I Must Use All The Bar Soaps
Ever since I paid off my credit card debt early this year, I got into the rabbit hole of minimalism and simple/frugal living because I'm terrified of going back to my shit coping mechanism of impulsive shopping. As I kept watching all the videos, I came across this idea of Project Pan.
It started with the makeup community, I think. The goal is to use up a product until you start seeing the pan underneath and then keep going til empty. Fun idea right? A lot of other people thought so too! And because we live in this day and age of social media and rampant consumerism, we own far too much stuff, and we keep acquiring more.
This trend has been expanded to include pretty much every consumable item you can think of in your house. The usual premise of the Project Pan videos is to confront your stash and take count of how much you have so you can track it while you use it up. I still haven't done that. Just thinking about it makes me feel overwhelmed and discombobulated.
So now I only focus on a few items at a time. I currently really love using up my shower products. I've realized I prefer bar soap vastly over shower gels or body wash but unfortunately I still have a couple of bottles of body wash to use up. I've also found a groove with using lotion on my whole body after every shower and I've already used up two bottles of lotion in the last 5 months.
I stopped trying to track everything at this point. I'm just happy I'm getting to use up what I have at this point and there's less friction. Some days when I'm stressed out and tired and dopamine seeking, I get the intense urge to go spend money in my favorite brand to get bricks upon bricks of bar body soap and bar shampoos and conditioners and whatever I feel would make me feel "good" about myself. I choose to feel bad about myself but not go through with it.
So for now, Project Pan is working for me. Even though I'm not so strict as to track everything yet, it helps me keep in mind what I have and it's enough to remind myself whenever I need to exercise willpower to not spend.
How about you, have you heard of Project Pan? Are you participating in it too?