Doom is the prefix du jour. Doomscrolling, doomposting, doomsplaining, doomspreading. Doom joins other recent suffixes -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.

A survey by Credit Karma, a consumer fintech company, published in the fall of 2024, introduced the concept and the general parameters around it. Chronically online youth had begun coping with anxiety about the economy and world events with retail therapy. They claim 27% of Americans doomspend to deal with stress. The numbers rise to 37% of gen Z and 39% of millennials.

But while the term doomspending as a term is relatively new, the discourse around it echoes commentary that traces back to the aftermath of the Great Recession. When Canadian businessman and television personality Kevin O’Leary went viral recently after castigating gen Z about their “$28 lunches”, I immediately thought of the heated blame game around millennials’ supposed love for “avocado toast” a decade ago: that was the treat many insisted was the real cause of declining home ownership among gen Z’s older siblings, the millennials.

But doomspending specifically is a more recent phenomenon, and it’s tied to changes in western economies since the financial crisis cratered the traditional life script almost 20 years ago. Save when you’re young and spend when you’re old doesn’t make sense in an inflationary economy.

Elderly North Americans and western Europeans have difficulty internalizing this. In the United States, the dollar lost 30% of its value since Covid, according to the Truflation index. More importantly, when discussing the perspective of boomers, it lost 60% of its value since the 90s, when many in that age cohort were in their earning prime – and 88% of its value since the 70s, when the boomers themselves were teens.

Consumer goods have gotten cheaper, which has obscured the dollar’s decline. But the big-ticket items, so-called positional goods, due to their relative non-fungibility (we aren’t making any more Harvard’s or Malibu coastline any time soon), have gotten more and more expensive. Housing, healthcare and education are priced at all-time highs relative to wages.

As I like to quip: Prada is cheap. Rent is expensive.

This isn’t a data journalism piece, so I don’t want to get too bogged down in specifics. So often discussions like these get sidetracked by competing definitions of inflation and the difficulty of comparing metrics from a variety of countries that have different data collection techniques and different methodologies.

What’s more important here is the narrative of our moment. Like generations, which are ultimately inexact generalities, cultural narratives are easy to nitpick but hard to disprove. They tell us something about the historical circumstances we are living through.

The term generation gap was coined to describe the mindset disparity between baby boomers and their parents, the so-called silent generation who, scarred by Depression-era poverty and wartime rationing, exemplified frugality. Meanwhile their children were born into unprecedented postwar prosperity.

Today, the term just as well describes the frustration that exists between boomers and their children and grandchildren, the millennials and zoomers, who after watching the price of clothing, electronics and homewares decline while the cost of housing exploded, have made the rational decision to spend today, rather than save for tomorrow.

Gen Z, especially, lived through proto-UBI, the common acronym for 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 or not the current system will “collapse” is an issue of semantics. Something new is coming down the pipeline, that much is certain.

It may be right-coded populism or left-coded socialism. It may be something else entirely. But redistribution cometh, one way or another.

That belief is really what doomspending comes down to. Maybe the boomers are right. Maybe wasteful spending on digital conveniences – shopping online, ordering takeout, using rideshare apps, financing vacations with buy now, pay later services – is the cause of, rather than a self-soothing response to the declining financial fortunes of young westerners. But, it wouldn’t really matter in the end.

If everyone is spending like there won’t be a tomorrow, there probably won’t be a tomorrow.

The angry response doomspending elicits reveals that we still believe financial habits are moral habits, that being spendthrift and wasteful are symptoms of someone with poor character. But this belief, much 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 with other economic actors.

Young people just don’t believe that’s true any more. At best, they see the economy as a casino, where some get lucky, but most lose. At worst, they think the large, quasi-monopolistic tech firms that increasingly mediate all economic activity are self-dealing parasites.

In the United States and United Kingdom, the asset class is playing a game of musical chairs, moving between various localities – London financiers in Dubai, Silicon Valley venture capitalists in Miami – that when the music stops, they won’t be domiciled in a state or country that institutes a wealth tax.

Meanwhile, among the wage-earners, there’s an increasing sense that while the money and economy are fake, the treats are real.

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 lead a fulfilling, if uneventful, life. If the general public doesn’t believe that to be true, let them eat Deliveroo.

• Sean Monahan is a writer and trend forecaster based in Los Angeles. He co-founded K-Hole, the trend forecasting group and currently publishes the newsletter, 8Ball