Whatever the motivation, these sorts of living experiments always intrigue me. The book "Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping" (Judith Levine) is another example. I informally decided to go a year without buying any clothes back in January, and while I haven't totally kept to it (have bought a few t-shirts from Threadless), I've managed to spend much less than usual and not look like a hobo.

The point of most of these seems to be that we can manage, quite well in fact, on a much lower level of consumption than we might be used to. Worth remembering, imho.