Doom is the prefix of the moment. Doomscrolling, doomposting, doomsplaining, doomspreading. It joins other recent suffixes like -maxxing, -pilled, and -slop, giving discussions about contemporary life an overtly negative cast. Doomspending, in particular, is a new term for spending frivolously with no concern for future financial consequences. It has become synonymous with the declining fortunes of young westerners.
The Rise of Doomspending
A survey by Credit Karma, a consumer fintech company, published in fall 2024, introduced the concept and its general parameters. Chronically online youth had begun coping with anxiety about the economy and world events through retail therapy. The survey found that 27% of Americans doomspend to deal with stress, with numbers rising to 37% of Gen Z and 39% of millennials.
While the term doomspending is relatively new, the discourse around it echoes commentary from the aftermath of the Great Recession. When Canadian businessman and television personality Kevin O'Leary went viral recently after criticizing Gen Z for their "$28 lunches," it immediately brought to mind the heated blame game around millennials' supposed love for "avocado toast" a decade ago. That treat was often cited as the real cause of declining home ownership among millennials.
Economic Context
Doomspending is a more recent phenomenon tied to changes in western economies since the financial crisis cratered the traditional life script almost 20 years ago. The old adage "save when you're young and spend when you're old" no longer makes sense in an inflationary economy.
Elderly North Americans and western Europeans have difficulty understanding this. In the United States, the dollar has lost 30% of its value since Covid, according to the Truflation index. More importantly, when considering the perspective of boomers, it lost 60% of its value since the 1990s, when many in that age cohort were in their earning prime, and 88% of its value since the 1970s, when boomers were teenagers.
Consumer goods have become cheaper, obscuring the dollar's decline. But big-ticket items, known as positional goods due to their relative non-fungibility, have become increasingly expensive. Housing, healthcare, and education are at all-time highs relative to wages. As the author quips, "Prada is cheap. Rent is expensive."
Cultural Narrative
This is not a data journalism piece, so specific metrics are not the focus. What matters is the narrative of our moment. The term "generation gap" was coined to describe the mindset disparity between baby boomers and their parents, the silent generation, who were scarred by Depression-era poverty and wartime rationing and exemplified frugality. Their children, however, were born into unprecedented postwar prosperity.
Today, the term describes the frustration between boomers and their children and grandchildren, millennials and Gen Z, who have watched the price of clothing, electronics, and homewares decline while housing costs exploded. They have made the rational decision to spend today rather than save for tomorrow.
Gen Z, in particular, lived through proto-UBI (universal basic income) during Covid, and now, as they watch AI decimate white-collar employment, they patiently wait for the rollout of the real thing. Whether the current system will "collapse" is a matter of semantics. Something new is coming, that much is certain.
It may be right-coded populism or left-coded socialism. It may be something else entirely. But redistribution is coming, one way or another.
The Morality of Spending
The angry response to doomspending reveals that we still believe financial habits are moral habits—that being spendthrift and wasteful are symptoms of poor character. But this belief, more common among older generations, relies on the presumption that the economy is moral in general, that those with wealth earned it through playing by the rules in fair competition.
Young people no longer believe that. At best, they see the economy as a casino where some get lucky but most lose. At worst, they think large, quasi-monopolistic tech firms that mediate economic activity are self-dealing parasites.
In the United States and United Kingdom, the asset class is playing musical chairs, moving between localities—London financiers to Dubai, Silicon Valley venture capitalists to Miami—so that when the music stops, they won't be domiciled in a state or country that institutes a wealth tax.
Meanwhile, among wage-earners, there is an increasing sense that while the money and economy are fake, the treats are real.
Conclusion
"Spend today because there won't be a tomorrow" is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The only way to stop it is to make people believe that an average person of average abilities can wake up every day, play by the rules, and expect to lead a fulfilling, if uneventful, life. If the general public doesn't believe that, let them eat Deliveroo.
