I spent this year’s Spring Break in Utah with a group of 11 other University of Michigan students, most of whom I hadn’t met before. We embarked on a trip with the Michigan Backpacking Club, and had been paired together based on our preferred spring break destination and daily hiking distance. The plan was to spend a week driving through the southern part of the state, following good weather, and to enjoy as much time in the backcountry as possible.
In backpacking communities, there are certain “iconic” hikes that convey a level of status and expertise: climbing the steep granite crest of Half Dome in Yosemite, summiting Mount St. Helens, descending 6,000 feet into the bottom of the Grand Canyon and coming back up again. We were in Zion National Park, in part, to complete one of those iconic hikes. More than half of my group had no real hiking or backpacking experience, but this trip was about to establish our place among “serious backpackers”: we were going to complete Angels Landing.
On paper, Angels Landing is a deceptively short, 5.4 mile hike that covers a modest 1,488 feet of elevation gain. For the last half mile, however, hikers cross over a narrow rock formation that’s just a few feet wide in certain spots. Metal chains have been drilled into the rock to support hikers in segments that are too steep to complete unassisted. One wrong move, one misplaced step or moment of hesitation, and you’ll fall nearly 5,000 feet into the red canyon below.
Angels Landing started out as a loose suggestion: Wouldn’t it be fun to do it if we were going to Zion anyway? But for some members of my backpacking group, it became an obsession. Individuals in my group with improper equipment (crampons are strongly recommended in icy conditions) insisted on attempting the trek anyway, and attempts to dissuade them from putting themselves in the way of undue danger turned into a screaming match. One person even admitted that they had only signed up to make the 30-hour drive to southern Utah with the backpacking club to hike Angels Landing.
In the end, most of my group — myself included — did complete the hike. It was stunning and strenuous and everything everyone had described it as. It would be untrue to say that it didn’t live up to the hype. But I felt a strange disconnection between Angels Landing as a physical place and embodied experience and Angels Landing as an ideal.
I began to suspect there was something deeper to the way certain hikes and outdoor experiences convey status — that for some people, it really wasn’t about enjoying nature, but about something else entirely. This thought lingered in the back of my mind throughout the trip. Again and again, comments would come up that made me return to this:
We should hit all five National Parks in Utah just to say we did it, we can just go to the visitor centers.
I don’t want to spend three days in Capitol Reef National Park; no one has ever heard of that.
Why were we so obsessed with having certain experiences and how had their subjective value in our collective imagined warped my experience on my trip? There was an unspoken agreement that we would rather visit certain high-profile attractions in a superficial way — stopping at the visitor center, checking out the scenic overlook and then leaving — than spend more time hiking less iconic spots. Was the visitor center at Bryce Canyon really worth more than three days of backpacking in Capitol Reef?
Overconsumption has been written about extensively. Overconsumption of new, trendy and low-cost clothes is fueling the fast fashion industry, which contributes to climate change and the exploitation of low-paid garment workers in the Global South. Overconsumption of social media is divorcing people from real life and contributing to a crisis of loneliness and isolation, especially for teens. Overconsumption contributes to a deep, psychological unhappiness where more is the ultimate goal — and where there is no longer any pleasure in enjoying the everyday or familiar.
Notably, critiques of overconsumption have almost exclusively focused on physical goods. This is unsurprising — it’s easy to cite how overconsumption contributes to hoarding, excessive shopping hauls and social media companies’ mandate to get people to spend more and more time online. But is it possible to “overconsume” experiences?
I used to think it was impossible. In fact, I constantly worried I was disengaging from real life, too caught up with whatever was on my phone, on my computer or lingering in my mind to deeply experience what was around me. Now, I’m convinced that it is, in fact, possible.
Overconsumption isn’t just for the tangible. The same logic that demands we constantly pursue newness is pushing us to live shallow, disengaged lives. It makes no difference if you experience something deeply, all that matters is that you experience it. Overconsumption is coming for real life, too.
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Once I started thinking about overconsuming experiences, I began to see it everywhere. The most egregious example was BookTok. BookTok is an influential corner of TikTok dedicated to reading and reviewing books. I am, admittedly, not a regular viewer of BookTok content, mostly because I don’t like to read Young Adult novels anymore (despite being marketed towards teens, the genre has taken a hold on chronically online 20-somethings). But more importantly, I had an aversion to the community’s obsession with their “read counts” — how many books they had read in a given week, month or year.
I admit that this may seem like a hollow critique — the point of books is, after all, to read them. On BookTok, however, read counts are the ultimate indicator of status. Creators will boast about completing 100 books in a year. Not only is this reading volume unrealistic for the average person, it’s hardly aspirational. To meet these lofty reading goals, creators offer their viewers tips on how to finish novels faster, such as listening to audiobooks at double speed. Here, the novel functions more like a Zoom lecture that a reader just needs to get through than something to be engaged with and enjoyed. Other tricks that these influencers tout include skimming long passages of text and opting for shorter texts like novellas or graphic novels. The imperative is clear: read a book so you check another item off your to-read list, not because you’re actually interested in the text.
Of course, there’s an element of traditional, commodity-based overconsumption to BookTok. Novels are primarily a tangible good, and literary influence has made substantive critiques of how literary communities encourage consumerism. Nevertheless, BookTok’s incessant pressure to finish more and more titles suggests it’s not just about owning an excessive amount of books. Reading becomes a means to an end, devoid of any critical analysis or enjoyment.
Overconsumption is, at its core, about making yourself palatable and interpretable to others. Real-life overconsumption is largely driven by self-presentation. If someone tells you they read five books last year, it certainly tells you something about them. But if they say they read 100 books last year, or even 30, it’s a clear signal of who they are. That person is a reader, embodying a particular aesthetic that comes with the title. Other facts about that person are irrelevant, because reader provides a neat rubric through which they can become legible.
In an essay for Bustle, author Stephanie Danler describes her foray into BookTok. Danler, who’s novel “Sweetbitter” was popular among reading accounts on Instagram, joined TikTok to stay up-to-date with literary trends, but found that the app was more about successfully performing aesthetics than actual content. “On it, you can’t just show a book by Clarice Lispector,” Danler writes. “The successful accounts performed being a ‘woman who reads Clarice Lispector.’ ”
The same is true of outdoor communities. Visiting one national park is a weak signal of someone’s identity. Overconsumption, however, provides a neat way to translate a narrow set of experiences into a fully formed idea of a person. In my mind, I can picture the kind of person who visits all five national parks in Utah. The line “I’ve hiked Angel’s Landing and Half Dome and Mount Saint Helens” makes it immediately clear to me who someone is. If they’re a woman, they’re probably a “granola girl” or if they’re a guy, they’re probably a “dirtbag” — a brand of outdoorsman who “is committed to a given (usually extreme) lifestyle to the point of abandoning employment and other societal norms in order to pursue said lifestyle.” It’s less about what particular archetype someone embodies, but more that living that archetype allows everything about them to fall into place. A narrow set of experiences that, on paper, don’t mean anything deeper suddenly convey a litany of products, media, beliefs, values and behaviors we should come to expect from a person. Overconsumption allows us to reduce people to a generic Type Of Person, shedding all the complexities and nuances of being a fully formed individual.
In an age marked by capitalistic excess, where the market’s growth imperative demands that everyone constantly reinvent themselves through a carefully curated selection of products and experiences, overconsumption can feel inevitable. It’s often difficult to ascertain if I really want to do something, or if I just want to perform being the type of person who would do that thing. How will anyone see me as outdoorsy if I can’t wear my hiking boots to class? Does it even matter that I went to Yosemite if I didn’t hike Half Dome? If I’m not continually reasserting my identity through consumption, will I even be that person anymore?
Once I began to see how the logic of overconsumption had invaded my actions, I began to feel that my sense of self was actually quite fragile. It was much easier to keep curating myself — going on the right kind of trips, attending the right concerts or joining the right extracurriculars — than to reflect on what I really wanted.
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I’m a senior, in the last stretch of my undergraduate career. When I came back from my spring break trip to Utah, a peculiar sense of finality settled over me. I had felt it in moments all year: walking through Nichols Arboretum in October and realizing this would be my last fall in Ann Arbor, stopping to make a snowman on the Diag for the first and last time, slowing down while walking through campus to take everything in. In all these cases it was a fleeting feeling, but now it had taken a more permanent form; I was keenly aware that the second half of winter semester would be characterized by many lasts.
I realized I desperately wanted to experience these next few weeks deeply. I wasn’t interested in quickly checking unfinished items off my Ann Arbor bucket list or trying to artificially manufacture as many memorable “college experiences” as possible. It would feel disingenuous to try to construct some idealized experience in my final few weeks at Michigan, just to say I did all the things that a college student “should” do. Instead, I returned from spring break with a renewed focus on being truly present in every moment. Better to really experience my life as it is than to construct something that wasn’t real.
Statement Correspondent Haley Johnson can be reached at haleyej@umich.edu.