What do I want to say about doom-spending? Firstly, that I love it.
Getting emotional about money. I’m going to reference Fight Club again (I’m sorry).
As a 25-year-old who wasn’t an engineering major and didn’t know that “summering” was a verb until very recently, it is safe to assume that my financial health is somewhere between just okay and on life support.
My back-up retirement plan is to just rack up debt and then die. What are they going to do about it? I’m going to die eventually, and dead people can’t pay bills or be chased down by collectors. Technically, since I haven’t actually started saving for retirement, this is “plan A” for now (but I will start soon, I promise! Please do not lecture me about how important it is! I know!).
I love my job, honestly speaking. It is in my field, it feels like important work, and I do not dread the tasks that make up my day-to-day. That’s awesome, and I am grateful to have found it. However, I don’t get paid a lot. I get paid a “livable” wage, whatever that actually means, and I am far from destitute. My rent is also relatively cheap for where I live, another blessing that makes me want to start believing in God again just so I can thank Him.
However, I don’t make “buy a house”, “go on vacation twice a year and still have money leftover for savings”, “start a family”, or “have a large savings account” money. I don’t make “fuck you” money. I make enough that I don’t have to be living more-or-less paycheck to paycheck, but little enough that not doing so would take a considerable effort of budgeting and impulse control.
My relationship with money is thoroughly clouded with emotion. Most money podcasts will at some point acknowledge the outsized role of emotions in money decisions, and they are probably right. My emotions guide my wallet like a sheep to slaughter.
A recent trend that I unknowingly participated in long before knowing the name for it was “doom spending.” Doom spending is spending excessively as a way to cope with financial anxieties, treading the warm waters of credit card debt without a passing thought of sharks.
Ask not if you can afford this. Ask instead “Do you take Apple Pay?”
Forget about emergency funds, Roth IRAs, 401ks, coupons, savings accounts, the concept of interest. Forgot about the distant and seemingly far-fetched dream of owning a home or retiring someday. Think about what outfit you are going to wear on your next vacation. Think about what brand of smoothie maker will change your life. Think about what to buy next.
When financial security feels far away out somewhere in the ether, buying things with reckless abandon brings a twisted sense of comfort. The gap between where I am financially and where I would like to be feels almost impassable. There are a lot of uncomfortable realities: my income to spending ratio (bad), my lack of emergency fund (bad), my lack of retirement savings (bad, I know!), the marathon distance between me and the financial place I would need to be in to buy a house or support a family (long-term scary), the looming possibility of having to budget in a higher monthly rent (short-term scary!).
Seriously confronting my financial future involves dealing with all of these uncomfortable realities. It can feel hopeless. Realizing how much time it would take to first, fully pay off all of my credit cards, then establish an emergency savings account with more money in it then I have ever successfully saved in my life, then save even more money in some other type of bank account, all the while maintaining a credit score high enough for a bank to look at me and say “Yeah, she deserves a mortgage.”
This will require years of dedicated planning, careful budgeting, and strategic self-deprivation. None of these are things I am good at, which is largely how I ended up where I am in the first place. It is easier to keep digging the hole: keep buying jeans from Depop in the hopes that someday one pair will fit, keep saying yes to dinners out and vacations that a financial planner would probably scream that you can’t afford, keep buying drinks for your friends and not worrying if they ever pay you back. Just keep spending, and don’t think about the future. Keep having fun.
Forget the hope of retirement or owning a home or even just having significantly more money than debt. Give up on all the wealth building podcasts and financial literacy influencers. Find freedom in the loss of hope. Feel the freedom in just buying whatever you want to fill the void. Maybe true freedom is being able to not only choose between, but buy all of the 100 different types of toothpaste.
And shopping feels good. It’s not just the dopamine hit. Shopping, especially buying clothes which are a common doom spending purchase, is part of identity construction. Buying things is a way many people have been taught (by our media environment) to express themselves. In The World is On Fire but We’re Still Buying Shoes, Alec Leah wrote:
“Optimism is at the heart of our experience of fashion. When we get dressed, we’re building an idealized self, and when we step out of the door, we present that fantasy self to our peers. We’re telling the world This is who I am. Or at least This is who I want to be. In this sense, fashion is all about transformation. Maybe that’s why we give ourselves makeovers when we go through breakups, start new jobs and move to new cities. Because a new look gives us the feeling that life is moving forward, away from the bad and towards the good.”
The World is On Fire but We’re Still Buying Shoes focuses on the complex relationships among fashion, capitalism, and sustainability, but I think this applies to more than just clothes. It doesn’t need to be a new look for us—it could be a new design for our home, some new decorations for our car, a new wellness routine, or a new highly romanticized experience. Ironically, doom spending can represent a twisted optimism. Constantly having new stuff and new experiences allows us to feel constantly new, constantly reinvented, fresh, one step closer to a completeness that doesn’t exist. The false optimism of perceived progress is an escape from the hopelessness of stalled progress.
Sinking into doom spending provides both the dopamine release of clicking “Purchase” over and over again and the freedom of admitting that my financial goals are futile and it isn’t worth it to try. It brings me out of the cold world of numbers and account balances and paychecks and necessary expenses, into the fun sexy world of online shopping and booking vacations (that I can’t afford) and going out for drinks and appetizers just because it’s a Tuesday. I loved doom spending, the way people love cigarettes and booze and other toxic security blankets.
I am not alone here.
When I first read about the “doom spending” trend, I felt relieved in a way that I wasn’t the only person who had at times succumbed to the void of spending as a coping mechanism for financial anxiety. In a 2023 Credit Karma survey, 96% of the Gen-Z respondents were anxious about the economy, 27% copped to doom spending, and 32% reported taking on more debt in the last 6 months. I am not alone here.
Doom spending as a coping mechanism makes a lot of sense in our increasingly online world filled with both near-constant stressors and opportunities to shop. Research has identified various drivers of compulsive spending, a the academic term for what doom spending is at its core. Materialism and anhedonia (especially when paired with substance use as a coping mechanism) lead to more compulsive spending, as does reduced social support from family. The “pain of paying”, or the negative emotions we feel when spending money, is a major driver as well: we buy more when it is easier (emotionally) to do so. Buying something with cash, for example, has a much higher pain of paying than tapping our phone or clicking “Place Order.”
Materialism is also pretty strongly linked with heavy social media use, which is another popular maladaptive coping strategy. Online shopping, especially with my credit card info stored by Apple pay and accessible with a tap on a fingerprint reader or just by showing my face to my phone, all but eliminates the pain of paying.
It is very easy to doom spend these days, and it is very hard to confront the feelings behind the bad habits. It is very hard to figure out a way to live that includes the perfect balance of pleasure and restraint. You also can’t budget your way out of low pay and high rents.
Harm reduction is very demure.
I know there is a middle ground between an ascetic life pining after financial security and a hedonistic life of doom spending. Little steps do matter, and my current approach to budgeting is a form of financial harm reduction.
During my most recent Dave Ramsey-inspired shame-fueled aggressive debt payoff mission, I tracked every single thing I bought in a spreadsheet. I had a set goal to keep my monthly spending under some number, and the spreadsheet really kept me accountable. Every time I bought something I did mental math to see how much it would impact the total at the bottom of the spreadsheet and where that would leave me in relation to the goals written at the top.
The spreadsheet worked very well, for about a month. Then, I wanted a break. I needed a break. I wanted to be able to go shopping without the voice in my head reminding me about the spreadsheet and my goals. I wanted to be able to go out for drinks with my friends and have more than one of not the absolute cheapest beer, without guilt. I wanted to be able to buy little treats for myself and for my friends without the pang of spreadsheet-induced guilt. The spreadsheet had grown to haunt me as I walked the aisles at the grocery store or contemplated a trip to the laundromat. I had gone from spending with reckless abandon to agonizing over how to spend as little as possible on actual essentials. Eventually, I was in a constant rotation of praising myself for spending so little and flagellating myself for wanting to spend more.
While on vacation, I finally broke. Since I didn’t have my laptop, I was planning to keep a Notes app list of every purchase. It started with small excuses: Does a $5 coffee really matter in the grand scheme of things? Do I really need to pull out my phone and make a note right now? I couldn’t hear the price of that drink before I tapped my card, do I really need to bust out the app to figure it out right now? I was busy living in the moment, and polluting that with all those numbers felt sad. Once I fell off of the obsessive budget tracking wagon, I soon rebounded to my old, more carefree ways.
Part of me wants to return to the spreadsheet life. In some ways, it was nice to be so aware of my spending. I learned what my minimum budget for essentials actually is and got a better feel for what living within my means actually looks like. On some level, knowing that, if I stuck to it for at least 5 months, I would both be able to pay off everything and establish some savings was comforting—there was a light at the end of the tunnel. My goals are lofty but possible.
But I failed. I couldn’t stick to it for at least 5 months. I barely lasted more than 1. 5 months of strict budgeting felt like 5 years, even though 5 years of continuing to doom spend can go by in 5 minutes. I failed to stick to the spreadsheet, and the shame spiral kicked off by that failure fueled enough doom spending to basically undo my month’s effort. I ended up almost exactly where I was.
But not exactly where I was—I had learned from the spreadsheet, and I had learned from my efforts. Being forced to say no to myself as often as I did during the spreadsheet month was a good exercise. There were some things I really missed during spreadsheet month, but there were other things that I realized I was genuinely better off without. That is useful information.
Part of me wishes to return to the spreadsheet, and many people would probably tell me I absolutely should. But I fear repeating the cycle of being vaguely miserable for a month but making a lot of progress and then undoing all of that progress in an epic shame-fueled spending bender. My current goal is to continue to reduce my spending, but to avoid getting too neurotic about it.
A big component of doom spending for me is not keeping track of it: spending as if money is fake (well, it kind of is) and credit card companies are benevolent figures who understand I just really needed that new shirt. So, a big component of my financial harm reduction is staring my spending straight in the eyes. No spreadsheet, but very frequent checking of account balances.
No penny pinching at the grocery store, but before I click “Purchase” or accidentally spend $200 at Target, I try to check in with myself to see if it is something I genuinely need or strongly desire, or if the toddler in my brain is just screaming “More!”
I cancelled Amazon prime and deleted the app from my phone. I set a limit for myself on Depop purchases and try to sell more than I buy as much as possible (though this one is admittedly a work in progress). I still go out, but I limit it to once or twice a month and I still make some effort to go with the cheapest (or at least cheaper) option. I’ll still buy drinks and little treats for my friends, on actually special occasions. I am learning to prioritize my spending.
I am learning to approach tracking my spending with neutral curiosity instead of panic and shame. I am learning to spend with hope instead of spending with doom.