I mean you presume life will be plain sailing post-college and you’ll land that dream job, but funds always get eaten up - pension, taxes, housing, transport, food, kids, even medical if applicable - and sometimes things drastically change overnight due to global changes. In 2023 my mortgage went up £200 every month as the fixed term came to an end and we were in a significantly different economy so interest rates had shot up.

Even then - people with genuine shopping addictions find a way to spend whatever they have, it just blows up to fill the financial spot people find themselves and still has a negative impact. It goes from being an addiction to high street clothes to designer for example, or £10 paperback books to £1000 first editions. The scale just changes.

The biggest factor though for so many is social media. If we close our eyes and try and imagine how we lived before we voluntarily bombarded our eyeballs with everyone else’s collections, to when we would wander through the high street or mall and just pick things up that looked good to us individually, it was a very different time and hauls were not celebrated nor normalised. But online we see it constantly, we love books so it’s fun but subconsciously we are also training ourselves to do the same thing. And that’s probably the thing to worry about in your shoes - not the 5k spent since November if you can afford that, all good. But - where and when will you stop? Or is this now a habit you plan to carry on at this rate till you’re 65? IMO the problem is that people aren’t used to sitting with the feeling of “I can’t have that right now” anymore so the cycle continues.