I'm not going to pretend to be above consooming or anything but one thing that I have developed an understanding of is that part of my urge to impulse buy comes from a desire for novelty and wanting nice stuff.

This advice should be taken with all due caution because it's not an endorsement of simply transposing the urge to consume onto a hobbyist consumption habit but I find that I can meet a lot of my needs for nice things and for novelty, to sorta plug that aching ennui in my ADHD brain which is full of bees, through cultivating hobbies that are oriented towards creation and production rather than consumption.

I try to find hobbies and ways of going about them that are cheap and sustainable.

Often hobbies are curated for us on a sort of Juicero model - they sell you the expensive kit and you are funneled into a walled garden or a pseudo-walled garden where you buy packets of things, often on a subscription basis, and the kit does everything else for you.

The opposite of this is very DIY oriented. Stuff like cooking, gardening, fabric craft, making music and other art, design, writing etc. can all be very low tech and focused on upcycling. If you occupy a lot of your time with making do with what you've got, customising things to your preference, and upcycling then generally these sorts of hobbies can be started with minimal inputs and minimal (or sometimes even zero) cost. Try not to get lost in wanting everything or needing to buy all the best tools and inputs too - very often you can hone your skills and produce great things because of constraints and not just in spite of them.

It's not a panacea to consumerism but I'd encourage everyone to try and get into any sort of DIY scene that takes their interest. Yes, it takes longer to mine clay from the soil and refine itl than it does to buy a nice, instantly-gratifying package of pottery clay but sometimes it's about focusing on the process and challenging yourself to learn and to really just slow the fuck down and attend to the moment rather than desperately trying to fill the void by making endless purchases.