Economic Crisis: Little Nihilists
How to talk about money at the end of the world
There’s a special measure of the economy called “The Stripper Index”, wherein exotic dancers are able to accurately predict economic downturns due to their cash tips dwindling. As someone who’s been on Twitter since 2007, I’ve used a similar predictor: let’s call it the Date Index.
On Black Twitter, successful dates were measured by how much money one spent on said date. (The man always paid back then, there was no discourse about splitting or going Dutch.) Between 2007 and 2016, the expectation was that one would spend $200 on a date. In 2018, this dropped to $100: I raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
COVID changed everything. Suddenly, the discourse shifted to: Is walking considered a date? Is getting a smoothie together considered a date? What about nap dates— why don’t people just invite each other over and sleep next to one another? Why go out at all? Netflix and Chill loomed over every relationship, being a guaranteed step on the way to intimacy, but to ask a straight woman to come over to a stranger’s home to stream a movie for their very first encounter? Inconceivable.
And yet.
I am (famously) not an economist. But I do spend a lot of time on the internet and I’m here to report that the vibe online is grim.
I posted the Mainstreaming of Loserdom to TikTok, and multiple people rushed to the comments to say how they couldn’t afford to have a single hobby or how they didn’t have gas money to visit friends (an ostensibly free hangout with a hidden cost in the suburbs). We have people Venmo requesting their friends after babysitting their kids, nickel and diming them for toilet flushes and snacks. We have people fantasizing about a Santa-like figure dropping off groceries. In 2022, Amy Schneider won $1.4 million dollars on Jeopardy and revealed her dream was to buy a home. We no longer dream of luxury: we dream of housing.
(Anecdotally, there’s always been a rise of low-cost to free in-person clubs and organizations: run clubs have taken over Austin and New York, and more and more people are crowdsourcing low-cost activities on social media in order to meet friends.)
Even discussions of what count as luxuries and treats were changing: people on Twitter recently argued that for many, getting your hair/nails done has always been a luxury. No one believed me when I discussed Recession Brunettes, and I knew the economy was in the toilet when both Dorit Kemsley and Hailey Baldwin stopped dyeing their hair blonde.
When I discussed polyamory and divorce I mentioned the collapsing social systems that likely lead people to alternative solutions to their problems. Parents in this country are under an unbelievable amount of stress: I’ve spoken with two friends who told me what daycare costs in New York (I screamed), and another friend told me she could only afford to have one child in New York City because of the cost of childcare (childcare costs are now rising more quickly than inflation). Even formerly lucrative industries have been hollowed out: finance, tech, media, and academia have all been gutted in the last ten years, plagued by layoffs, corporate restructuring, and ill advised overspending.
Last year, someone tweeted that the economy wasn’t bad and we were all hallucinating. While I don’t disagree that there is a pervasive nihilism on the internet, I believe that the economic struggles facing basically everyone are seeping beyond the internet. People are truly struggling. The amount it takes to buy a house has skyrocketed, and the average income in the US has decidedly not increased at the same pace. The Indigo Girls said money makes you mean, but lack makes you meaner.
In grad school, I conducted research about cohabitation rates and declining rates of marriage in the US, and the explanation for why many people were delaying their weddings or not getting married at all was always the same: money.
Not to overly speculate on other people’s finances, but I do think the tightening has affected celebrities as well. People joked that Kristen Stewart playing straight was a recession indicator, as was Kylie donning her infamous teal wig. Jennifer Garner is doing Capital One commercials and Scarlett Johansson is going to be the face of the Jurassic Park reboot after a gnarly experience with a different franchise.
The nihilism caused by the current economic climate feels like a miasma: millennials are posting about their lack of long terms goals or planning due to the rising cost of living, the political climate, and the environment. A recent pregnancy announcement was met with “good luck with COVID, the climate collapse, socioeconomic collapse, the rise of fascism…”, an exceedingly cruel thing to say to someone newly expecting.
In Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel wrote about how, for many, the world has always been ending. People of every generation have dealt with wars, plagues, and social and economic collapses of all kinds. I promise I am not an agent sent to placate us as we sleepwalk into devastation: I’m simply pointing out that this air of defeatism feels new. (This would be where I point out that social media enables us to ingest human suffering at previously unimaginable scales. It’s easy to pinpoint how the slide into pessimism can coincide with spending hours reading about every atrocity known to man every single day. They even came up with a term for it.)
I am a Sagittarius: I naturally lean towards optimism. There are so many things I want to do with my life. I write about these trends I see online because ultimately, I’m worried. It’s scary that no one I know can afford to buy a home, or move, or get married, or save for the future. It’s scary that the prevailing emotion spreading across the internet is a sense of devastation and defeatism, especially because so many of us are so young. How can you begin a life already believing that nothing matters? Sociologically, I understand the forces that have brought us here (capitalism), but even the last recession didn’t feel this bleak. I understand that this is where the communists will interject and say we need a whole new system (obviously), but the one thing I know is that everything feels precarious, everything feels unsustainable, and I’m not sure I have a pithy little quip to see my way out of this one.
Neat Little Morality Slogans
Writing this depressed me. I think this was the last of the original “things I noticed on the internet” posts I planned out before I got on Substack. I’m excited to take a step back and write about things going on in overall culture vs. the insular world of internet-borne misanthropy.
Official TtB Book Club dates coming this week! I apologize for dropping the ball on this: I had an unexpectedly busy month and it is truly so hard to find somewhere to host for free.
This Demi Moore interview is so good: her new movie seems like a direct response to her earlier work, where her body took center stage due to her addiction and ED. I’m so excited to see her break free.
Great writing on a fascinating topic. One note — that screen grab you shared of the woman who invoices another mom for a playdate was rage bait from that creator. It was such a bonkers TT that I had to dig deeper on her page and it turns out that she makes her money with various rage bait posts. Which is ALSO bonkers to me. Making people furious for cash — cool cool cool cool cool.
ANYWAY, a thing I find myself saying to my friends any time I see a peer living a life that seems truly economically out of reach for me is, I just want to know HOW. I’m not resentful or jealous (though I am envious), but I am deeply curious and want to know HOW they can afford multiple homes and multiple kids in private school and multiple high-end vehicles. The ability to afford necessities — let alone luxuries — is so inconceivable for so many that I find myself constantly wanting to get to the root of everyone’s personal finances. Which is, of course, none of my business. But I am nosy and social media is performative and I want some facts with those performances!
Whew. This was a tangent. I apologize.
I've been in personal finance since 2012. I've heard a lot of this, but I've also seen a lot of receipts. They tell very different stories.
I think we all know that people routinely lie to others about their finances and spending. What shocked me is how much we lie to OURSELVES.
As a percentage of the hourly wage of blue collar workers cost of food from the grocery store is near its all time low.
I'll repeat that. In the history of the country an hour of work at the blue collar wage has never, ever bought as much food.
Yet, in 2008 food bought away from home passed food bought at the grocery store as a fraction of household budgets. (USDA ERS)
More anecdotally door dash does tens of billions of revenue annually in the US. What do you think the median age of door dash customers is?
Median personal incomes adjusted for inflation (including the cost of housing) excluding covid benefits are at an all time high.
Millennial income is at an all time high.
Homeownership rates are at an all time high.
Homeownership rates amongst millennials are at an all time high.
Net worth amongst millennials adjusted for inflation is higher than boomers and Gen X at the same age.
Housing affordability as measured by the median monthly income divided by the 30 year payment on the median priced house is indeed very low right now! Similar to what it was in the early 1980s.
People forget. People trick themselves.
It's the same stuff. People complain about lack of time and spend an average of 5.5 hours per day on their phone.
When the data says one thing, and social media tells you another my bet is always, "the people on the internet are lying to you".
This is true when it's out-group people claiming the covid shot killed their second cousin and it's true when in-group people claim the economy is the worst it's ever been.