Stacey Vanek-Smith

I've been covering business and economics for more than 15 years.

And one thing that has always blown my mind is how much shopping is the lifeblood of our economy.

Nearly 75% of the U.S.

economy, biggest economy in the world, is consumer spending, a.k.a.

people buying stuff.

It is not an exaggeration to say that you buying that coastal grandma cardigan on your lunch break is a main pillar of the whole world's economy.

Consumerism is a vast and powerful machine, and opting out of it is not easy.

For Alicia Berman, the push to try came from this one moment when she ducked into a store in Brooklyn to buy gloves.

Alicia started to think about how much she was buying and she started to feel like it was too much.

Alicia was also in a lot of debt.

Her bank account was empty, her closets were bursting, and she had been reading about what overconsumption was doing to the planet.

The giant mountain of discarded clothes in Chile, the one you can see from space, the piles of clothes that have washed up and overtaken the beaches in Ghana.

She decided she was going to make a change.

A big change.

Alicia decided to try the no buy challenge.

She'd seen it on social media.

People saying not going to buy anything for 30 days or 60 days and then chronicling their no buy journeys on TikTok.

Alicia decided to join in for a year.

At the time she made her first TikTok, she did not have many followers.

The videos were mostly for her.