The financial press is abandoning young workers to a rigged economy and propping up the meritocracy myth. A Credit Karma survey making the rounds on the shop bench this morning reports that thirty-nine percent of millennials doomspend because saving feels pointless. A Guardian trend forecaster named Sean Monahan wrote this week that the economy has become a casino for the young, who spend frivolously while the boomers’ asset classes play musical chairs to tax-friendly jurisdictions. The commentary treats that spending as a moral failure, which is the meritocracy myth in its late-stage, self-sabotaging form. The same extractive mind Wendell Berry documented in The Unsettling of America—the one that destroys the soil and the communities that grow on it—is now destroying the meritocracy myth itself by telling people the rules are fair while hoarding the positional goods: housing, healthcare, and the local grocery store.
The postwar script—save in your youth to live comfortably in your age—is a relic of a country that no longer exists. By some measures, the dollar has lost thirty percent of its value since the pandemic, sixty percent since the nineties, and eighty-eight percent since the seventies. While consumer electronics and clothing have gotten cheaper, the big-ticket anchors—housing, healthcare, education—have exploded in price at all-time highs relative to wages. Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation showed how corporate consolidation seizes the income of the working class and turns it back to profit, engineering an economy that extracts labor value before the worker can apply it to building equity for his family. That generational frustration is not new, but it is intensifying. The same corporate frustrations that are making consumers in counties like Adams rage against the companies—as Main Street Independent reported last week—are what Monahan’s article calls doomspending. The reason the young spend today is that a Gallup poll last month found their job-market optimism has dropped sharply; the future looks thinner with every quarter.
The vitriol directed at young people for their twenty-eight-dollar lunches is a dated morality play, echoing the “avocado toast” blame game from a decade ago. It relies on the assumption that the economy is a fair, moral competition. In reality, young people increasingly perceive the economy as a casino rigged by quasi-monopolistic tech firms, where wealth remains concentrated and the affluent move assets across a global chessboard to dodge the taxes that might fund the schools their own children attend. The “generation gap,” once a term denoting the transition from the frugality of the silent generation to postwar prosperity, now describes the bitter divide between those who believe the rules still work and those who see the game as a fraud. Deferred gratification is just a way of telling the young to starve themselves for a future that arrives empty. The only way to stop doomspending is not to lecture Gen Z about their lunch tab, but to make people believe that an average person of average abilities can wake up, play by the rules, and expect to lead a fulfilling, if uneventful, life.
The young out West are ordering takeout, financing vacations, and buying digital conveniences. Up here in Adams County, the young buy Stihl and Husqvarna chainsaws on credit because the only work available is running a brush hog or a snowblower, and seasonal work does not come with a 401(k). The big-ticket items have always been the anchors. When the housing market and the equipment market are priced at all-time highs, the old adage is just a cruel joke. Berry warned us about the cost of a system that severs the link between labor and belonging. It has done it. The young are spending like there won’t be a tomorrow because the economy has made it clear its tomorrow does not belong to them. Fixing it doesn’t require a lecture from a Los Angeles trend-forecasting pod, detached from the mud and mechanics of Adams County. It requires building a country where the average person can wake up, run their shop, and expect to stay in the county they work in. Until then, if society won’t provide a tomorrow worth saving for, let them eat Deliveroo.