The Overconsumerism of Fall

Every September, the world starts to dress itself in colors of amber and red. The leaves start to fall off the trees and the air starts to cool. Stores are now stocked with smells of pumpkin spice, and our social media has become a carousel for all things autumn. From pumpkin patches to endless Starbucks fall drinks, and curated leaf piles, the season of autumn now starts to feel staged. Autumn was once quietly cool months right before the chill of winter, but now it feels like the season is just a performance. Its beauty is bottled into candles, plastic cups, and Instagram captions. We don’t experience autumn anymore, we buy it. We buy it from our Starbucks pumpkin cream chai’s to our cozy sweaters we find on our Tiktok or Instagram pages. We buy it, package it, and post it. We chase fall like it’s a product on backorder, but we forget to slow down and enjoy the feeling of the leaves at our feet.  

Every year, fall seems to fall earlier than usual. And I am not talking about the cooler weather. We start planning our fall wardrobe in August and buying an endless amount of Starbucks pumpkin drinks. We start planning our Halloween costumes in the summer, before the air has even started to cool. But why? Is it our brains coaxing us to buy the illusion of fall rather than live in it? Stores start to overflow with fall blankets, ceramic pumpkin, and anything with the smell of cinnamon. It urges us to believe that to be with the season, we must purchase it. The gentle transformation of summer to fall and the leaves falling has been drowned by curated pumpkin patch photos, and endless “fall décor” sales. Autumn, once a season of fleeting and change, is slowly turning into an industry worth million. 

Autumn is not just commercialized in stores and coffee shops. It is commercialized on our screens as well. Instagram and Tiktok have turned into the perfect fall backdrop. From a curated aesthetic of pumpkin patches, fall knitted sweaters, and apple picking Instagram reels. Romanticizing the season through Pinterest boards of what we want our fall to look like. I love making seasonal Pinterest boards. It makes me romanticize the season and helps me see the beauty in it. But I do often find myself in a game of comparison because I do this. If my version of autumn does not look like the girls on my Pinterest, am I really living fall? And then I start to overconsume again. I bought more pumpkin drinks and more fall sweaters. Just to live my fall like the girls I romanticize on my Pinterest. It feels like we are no longer experiencing fall as happens and instead, we are performing it. Capturing its beauty as someone aesthetic for strangers to scroll past or leave a like or comment. In trying to preserve autumn’s beauty using likes and comments on an aesthetic autumn post, we stripe the season of its real beauty by mistaking the seasonal joy instead of the real thing.  

At its core, Autumn is a season of surrender and change. The leaves fall off the trees and begin to die, fields are harvested bare as we prepare for the winter months. But it feels like we refuse to let it be simple. We want these months to be a fantasy instead of living. But instead, we replace it with plastic pumpkins, artificial fall scents, and pumpkin spice lattes that promise us a shortcut to the coziness that we crave in this season. In doing this, we drown the season of its natural beauty—the breeze of the wind, the hush of cozy nights, and the quiet lesson in accepting change. It feels like the symbols of fall matter more than the season itself. That we are so focused on accomplishing the perfect aesthetic of fall matter than enjoying slowing down and enjoying it.  

Autumn is meant to be a time where life slows down. The beauty is in the crunch of the leaves, the quiet surrender of the trees, and the cool breeze in the air. But instead, we post about it, package it, and purchase it until the beauty feels hollow. To honor autumn, we must learn to stop buying the aesthetic of the season and start simply living it.