novels or writing anything, they call this the inciting event.

Crystal Chen [00:22:39]:
So I'd love to tell you about the inciting event which drove me to create the channel. It was like a message from God. It was, it was so clear what I needed to do. So fast forward a few months, I got injured in the spring. I came up with Slow By Method. I start practicing in June. By August, I was like, I think I'm good. I like feel vaguely like back in control.

Crystal Chen [00:22:59]:
I haven't impulse purchased anything in like months. Now, because I subjected to the— I was like doing well, so enjoying my life, enjoying the baby. He was real cute at that time. He's still cute. He's still cute. And we're walking around in the neighborhood and I go to one of the stores in our neighborhood and they have done a collaboration with like a CFDA award-winning new hot British designer. And I'm like, oh dang. So I'm in there and I'm like enjoying the collaboration items with limited edition, all that stuff.

Crystal Chen [00:23:30]:
Stuff. And I'm like looking at the items and just mentally going through my, my slow buy questions, being like, oh, you're a 6 out of 10, I don't need you, but you're cute, you know, like doing a little talking, enjoying myself. I still love shopping, I still get to do it, I just don't buy as much. And then there's another person in the store and she's super excited too, super cute girl, like maybe 10 years younger than me, beautiful red hair and these, these, these green eyes. And, you know, she's like, oh, isn't this collab great? We start talking about it and she's like, I am obsessed with this collection. And she's shaking a little bit. She's so excited. I'm obsessed with this collection.

Crystal Chen [00:24:04]:
And I told myself, you know, I want to buy all the things, but I'm just going to buy one thing. And I, I picked it. I'm going to get this thing. And she showed me. I'm like, oh, that's really cute. Great selection. I think it's done. And then we start talking about the store and the other products.

Crystal Chen [00:24:20]:
And I'm like, oh, have you seen— you know, they just— yeah, they're known for the recycled polyester line, but they recently launched a recycled leather line. What do you think about that? I regret it as soon as the words come out of my mouth because her eyes go over to the recycled leather line and they settle on this one chartreuse-colored bag. And then her face just falls and she goes pale and she starts shaking even more. And I'm like, oh gosh, I'm sorry. But she picks it up and she's got her original thing that she came in the store, just one item. And then she picks up this other thing. She's like, Should I get both? It's a genuine question to me. We have a rapport, and I'm just— it's like being in a time warp, Christina.

Crystal Chen [00:25:03]:
I'm like, how do I tell you everything about the Slow Buy myth? Like, I see it unfolding, I see you're nervous, I see you're shaking. Like, something's off about this interaction. You don't need it. It's okay. I wanted to reassure her. I want to talk. All that came out of my mouth was, well, do you have anything like it currently? And that's not what she wants to hear. She wants me to enable her.

Crystal Chen [00:25:25]:
Yes, queen, you deserve it. Oh, whatever. In that moment, and so she pulls away from me just a little bit, and I'm about to launch into a spiel or something. And then the shop is just like, the retail associate comes over, and then that's when she delivers. She seals the deal. Oh, that one, she's super cute. I think there's only one left in stock. It's going to be final sale.

Crystal Chen [00:25:49]:
It's an extra 30% off. I don't think they're going to make it again. And that's when I completely lose her, and it feels like I've lost myself. I've been there before, in the store shaking. I came in here for one thing, I promised myself, I made a commitment, and then I see something and it gets me, and now I'm running through edge cases and exceptions and justifying to myself and getting caught up in the cognitive dissonance and then finding stronger rationale. You're, you're trained in psychology, you know all this stuff is happening. I see it happening to her. I'm getting emotional right now because she was She went so pale.

Crystal Chen [00:26:25]:
I mean, she had an issue. So I tried to catch her. I tried to— I don't know, I wanted to pattern interrupt, but it's gone. The shop assistant— this is what I'm talking about when I say it's important to take it out of the marketer or the brand's context, because the shop assistant, she has the power in that interaction. I'm just a customer. I don't get to influence or de-influence in the store. That's inappropriate. Inappropriate.

Crystal Chen [00:26:49]:
So she's in the line, I'm in the line behind her. Why am I in the line? I didn't even buy anything that day. I think I was being nosy. I was just like, what's she getting? Did she get both of them? In the end, so I'm kind of floating around the checkout. She got both bags. And as the sales associate, who literally at this point does not give a shit 'cause she made the sale, like the disinterest is just so clean on her face. I did it, I made the sale, I got rid of the stuff. This poor girl is muttering to herself in this nervous laughter, and she's saying, well, I remember this clear as day, well, if I, if I, if I don't end up liking it, I'll just give it to my mom.

Crystal Chen [00:27:27]:
It's her favorite color. That was her justification. I've been there, I've done that. I have lived through that. I got caught shoplifting back in my college days because I was shopaholic, and shoplifting that polyester pencil case was the result of me justifying that I was gonna give it to someone that I loved. That was how I justified it. So I heard, I heard the justification cleanly. I tried to catch her eye on the way out, and it was like, I just— this veil of shame.

Crystal Chen [00:27:59]:
She would not meet my eye. We hadn't talked for a while, not meet my eyes, just blazed out of there. A couple of realizations happened to me in that moment. There was the marketers' context or the brand's context, which I mentioned. They're so powerful in that moment. That was number one. The second one was that products are about people. We heard it in what she was saying.

Crystal Chen [00:28:21]:
It's for my mother. It's her favorite color. I'll just give it to her if I don't like it. And I wanted to yell after her, why don't you just call your mom? Maybe there's some reason she can't call her mom. You know, maybe there's some very good reason. They're estranged. There's no contact. I don't know, there's all kinds of stuff, right? But it was very clear it was about her mother.

Crystal Chen [00:28:42]:
And anyway, that incident sat with me. The marketers, context, and products are about people. And I couldn't tell her anything that I wanted to tell her in that moment. And 3 days later, I made my first video. And I was like, I really— I know I'm not alone. I know she's not alone. And I know how painful it is to go through something like that.

Dr. Christine Li [00:29:05]:
Yeah, you were very connected to her pain and you wanted to help her with it, right? To help her maybe not change her decision, but help her feel like she had some power over what was going on with the pain. Yes. And that could be really a lovely thing to do for people. And I'm glad that TikTok exists because it really does give people a platform and a forum to reach people who do need another voice, if not direct help, just a place to consider, what are my actions about? Do I need to continue with the same line of behavior that I've been doing? And that's what I appreciate about the platform. It's a big mess, but it's a big human mess. It's a mess. It's a human mess. Indeed.

Dr. Christine Li [00:29:54]:
You can pretty much find an opinion about everything, but it's honest and largely— it's largely honest, regular people sharing their experiences. You mentioned before we pressed record that you could speak about decluttering a bit, and I would love to hear your thoughts about decluttering, the process, the experience, what your own experience has been around it.

Crystal Chen [00:30:23]:
Yeah, for sure. The biggest experience with decluttering was definitely during my nesting phase right before I gave birth. But even before that, I was moving apartments constantly, and every time I would have to move, I would realize how much stuff I had acquired. In my early days when I was shopping a lot at Zara, I had bought so many things from Zara that it wouldn't fit in my closet. And granted, it was like a 280-square-foot apartment, so the closet was not very big, but still, the pile of clothes lived on my bed during the day. And at night when I needed to sleep, I would move that big pile of clothes over to my desk. And this was how it went on for a year. And I would add to it and add to it because what was one more, you know, polyester thing on top of this giant mound? And I you know, realize I was in pursuit of all of these identities because I wanted to feel lightweight and free and living easily and breezily.

Crystal Chen [00:31:24]:
But I was carrying the mental weight of this giant hump of clothes. It was like my turtle shell, you know. I had this invisible turtle shell of clothes that I would come home to every single night. And it went on for some time. Every time I moved apartments, my turtle shell would would collapse, but it would gradually come cluttering— I like to say it came cluttering back again. And it wasn't until I came up with the Slow Buy Method that I finally was able to reconcile with it. It being the decluttering and rebuying cycle. One thing that I realized from thinking about it so much is that the reason clutter comes back, at least for me, was because I had not let go of it properly.

Crystal Chen [00:32:09]:
And on a cute note, I mean, we've all heard of this concept of buyer's remorse. I like, I coined something. I needed to coin it because I am a marketer and I like words in that way. I call it chucker's regret, where you throw something away, you haven't properly said goodbye to it, and now you have regrets around it and you want to get it back. You threw it away for improper reasons. What are those improper reasons? I thought about it a bit more. And there was a comment that came in from TikTok. That was illustrative of this.

Crystal Chen [00:32:40]:
And she was like, can you tell me more about this decluttering and rebuying cycle? Because I think I have this. I go to thrift stores, I don't spend very much money, but I will buy a bunch of antiques or cassette tapes or whatever it is. And then I, you know, love them when they come in. I, I feel like I'm rescuing strays. This is sort of like, I feel like I'm rescue rescuing stray animals. When I go into thrift store and, you know, the other week or month or whatever, I, I got rid of all of them, I sold them for bulk, and now I have so much regret and I wish I hadn't done that. Why do I feel this way? So I was examining that, and I think the gap— sorry, the chunkers— regret comes when you do not part ways with the item on the same emotional level that they have come in. With.

Crystal Chen [00:33:33]:
What do I mean by that? Sorry, this is going to get into a bit of another framework. I do a lot of framework thinking, but in a nutshell, she welcomed these items into her home as stray animals. We have a kind of— we have a mental, emotional connection to items that we personify and anthropomorphize this way. And then she sold them off like $0.25 a pop. Oh, like, I mean, don't you just— you felt that, right? You felt like that's something that's not right. About the way that was let go. So let's put it into this, this framework, which I call the object relationship ladder. The bigger the gap between— there are 5 different, 5 different stages— and the bigger the gap between how something comes in and how it goes out, the more chuckers regret you are going to be.

Crystal Chen [00:34:16]:
So for her, the 5 levels are: at the very base you have transactional, and at the very top you have humanistic. And items that come in, you're paying a price for them, it's a transaction. Let's say they sit in your home for a while, maybe you— they have some sort of a soul. If you're familiar with— I imagine you must be familiar with Marie Kondo, you know, and this idea of saying thank you to your items when you part with them. Yes, there's this idea even in Shinto belief systems that, you know, every object has a spirit. And in the West, it's, it's known as panpsychism. Every object, you know, quantum, the thing within itself, everything has a spirit, something in and of itself. And if you acknowledge that, then you've moved on in your relationship with objects to the animistic level.

Crystal Chen [00:35:00]:
Beyond that is something called domesticated. I picked this up from another TikTok creator called Draft, who's doing her PhD in, I think, fashion and object studies. And she came up with this idea that like clothing objects are like animals, that wild animals, and we bring them into our home and we need to domesticate them. I thought that was such a clean parallel to what this other person was saying about, I'm rescuing strays. So you domesticate them, you put them to work for you. It's very Western ethos, but it works mentally and logically speaking. And then beyond that, then you have the fourth level, which is— I'm calling integrated, still working on the words. This is the idea that all these items in your closet are working together somehow.

Crystal Chen [00:35:45]:
They are individual beings that have been introduced to one another. They harmonize. They have harmonics. It's a bit like you're the host of this party. Your body is the party or the event, and the clothes are guests that interact with each other. It's integrated. They have a place. And then the last one is, you know, that objects are about people.

Crystal Chen [00:36:06]:
Products are about people. So a shirt is not just a shirt. It's some identity you're trying to inhabit, or it's about something that you're trying— somebody you're trying to become. And so let's go back to the example of this person with the strays and rescuing them. So they came in already at the domesticated level emotionally for her. They had stayed in her closet long enough for her to use these objects, become fond of them, to develop feelings for them. They had moved on almost to like the integrated level. She was, oh, I use this, you know, I played this mixtape, or like this thing sat on my drawer.

Crystal Chen [00:36:43]:
That was part of her home. And then she let them go at the transactional level, 25 cents, 35 cents a pop. So she had not done the work to bring the objects back down to the transactional layer before sending them off. And this is why I think departure rituals, goodbye rituals, no matter what they are, saying thank you to the objects, that helps you take the objects back down to the transactional level where you can Release them back into the wild, if you will, either for free at the thrift store or the Goodwill, or, you know, you're consigning them. And then you won't have chucker's regret. And because the gap is where you want to rebuy the thing because you need— it's not that you want the thing, it's that you want another chance to say goodbye properly this time.

Dr. Christine Li [00:37:33]:
Yeah, I love the phrase chucker's regret. I experience it with the people that I'm working with quite often, and I've never had a term for it. It is a very pertinent and prominent experience for people, and it can happen over anything, right? It doesn't have to be of substantial monetary value. It could be of deep emotional value, or maybe not even so deep, but it's really about human attachment. You know, your 5 levels, it Makes me think these are different ways we attach to items, to people, to animals, literal animals and crystals that we find in the thrift store that become like stray animals to us. It's really our imagination, our belief system, and our heart. And it is difficult, in quotes, for anybody who's not watching us on YouTube or on video. It's difficult, like Crystal is teaching us, to work with matters of the heart and say, oh, this is a casual exchange.

Dr. Christine Li [00:38:40]:
This is a casual declutter. Because much of our lives, we're not doing things so casually. We're actually being very purposeful. We're being very intentional. We are spending our time and our money for reasons, right? And I think Crystal's story and her history and what she's done with her story and history is really about being intentional without hurting yourself. Use your intentionality to, to nurture yourself and to take care of yourself at a deeper level and buy what you need and what you care for. But again, there is some sort of line system or framework where you can help yourself to take care of yourself at a deeper level. It's really never about the stuff, in my opinion.

Dr. Christine Li [00:39:29]:
That's where I'm going to throw my own thoughts about things. It's never really about the stuff. It's about the feelings, the energy, and at what level are you taking care of yourself. So thank you, Crystal, for sharing— Thank you so much. —your thoughtfulness, your words. I can tell why you want to be a writer and are a writer and that you care really deeply about helping people to spare themselves of the pain of all of this. And so once you get a little more information, you have a little more power over the pain, which is a beautiful thing. So, Crystal, thank you.

Dr. Christine Li [00:40:07]:
Thank you.

Crystal Chen [00:40:09]:
Thank you for having me and letting me share a bit about what I am thinking about. I really hope that this helps people, and feel free to check out my channel on TikTok. I post new videos every day. Just trying to reinforce some of these principles and some of these learnings so that people don't have to be confused and feel lost when they feel like they are shopping too much.

Dr. Christine Li [00:40:32]:
And the TikTok handle is Slow Buy Club. Slow Buy Club. Terrific. And Crystal also has a free download. Is it a quiz? Can you describe a little bit again what it is?

Crystal Chen [00:40:47]:
The link is in my bio on TikTok, but if you're curious about what type of overconsumer you are, There are actually 3 kinds. There's overspender, overbuyer, and overshopper. And once you know which type you are, you can learn these specific anti-marketing strategies that will help you not spend or buy or shop as much. I have been on de-influencing TikTok, and I've seen lots of different types of diagnostics. I haven't seen anything like this. Nobody's broken it down in terms of the different types of overconsumption. I think that if you can put a fine point on the type of issue that you have, then you can use targeted strategies to mitigate and help fix.

Dr. Christine Li [00:41:29]:
I love it. I have also created a URL so that you can get easy access to that quiz, and that is maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/slow. S-L-O-W. Again, maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/slow. Definitely follow Crystal over at Slow Buy Club, S-L-O-W-B-U-Y Club, over on TikTok. Thank you, Crystal. This is awesome.

Dr. Christine Li [00:41:59]:
You've made me think more deeply about all of these things about the chucker's regret. I know I'm just going to keep quoting you on that. Please do. And also about the framework of just how we're interacting with stuff when it's in our home. Which I had not thought as deeply about. So now I've got a different way of teaching about this and sharing about this. So thank you for helping me as well.

Crystal Chen [00:42:24]:
Thank you so much for having me. And to everybody listening, I hope you have a great day.

Dr. Christine Li [00:42:29]:
Yeah, let's all have a great day. Thank you, Crystal. Thank you, dear listener, for being with us for this beautiful conversation. And I will see you next week on the Make Time for Success podcast. Let's go. Okay, bye.

Dr. Christine Li [00:42:41]:
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time for Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you've heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website, maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com, for past episodes, show notes, and all the resources we mention on the show. Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too. You can find me there under the name Procrastination Coach. Send me a DM and let Let me know what your thoughts are about the episodes you've been listening to, and let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making time for success. Talk to you soon.