The wealthy are robbing our tomorrow to protect their bubbles. The Credit Karma survey from last fall called it doomspending: thirty-seven percent of Gen Z and thirty-nine percent of millennials spending frivolously to cope with economic anxiety. Pew has been measuring this sense of financial insecurity since before some of these kids could vote, and the line keeps going the same direction. The editorial pages called it a moral failure. We are not failing to save. We are recognizing that the rules have been rewritten while we were busy trying to keep our kids fed and our mortgages current. The angry response to youth spending still runs on the old assumption that financial habits are moral habits. The older generation believes the economy is a meritocracy where playing by the rules guarantees a fulfilling life. We learned, slowly and against our training, that the economy is a casino, and the house always stacks the deck.
The math shows a different story. BLS Consumer Expenditure data for 2024 puts average annual household costs at $78,535, while median income stays flat. Housing spend jumped 3.3 percent last year alone, after a 4.7 percent surge in 2023. The Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that half of all U.S. renters are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than half their income on a roof. Childcare for a two-child household runs $2,400 a month on average. The CPI tells us inflation is manageable, but the rent bill and the daycare invoice demand that the math bend. We make a rational choice. We spend today because the alternative is carrying an impossible debt for a lifestyle that doesn’t exist anymore. The CPI says the dollar is stable. The Aldi receipt says it is not.
This isn’t about buying expensive coffee or financing vacations with buy-now-pay-later apps. This is about how positional goods—housing, healthcare, education—have detached from wage growth entirely. Consumer goods got cheaper, which hid the collapse of the dollar’s purchasing power, but the big-ticket items have become locked out for the working family. Since the pandemic, the dollar has lost roughly 30 percent of its purchasing power, according to the Truflation index, eroding any sense that tomorrow will be easier than today. We are watching the rollout of an economy where white-collar employment is eroded by AI and the foundational goods of a standard life have been drained of their status as public priorities.
Our grandmothers’ generation learned frugality from Depression-era rationing. They bought a house on one salary. We bought our rowhouse with the help of a retirement estate and a 7-percent mortgage that refuses to refinance down. Their community held each other up through the parish sodality and the Knights of Columbus pancake breakfasts—the infrastructure of mutual aid that did what the government would not. We don’t have that anymore. We have a Credit Karma app and a credit card. The gap between our parents’ household economics and our own is structural, not generational. The recognition arrived at the kitchen table, late at night, when the spreadsheet refused to balance.
Taylor Swift named it in “You’re On Your Own, Kid.” The title line is the American care infrastructure’s mission statement: you wait for permission, you wait for help, and you learn slowly that it isn’t coming. We metabolized this into self-blame, thinking if we just optimized our grocery lists, cut the subscriptions, and stopped ordering takeout, we could trick the system into rewarding us. Anne Helen Petersen describes this as burnout designed into the labor market, not a personal failing. We are not doomspending to spite our elders. We are doomspending because the only treats left are the ones we can consume before the monthly payment hits, while the asset class plays musical chairs through Dubai, Miami, and London, dodging the wealth taxes it refuses to pay at home. The future, as it was promised to us, has been cancelled.
If the system’s architects want us to save for tomorrow, they have to first demonstrate that tomorrow is a bridge worth building. That means a floor beneath our families’ survival: universal childcare capped at six percent of income, aggressive price-gouging measures on healthcare and rentals, and a living wage indexed to regional costs rather than a decade-old federal minimum. Without a restored social contract that treats the family as an economic foundation rather than an optimized line item, the so-called doomspending will just accelerate.
We close the spreadsheet at eleven at night. We pay the bills. We take out the trash. We put the kids to bed. The math does not change. It never really did. The rules were written for a household that operated on their incomes, not ours, and no amount of self-denial will bring that household back. So we spend today. Not because we are wasteful. Because we are finally awake.