Doom Spending
Shopping through the apocalypse
There is something darkly comic about the fact that 96% of Americans are concerned about the current state of the economy, yet more than a quarter are responding by spending more money they do not have. It is the sort of collective behaviour that would be dismissed as implausible if you encountered it in fiction. Jumping into a lake because you are worried about rain getting your clothes wet.
Except it is not implausible at all. It is happening.
Most of the research on this comes from the United States, which is where the term “doom spending” seems to have gained traction. But I would be surprised if the pattern were uniquely American. The structural conditions certainly are not. Britain has its own version of stagnant wages, inflated housing costs, precarious employment, and a generation of young people looking at futures that appear materially bleaker than their parents’. The mechanisms might differ slightly. The underlying anxiety is likely identical.
At least calling it “doom spending” has the virtue of honesty. This practice of compulsive purchasing as emotional anaesthetic for economic anxiety. No one is pretending this is about investment or value. It is shopping as coping mechanism, consumption as self-soothing. Which is hardly new, obviously. What makes this moment different is the scale of it, the specific demographics involved, and the technological infrastructure that has made the whole process as frictionless as scrolling.
The Ones who will not Inherit
Here is where the data becomes difficult to ignore. Generation Z leads at 41%, followed by millennials at 43%. These are not random cohorts. These are the people who have watched the social contract their parents received get systematically revised, then shredded, then set alight.
The first generations that will be poorer than their parents for a very long time. And they know it, which is important. This is not happening in ignorance. They entered the workforce mid-pandemic with student debt, inflation at levels not seen in decades, and housing prices that have become a sick joke.
The milestones that once structured middle-class life have not disappeared exactly. Degree, job, house, family, retirement. They have just moved behind glass. Visible, theoretically attainable, but requiring resources most people simply do not have.
So when a 25-year-old in Silicon Valley learns that saving for a house will take far longer than it took their parents, they decide to buy a brand-new car instead. Well. Is that irrational? Or is it a perfectly rational response to a situation that has been rendered fundamentally irrational by forces entirely outside their control?
If the finish line keeps moving further away, at some point you stop running towards it.
You do not necessarily stop moving. You just redirect the energy elsewhere. Smaller victories. Achievable pleasures. Things you can actually have.
How it Works
The psychology here is straightforward enough, even if the implications are not. People buy things to feel a sense of control during periods of high uncertainty. Shopping becomes one way to feel autonomous. And before we dismiss this as self-delusion, which would be easy and satisfying, it is worth considering what “control” means in an economy built on precarity.
Gig work. Zero-hours contracts. At-will employment. The ever-present possibility that your income could simply evaporate because an algorithm changed or a billionaire had a mood.
In that context, buying something produces a guaranteed result. You click, you pay, the thing arrives. Cause and effect. Simple. Contained. Unlike literally everything else about contemporary economic life.
The official line is that doom spending is rooted in procrastination. Specifically, putting off thinking and planning long-term about finances. Which is true as far as it goes, but frames the whole thing as a personal failing. As though the problem is that people lack discipline rather than that long-term planning requires projecting yourself into a future that appears, let us be honest, fairly apocalyptic.
When the future itself seems like a bad bet, procrastination might be less a character flaw than an adaptive response.
And in 2025, the spiral has tightened. One in five Americans now admit to doom spending, with 29% citing fear of tariffs as a major factor. Twenty-eight per cent have already made large purchases, whilst 22% have started stockpiling. Non-perishable food, toilet paper. We have imported the logic of pandemic panic buying into the permanent state of things.
This is just how we live now.
The Scroll, the Swipe, the Purchase
But if doom spending were purely psychological, some timeless human weakness for immediate gratification, it would not have achieved this kind of cultural saturation. What makes it a defining feature of the current moment is how completely it has been integrated into social media infrastructure.
Fifty-seven per cent of Generation Z are likely to purchase based on an influencer’s review. Thirty-two per cent recently gained trust in a brand because of an influencer. Think about what that means. The parasocial relationships people build with content creators are not separate from consumption. They are consumption. Influencers do not just advertise products. They model entire lifestyles predicated on continuous purchasing.
The line between person and shopfront has dissolved.
Now here is where it gets properly strange. Forty-three per cent of Generation Z say social media content about tariffs has influenced their spending. Political news about economic policy is now mediated through consumer platforms. The distinction between civic information and shopping advice has collapsed. You watch a TikTok about how tariffs will affect prices, and the obvious response is not “I should contact my MP” or “this seems like a systemic problem.” It is “I should buy this now before it gets more expensive.”
Doom spending shares the same root as doomscrolling. People endlessly wallowing in bad news, which reinforces the perception that there is no reason to plan for the future. The same device that delivers anxiety also offers immediate relief through one-click purchasing.
This is not accidental.
It is the obvious endpoint of an attention economy that profits from both producing anxiety and temporarily relieving it.
Every innovation in retail technology over the past decade has been about removing friction. Stored payment details. One-click checkout. Buy now, pay later. Each one eliminates another moment where you might stop and think. The gap between impulse and transaction has been compressed to milliseconds. What once required leaving your house, travelling to a shop, physically selecting items, and handing over cash now requires the smallest possible gesture. An automated thumb movement.
The Structure not the Failure
This is where we need to be clear about what is actually happening here, because the tendency is to frame doom spending as a personal failing that can be solved with better financial literacy or mindfulness apps or whatever the latest self-improvement technology happens to be.
It is not.
Doom spending is the predictable outcome of an economic system that has engineered this precise contradiction. Wages stagnate. Consumption must accelerate to sustain growth. These two things cannot coexist indefinitely without producing exactly the kind of behaviour we are seeing.
Doom spending creates the illusion of control in an out-of-control world, but what it actually does is give you less control in the future. Yes. Obviously. The people doing this are not stupid. They are not under the impression that buying expensive trainers or booking weekend trips will solve their housing crisis or their student debt or their non-existent pension.
That is not the point.
The point is not to solve the problem. The point is to not think about the problem for a few hours.
Businesses will increase prices as long as they are convinced people will keep spending, even as those same people complain about inflation. Here is the loop. Economic anxiety drives spending, which fuels inflation, which generates more anxiety, which produces more spending. Round and round. The system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed.
The doom spender is the ideal late capitalist subject. Anxious, indebted, consuming compulsively whilst fully aware that this behaviour makes everything worse.
But calling it “late capitalism” has its own problems. The term carries these apocalyptic connotations, this suggestion that the system is approaching its end. Which would be comforting, in a way. An ending implies something comes after.
What we are actually witnessing is not death throes. It is adaptation. Capitalism has learnt to profit not just from meeting needs but from generating anxieties and then monetising their temporary relief. This is not a system in crisis. This is a system that has successfully incorporated crisis as a revenue stream.
Where the Responsibility gets Placed
What becomes visible through all of this is how completely economic anxiety has been privatised. Every proposed solution operates at the individual level. Budget better. Save more. Practise mindfulness. Download this app. Read this book. Take this course.
None of which is necessarily bad advice, taken on its own terms. But collectively it performs this extraordinary feat of misdirection, systematically redirecting attention from structural causes to personal responsibility.
The alternative rhetoric suffers from the same problem. “Doom saving” instead of doom spending. Low-buy movements. No-buy challenges. All of it places the burden of response on individual consumers rather than examining the conditions that make such responses necessary.
Telling people to save more when wages have stagnated relative to costs for decades is like recommending swimming lessons to someone being swept out to sea. The advice is not technically wrong. It just fundamentally misdiagnoses what kind of problem this is.
What strikes me about doom spending, though, is how honest it is. Keeping up with the Joneses, conspicuous consumption, positional goods, all of that was at least nominally about social climbing, about taste, about signalling. Doom spending drops the pretence entirely. It is explicitly about emotional regulation in the face of blocked futures.
In that sense it might actually be more truthful than whatever it replaced.
The mask has come off consumer capitalism. What remains is surprisingly frank. Buy things because you feel terrible, and because what else is there to do?
The Part Where I Should Offer Solutions
This is where the essay is supposed to turn. Towards policy. Towards optimism. Towards some vision of how things might be otherwise. But doing that would just participate in the same misdirection that characterises most commentary on this subject.
The material conditions are these, and they are not obscure.
Housing costs have outpaced wage growth for decades. Student debt has ballooned whilst the wage premium for education has shrunk. Retirement security has been privatised through financial vehicles most people do not remotely understand. Healthcare costs (in the US) can bankrupt families who don’t have insurance. The climate crisis promises to make all of this considerably worse.
Against that backdrop, the advice to save more and spend less is not just inadequate. It is insulting.
Doom spending is not individual weakness. It is collective entrapment made visible. We have built an economic system that requires ever-increasing consumption whilst systematically undermining the conditions that would make such consumption sustainable.
The anxiety is not irrational. It is the only rational response to the actual circumstances.
The question is not why people doom spend.
The question, the only question that actually matters, is why we have built an economy that requires them to.