Overconsumption of material goods is a problem with significant consequences, from environmental crises – it’s a key driver of resource depletion – to diminished personal well-being – it can lead to a host of mental health challenges. One popular answer to this problem is minimalism, a lifestyle that promises freedom and simplicity by reducing material possessions. Guidebooks and popular culture about minimalism and decluttering have brought the idea of “less is more” into the mainstream.
But is minimalism a viable solution to overconsumption? Research suggests it can come with problems that may undermine its potential to improve our world and ourselves.
The paradox of minimalism
Minimalism initially began as an art movement focused on simplicity, then later transitioned into a lifestyle. Its initial appeal lies in its promise of freedom from material possessions.
Minimalism as a lifestyle movement, minimalism quickly gained popularity in the West (predominantly in the US, Japan and Europe), where it emerged partly as resistance to the excesses of consumer culture. It aimed to reduce the ecological harm of overconsumption and improve well-being.
However, the practical application of minimalism reveals unexpected challenges. The endowment effect makes it inherently difficult for individuals to part with possessions once ownership is established, as their perceived value increases significantly. Loss aversion can make the discomfort associated with a loss (eg with discarding an item) more intense than the pleasure derived from an equivalent gain (eg a clutter-free space).
A different challenge is that as consumer minimalism often becomes competitive, its adopters may strive to be the “most” minimalist or own the least. Social media platforms can turn the process into a public performance, where individuals showcase their sparse, curated homes and lack of clutter. Yet, behind the scenes, achieving that look can entail considerable spending on, say, designer multipurpose furniture or premium “timeless” clothing, and require ample time. So as minimalism became trendy, it morphed, for some, from an anti-consuming stance into a way to signal virtue and status. A corrective for overconsumption has become another form of conspicuous consumption, an identity project far from its original intent of promoting personal happiness and planetary health.
Performance management – a new approach?
Performance management is a fundamental business management practice that helps organisations effectively oversee and enhance employee performance. Its core components typically include setting clear objectives, tracking progress, providing continuous feedback, and recognising results.
Effective performance management systems use structured tools and processes to ensure individual efforts support broader strategic aims. These systems can not only affect behaviour but may also boost engagement, especially among lower performers, by clarifying expectations and offering ways for growth.
Thus, a structured approach, such as the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound) goal-setting framework, can significantly improve the likelihood of achieving objectives. Author Peter F. Drucker’s Management by Objectives introduced the idea of aligning personal and organisational goals, laying the foundation for modern performance systems. Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton’s Balanced Scorecard popularised the following principle: “What you measure is what you get.”
Applying performance management to consumption
Applied to consumption, this framework would involve transforming individual goals into concrete, measurable actions. Evidence from a recent article, Behavioral interventions for waste reduction: a systematic review of experimental studies, shows that goal-setting interventions that prompt individuals to commit to specific targets may lead to significantly greater reductions in waste and resource use than interventions focused solely on raising general awareness. Furthermore, a recent study of individual consumers found that participants who received multiple interventions – including information about environmental impact and tips for staying on track – reduced clothing purchases after one month “on average by 58.59%” in the case of individual goal-setting and “by 46.82%” in the case of group goal-setting.
Performance management approaches have been effectively applied not only in traditional organisational settings but in other domains such as sports and learning. Practices such as structured goal-setting and progress-tracking, when strengthened through contextual gamification, can positively influence motivation and engagement.
Marketers often incorporate activity streaks into social platforms, loyalty programs, apps and other digital tools to encourage and sustain engagement. The streaks introduce a meta-goal (“keep the streak alive”) on top of a task goal (“complete today’s action”). The app MyFitnessPal aims to reinforce healthy habits with daily streaks and progress-tracking. PocketGuard, which Forbes ranks among the top budgeting and personal finance apps, tracks spending behaviour and celebrates savings goals to encourage financial discipline. And Duolingo, the popular language-learning app, uses streaks and badges to try to sustain users’ motivation.
These apps share a common design pattern: they offer a simple, structured path for incremental progress, rather than abstract long-term goals. By making progress visible and rewarding consistency, they can help users stay motivated and engaged over time.
Imagine an app that helps you manage your consumption just like a fitness app helps you manage your health. This app would aim to align your values, such as sustainability or economy, with goals such as limiting non-essential purchases to two per month or tracking spending on categories like clothing and electronics. It could even reward you with points for skipping impulse buys.
Such a framework could mirror performance management and gamification concepts by providing personalised, real-time feedback to users about the environmental and personal-finance impacts of their consumption. Combined with behavioural design elements such as progress updates, commitment-confirmation prompts, and streak rewards, the feedback could help guide users toward healthier consumption habits while making sustainable choices more motivating. Whereas e-commerce platforms like Shein and Temu use similar concepts to encourage people to buy more, an anti-overconsumption app would be rewarding “buying better”.
The way forward
While minimalism raises important awareness about overconsumption, its individualistic, subjective and potentially competitive adoptions limit its effectiveness as a solution. Unlike subjective and extreme definitions of “enough”, performance management principles could be used to build a structured and quantifiable environment to address overconsumption. In other words, these principles can help translate abstract values into concrete, achievable goals and actions.
Yet there are usually some difficulties in implementing full-scale performance management systems. Data integration and computational complexity are usually the major barriers, while users’ engagement, as well as privacy and regulatory concerns, may limit effectiveness. Thus, a more sustainable solution probably lies in combining and moderating minimalism’s ethical awareness with performance management’s structured discipline. For marketing managers and app developers, this is a call to prioritise behavioural design for a higher purpose than just increasing engagement and consumption. Psychological techniques and gamification principles can be used to encourage users to reach meaningful goals.
It’s not enough to always be reminded that overconsumption is helping to drive environmental crises and contributing to mental health challenges. Consumers could use practical tools to guide healthier, more mindful choices that do not require going to extremes.
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