I was on the couch the other night, scrolling through a TikTok my granddaughter sent me.
The video was a young woman, maybe twenty-five, holding up an almost-empty tube of mascara. She had this proud, knowing smile. The caption said: “Day 47 of using up what I have before I buy more. #UnderconsumptionCore.”
I watched it twice.
Then I laughed out loud.
Because what this twenty-five-year-old was doing was exactly what my mother did every single week of her life. And what HER mother did. And probably what her mother’s mother did before that.
The mascara wasn’t a movement when my mother did it.
It was just a normal day for her.
I kept scrolling. The next video showed someone proudly displaying a sweater she’d worn for ten years. The one after that was a woman cooking dinner from leftovers. The one after that was someone repotting a plant in a peanut butter jar.
It went on like this for an hour.
And it slowly hit me, somewhere in the middle of a montage of someone reusing aluminum foil, that the internet had just discovered what entire generations of women had been doing without naming.
There’s a name for it now.
“Underconsumption core.”
It’s a TikTok aesthetic that’s been growing for the past two years. Wikipedia has an entry. The United Nations even referenced it in their Black Friday materials last year.
Gen Z and Millennials are credited with starting it.
What nobody seems to be saying, though, is that my mother lived this. My grandmother lived this. Most of the women I grew up around lived this.
And they just called it… life.
Not a movement. Not an aesthetic. Not a trend.
Just how you took care of what you had.
The thing this practice did, the thing that matters for any woman now standing in her sixties surrounded by decades of accumulated stuff, is that it kept our houses from filling up in the first place.
You can’t have clutter if nothing comes in.
You can’t have piles of stuff to sort through if you finished what you bought, repaired what broke, and saved what was useful.
The whole back end of decluttering, the part most of us spend our 60s and 70s working against, was prevented at the front end by a generation that bought less and used everything.
What follows are ten habits Gen Z is calling “underconsumption core” that women of my generation simply called keeping a home from filling up.