The idea occurs to me, as so many desperate solutions do, during the Christmas holiday season. I have maxed out the Visa, moved on to the Citibank debit card, and am tapping the ATM like an Iraqi guerrilla pulling crude from the pipeline. Convinced I am picking up no more than the occasional trinket - a tree ornament for Howard and Nanette here, a bar of French soap there - atheist Grinch that I am, I've still managed to scatter $1,001 across New York City and the internet in just two weeks.

In New York, only a day after the towers fell, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani counselled his trembling constituents to "show you're not afraid. Go to restaurants. Go shopping." When the world's people asked how they could help, he responded, "Come here and spend money." Shopping became a patriotic duty. Buy that flat-screen TV, our leaders commanded, or the terrorists will have won.

All this floats to mind in mid-December as I stoop to fish a glove from one of the slushy puddles that form on New York street corners after a snowfall. The corner of my paper shopping bag gets sodden, and the contents begin to drop through it. Frigid liquid seeps into the seam of my left boot.

This is freedom? I asked myself. This is democracy? I know there are others who have already opted out. Some started their resistance on the Friday after Thanksgiving (America's biggest shopping day), joining almost a million worldwide in celebrating Buy Nothing Day, a 24-hour period of abstention.

It comes to me: what if I were to meditate on the true meaning - and economic, environmental, social and personal consequences - of the Retail Season not just for a day, but for a month? Too easy. I've got enough stuff to last me for three. OK, three months. Nah, gratification of desire can be forestalled that long without much trouble. What if I resisted for the actual length of the retail season: the whole year?

We take the vow. Starting January 1 2004, my partner Paul and I will buy only necessities for sustenance, health and business - groceries, insulin for our diabetic cat, toilet paper, internet access. I am not primarily out to save money, though I'll be delighted if that happens. I have no illusion that forgoing this CD or that skirt is going to bring down consumer culture - I don't even know if I want to bring it down.

Materially, we will survive. That's the least of my worries. But, I ask myself, can a person have a social, community or family life, a business, a connection to the culture, an identity, even a self, outside the realm of purchased things and experiences?

December 31 We drive to Vermont. At 9pm we light candles on the kitchen table and send off the old year with our traditional dinner of spaghetti and caviar. We toast the Year Without Shopping with our second-to-last bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

At 10pm I unearth a Red Envelope catalogue with a turned-down page featuring a small concrete baby elephant. When I found it more than a year ago, we'd been looking for an ornament to place on a jutting rock in our perennial garden. The elephant was just right, and Paul volunteered to make the purchase but never got around to it. "Oh well," I sigh. "I guess we can say goodbye to our elephant."

"There are still two hours left!" declares Paul, surprising me with his enthusiasm. He leaps online. "They still have it!" he shouts, reaching for his credit card. A familiar frisson courses through me - the thrill of the perfect gift, the unbelievable bargain, the hat or shirt that is absolutely me.

Paul hits the Send button. The elephant will arrive the day after tomorrow. And after that ... 363 days will pass without the UPS man brightening our door.

The frisson turns to a chill.

New Year's Day I wake up to fresh coffee and a forecast of snow. The wood furnace is hot, the windows frosted. Last night's chill starts to dissipate. If anyone can make it through a non-buying year, I figure, Paul and I can. We're both self-employed and work at home, conducting most of our business by phone and email. We have no office rents; our work outfits - pyjamas and pyjama equivalents - require no dry cleaning. We make our own schedules.

We're free to rise before dawn and put in our eight hours before knocking off to ski in the afternoon; we can take two hours to mow the lawn with a low-fuel push mower or simmer a big, cheap soup all day. Because Paul and I were adults with established lives in two different states when we met, we still spend spring and fall in my Brooklyn apartment, and summer and winter in Paul's house in rural Vermont. The arrangement allows me to rent out the apartment and save a half-year's housing costs.

Paul is a political and energy-efficiency consultant, I am a full-time writer and editor. We are educated, cosmopolitan, self-directing and childless. We pay our own stripped-down, high-deductible health insurance premiums (with out-of-pocket dental bills, this comes to about $6,000 a year for me). We have no job security, no workers' compensation or paid vacations, and minuscule savings. We are both past 50.

Temperamentally, we are suited to the task. Paul is a non-shopper. A Vermont boy from a penurious family, he'd rather spend a day a month re-twisting and soldering the coils of an ancient toaster than purchase a new one. My own shopping enthusiasms are livelier but in the scheme of things American, I am a desultory and uncommitted consumer at best.

Yet somehow Paul and I have managed to amass what can only be described as a lot of shit. This fact will shape our strategy for the year. Besides those few pre-project panic purchases, we have decided not to stock up. We will use whatever we have, and if something runs out, decide if we need more.

January 15 The rules are shaping up, and we are starting to adjust. No processed or prepared food except bread. No restaurants, we tell our friends. Come to dinner, they reply. No movies or video rentals. I'm reading a book every three or four days.

January 16 I discover that I earn about the median income for a New Yorker (a bit under $45,000 before taxes and business expenses); my perennially unpaid credit card balance (about $7,500) is average, too. Even my attitudes to spending are normal. Research shows that just about everyone thinks she needs the things she buys and considers almost everything she wants a necessity. We're not greedy, we say. It's everyone else who is acquiring useless stuff.

February 14, Valentine's Day At the convenience store and Texaco station on the corner of Routes 14 and 15, the red foil-covered chocolate roses are selling well. A man in front of me in the queue buys two.

I pick up my New York Times (a necessity) and leave the store thinking about a Valentine's gift for Paul. When I get home, I empty the matches from a small, thin matchbox and wrap it in iridescent purple paper, glue hearts on either side, fill it with a couple of dozen tiny hearts cut from old magazines. When Paul gets home, he opens the box and the hearts tumble out. He kisses me.

I'm proud of my matchbox, proud as I am of our old Chevy held together with welding compound and Bondo. I'm not keeping up with the Joneses who drive the big trucks, but the Joneses who grow organic carrots and drive old bangers like ours. In our little subculture, not consuming gives Paul and me cachet.

March 7 For vicarious pleasure, or perhaps in anticipation of next year, I clip restaurant reviews and take them out from time to time to reread, returning like a regular to my favourite spots. Not patronising cafes, bars or restaurants has made social life, and especially business life, awkward. In Vermont in winter, with two feet of snow on the ground, you can't exactly hold a meeting on a park bench. I realise I'm forfeiting more than convenience. I'm losing conviviality and communion, which is a lubricant for deal-making both professional and personal.

March 26 Out for my daily walk, I stroll to Fulton Street, the down-market shoppers' mall in downtown Brooklyn, and find myself inside one of the two dozen shoe shops on the strip. The colours draw me in: Bazooka Pink, Creamsicle orange, sour-lime-candy green. The shoes are cartoon-like, toe boxes balloon-fat or turned up like elfin slippers; cloven like the hooves of mythical creatures. The companies have animal names suggesting bounce and bite: KangaRoo, Puma. One brand called Irregular Choice offers pairs in which the two shoes are different.

"Can I help you?" asks the salesman.

"No, thank you," I say. "Just looking."

I could eat those lime-green shoes. Not for nothing do the French call window-shopping la lêche-vitrine - licking shop windows.

April 4 Travel is out this year, but we have a months-old obligation (and desire) to fly to Montana in June to celebrate the graduation of my niece, Sarah. We're getting our tickets with frequent-flier miles, so we're not spending money on that (although if we were really serious about our ecological footprint, we'd keep our feet on the ground).

April 21 No matter how careful I am, I am spending. A week ago, I withdrew $150 from the ATM, expecting it to last two weeks. Twenty bucks went on an 11-ride subway card, $42.40 on groceries, $11.95 on drugstore items (toothpaste, floss, shampoo), and $55 for a haircut (necessary?). That's $129.35. What about the remaining $20.65? I plumb my memory. Aha! A week of newspapers, $9.50. Two quarters here, another quarter there from pocket to crushed paper cup: beggars. That still leaves $10 and change.

My friend Ann calls it "leakage", this unaccounted-for trickling of bills from wallet to limbo, not unlike the migration of socks between clothes dryer and dresser drawer. It's also a fact of life in New York, where a friend once estimated it costs five bucks an hour just to be - and that was in the 70s.

May 1 What should I do? I don't have a date and Paul is in Vermont. I could take a bike ride, I could read, I could learn to knit or start on ancient Greek. None of it appeals. Shopping defeats, or at least circumvents, boredom, but not only because it fills idle time. Consumption is an exercise in hope - hope for more happiness, more beauty, more status, more fun.

June 6 I meet Debbie, an editor friend, for a picnic in Hudson River Park. I've made a lentil salad and crudités, and have brought some baba ghanoush that Paul made from scratch. Debbie carries a Zabar's bag of fancy cheeses and crackers, gourmet cookies and chocolate. I suspect she is overdoing it with the delicacies since, poor me, I don't get out much.

We stroll away from the river and into the streets of the Village. Soon, we find ourselves on Thirteenth Street approaching the Quad movie theatre.

"Hey, let's go to a movie," says Debbie. "I'll pay."

"No, no. You don't have to do that." It's hard to know which is more wearisome, saying yes or saying no.

"I know I don't have to. I want to," she responds.

I give her an apologetic look.

"I wanted to go to a movie with you," she says with mocking niceness, and a laugh. "But since you're not allowed to, according to your rules, I figured I'd just pay." Ugh, my rules. I am inconvenient, a costly inconvenience. "My rules" require that if they want to spend time with me doing anything fun, my friends have to buy me. Debbie and I compromise on a coffee, for which I "let" her pay. By not buying, Paul and I have mobilised a small army of surrogate consumers.

June 7 We run out of Q-tips. I try to wash my ears with a washcloth but can't reach the sweet spot. Is impeccable ear hygiene a necessity?

June 10 We've been agonising over a gift for Sarah. Now we're getting down to the wire. As I put two bowls of soup on the table, Paul strides into the kitchen, excited. "Hey, I have an idea. Why don't you give Sarah something you own, that you love?"

"That's it!" I shout.

I mentally review my possessions. From body to body: jewellery. I open my Mexican jewellery box and pull out a silver and turquoise Navaho necklace that my mother bought just after the war. In my 20s, I noticed Mom never wore the necklace, and asked for it. She gave it to me. Now I rarely wear it. It is tarnished, its clasp broken. It needs a new life.

I call my mother to ask if it's OK to give the necklace to Sarah. She doesn't quite remember it (so much for "lovingly handed down for generations"). Still, the piece is meaningful to me: it feels like an heirloom. Plus the blue will bring out the colour of Sarah's eyes.

A friend of Paul's fixes the catch and polishes the silver...

June 26 When we get to Sarah's, I take her aside and give her the gift. It's as if the necklace is resurrected. The silver casts light on Sarah's face. She smiles, her eyes wide. She reads the card, which tells her it was my mother's and mine and now hers, and maybe (I've written) someday will be her daughter's. "Oh, Judy, that's soooo sweet," she coos. I close the clasp at the back of her neck and she goes into the bathroom to admire herself in the mirror. She comes out beaming, clearly moved. "Now I can have a little of Judy and Grandma with me wherever I go!" Sarah knows how to give back.

August 1 Not Buying is becoming a habit. When I'm picking up groceries at the co-op I don't even think about grabbing an egg roll from the cooler; when I'm driving, I have no impulse to stop for coffee. I don't read magazine ads, and I peruse the mail-order catalogues casually, like a woman declining the advances of a lover who no longer thrills her.

October 4 I stop to chat with Karen, a South African émigrée, at Mai-Mai, her shop on Smith Street. Mai-Mai traffics in elegant serving plates woven from reused telephone wire, pull toys made of recycled tin cans, hand-painted hair-parlour placards and other crafts bought directly from native South African artisans and their co-ops. I adore almost everything Karen sells.

Karen knows about my project and, far from disappointed, she is enthusiastically supportive. If she didn't own a boutique, she says, laughing at the contradiction, she'd stop buying, too. "Sometimes I can't believe I am in retail," Karen tells me today. "I feel so guilty."

No, no, no, I reassure her. Your store does good. You're supporting the livelihoods of black South Africans, helping the struggling post-apartheid economy. Plus you introduce Americans to South African culture - you're an ambassador! I blather on like this, sounding like a World Banker.

"No, there's no excuse for it," she says firmly. "I'm in retail." It's as if she has said, "There's no excuse for it. I killed him." We laugh.

October 7 Intoxicants, including vodka, Oreos and OxyContin, are off-limits. I wanna be sedated! For minor intoxication, I ride my bike to Fulton Street to the shoe store whose pink and green Popsicle toes had me salivating last spring. Needless to say, the neon-coloured cuties are now shopworn, marked down, and available only in sizes two and 14.

Fashion depends as much on repulsion as attraction. At the turn of the 20th century, Veblen described the way in which "the best of our fashions strike us as grotesque" a few months past their prime. He called the phenomenon "aesthetic nausea". So, as surely as autumn follows summer, the lusciousness of last spring's shoes has turned to a dusty aftertaste and a gummy feel in my mouth. After five months of fasting, though, something else has happened: I have lost my appetite for fresh new offerings.

November 4 "Let me put it to you this way," an ebullient president-elect tells the press this morning. "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it."

George Bush has won 51% of electoral market share and now, he says, he's got "the will of the people at my back". And what is he going to do with our windy will?

Transform America into the Ownership Society: make tax cuts to the rich permanent, starve just about all government functions to the skeleton, and hand what's left of the meat to a snarling pack of private corporations. The Ownership Society will mean that everything Americans own collectively will be poorer: public schools, housing, transportation, hospitals... Homeland Security will scrimp on guarding the nuclear power plants; the Pentagon will forgo bulletproof vests for the troops in Iraq. Private contractors will serve the meals on the military bases and, for wages many times larger than enlisted soldiers' combat pay, even fight the war itself.

November 9 "I Shop, Therefore I Am," a 1983 serigraph on vinyl by the feminist artist Barbara Kruger, sells at the Chelsea auctioneer Phillips, de Pury & Company for $601,600. When the gavel falls, the packed salesroom erupts in applause.

November 16 Paul and I are sitting on the stoop in the sun, assessing our collective net worth. He's got his Vermont acres, I've got my ever-more-valuable fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. "If we cash it all in 10 years from now," Paul says, "we'll have nearly a million dollars."

"But we'd be living in the cars," I say.

"If we sell those, we'll be worth about a million two thousand," he adds. "We'll be millionaires, but we'll be homeless. Homeless millionaires."

December 25 Christmas Day dawns mild and cloudy. Waking, I feel a pang. Usually Paul and I make coffee, then unwrap the few presents we've bought for each other. We settle in to do the difficult Saturday crossword puzzle and by the time we've given up it is afternoon. We put on our sneakers and head out for a walk in the neighbourhood.

Within a few blocks, we run into some friends, Ron and Jill. They are having a "traditional Jewish Christmas", they tell us, dim sum in Chinatown and a movie. What are we doing, they ask. Paul and I exchange glances and amiable shrugs. We're having a traditional atheist Jewish/lapsed Catholic/nonconsumer's Christmas. "Nothing special," I answer.

Paul explains to them about the project that is just coming to an end.

"You must have saved a lot of money," comments Ron. It's what most people say first when we tell them about Not Buying It. I respond that saving money wasn't the goal, but in the end, we couldn't help it. In fact, I've been going through my accounts and comparing 2004's expenditures with those in 2003. My basic nut, including mortgage, utilities, health insurance and the like, consumes about three-quarters of my gross income, which usually comes in between $40,000 and $45,000. But the remaining quarter, discretionary expenditures, have seen a noticeable drop.

On my 2003 tax return, I claimed $2,701 for "professional books"; this year, thanks to increased library use, borrowing from friends and secondhand purchases, that item will be $610. Last year, $719 went to "professional viewing tickets" and $1,494 to "meals and entertainment"; this year, I will enter a zero on both lines. Among other expenses, last year I dispensed $1,664 on clothing. This year, the total dispensed during my two lapses, one at a thrift shop, came to $105. "Walking-around money" - the cash I withdraw from the ATM for groceries, gas, subway fare and sundries - totalled $5,500 in 2003. In 2004, the little door has so far dispensed $3,180, and I've got all the cash I need until New Year's Day. Plus, I paid off a credit card balance of $7,956.21 in the first half of the year and did not run it up again. In all, I have spent about $8,000 less in 2004 than I did in 2003.

December 31 Our year is over. Are we excited, relieved? That's not how either of us feels. Today, I am calm. Paul is wistful. For him, it's been one of the best of our 13 years together. We have had a joint project. As Paul and I withdrew from private consumptions this year, we found ourselves more than ever out "in public". But we also became more intimate with the back roads of the places we live and with each other, doing what Paul calls "embracing the ordinary".

· This is an edited extract from Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, by Judith Levine, published by Free Press on July 1 at £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99, including UK p&p, call 0870 836 0875 (theguardian.com/bookshop).