doomspending and europoor summer
no one believes in the future, but they do believe in the present
the new meme prefix
Doom is the prefix du jour. Doomscrolling, doomposting, doomsplaining, doomspreading, doomgooing, and doomliving dominate discourse. (Ok, I made the last two up.) Doom joins other recent meme morphemes—the suffixes -maxxing, -pilled, and -slop—in giving our discussions about a contemporary life an overtly negative cast. Doomspending, in particular, has become synonymous with the declining fortunes of young Americans.
The posting spat that accompanied a viral interview clip of Canadian businessman and television personality, Kevin O'Leary, commenting on young people regularly buying "$28 dollar lunch" resurfaced the term.
Some of this has to do with the difficulty elderly North Americans have internalizing inflation. The dollar lost 30% of its value since COVID. More importantly when discussing the perspective of Boomers, 60% of its value since the nineties, when many of that age cohort were in their earning prime, and 88% of its value since the seventies, when the Boomers 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 are making any more Harvards or Malibu coastline any time soon), have gotten more and more expensive. Housing, healthcare, and education are priced at all time highs. As I like to quip:
Prada is cheap. Rent is expensive.
the only generation gap
The term generation gap was coined to describe the mindset disparity between the Baby Boomers and their parents, the so-called Silent Generation, who scarred by Depression-era poverty and wartime rationing exemplified frugality, from their children, born into 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 doubled, have made the rationale decision to spend today rather than save for tomorrow.
After living through proto-UBI during COVID, and now watching AI decimate white collar employment, they waiting for the current system to collapse. Whether that new system is right-coded populism or left-coded socialism is up for grabs. But redistribution cometh, one way or another.
Even the bogeyman of techno-feudalism implies this. People forget medieval peasants likely worked less than the happily holidaying, Frenchmen of today. Lacking historical knowledge, feudalism oftentimes gets confused with the sub-Roman period, when anarchy and banditry followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire. They’re confusing feudalism for civilizational collapse.
Feudalism was the reimposition of order afterwards. In the event we have an AI-powered repeat of that, it isn't clear our current elites will fare any better than the rest of us.
europoor summer
In the same vein as Kevin O'Leary's comments about Gen Z and their luxurious lunches, the concierge passport bro, Kevin Recouso, made a similar comment about 'Europeans'—another bugbear of the productive classes:
Inevitably, the implication that those who don't support co-working in cafes on Sundays are losers proved unpopular. And it's this general unpopularity—of their values, of their aesthetics, of their lifestyle—that powers the resentment so-common among those who work in tech for, well, everyone.
Silicon Valley feels far away when I’m across the Atlantic. When I open X, one day it’s the papal encyclical against AI; another its reporting that Peter Thiel may have moved to Argentina. The memory of America, or more specifically, California—Silicon Valley dips across the horizon line.
I tell a friend, "Americans bring their neuroses to Europe like conquistadors brought syphilis back from the New World."
I remember some post I read on X, probably when it was still Twitter, probably already deleted, from the infamous Bronze Age Pervert. He argued the two options for the West were a Singapore-style hi-tech surveillance state and some form of managed decline, the end result of which would be Brazil-style favelas—a fusion the tech writer Venkatesh Rao has called the Fourth World.
It's a vision of the post-developed West, replete with shantytowns, ethnic sectarianism, and stark economic inequality, but crucially still free in the ways that matter most to people. What seems to annoy the tech right, the new base that powered Trump's return to the presidency, is that the first option, the Singapore-style hi-tech surveillance state (built off of Silicon Valley’s products, naturally) is broadly unpopular.
The broad public disinterest in what Palantir’s Alex Karp has called, The Technological Republic, seems to be what annoys Silicon Valley most. Farmers refuse to sell their land for exhorbitant prices to data center developers. Despite public disorder and poor governance, New York and London and San Francisco are some of the most sought after cities in the world, offering the most enviable lifestyles.
Miami and Dubai and Austin have achieved enviable growth, but when my friends return from visits they sigh about how ugly and boring they are, how the lifestyle they promise is inanimate, that they feel like dead malls, the Dior and Chanel boutiques notwithstanding.
As I write this, I sit in a London flat, in Islington, DeBeauvoir Town to be exact, which is posh and out of reach for most living on British wages, but all the same, outside my picture window is the new it-pub, Goodbye Horses, an ice-cream-shop-slash-wine-bar. I watch as tourists and locals pedal in on Lime bikes and young familes wheel their prams up to drink a glass of natural wine and a £5 scoop of homemade ice cream, served in dainty silver dishes. They chat with friends in the brisk, but sunny, English spring. They enjoy each others company and indulge in a minor luxury.
At night, it has a twee charm so common to this city, the pink hued ties and mirrored walls lit up by a ceiling of a starry night and flying horses, a slapdash imitation of Chagall. A beautiful boy with blonde curls wiped down the counters after the early clothes, whistling while he works, energy in his step, happy. And there’s just nothing like this in the fluorescent caverns of the new world order, white elephants for a future most don’t want to exist.
I talk on the phone with my mother. She’s in Denver, visiting my little brother, who works for a property developer there. She’s happy for his success. She’s happy he lives in such a nice luxury condo building. During the day while he’s at work, she sits by the pool. In high school and college, she was a competitive swimmer and even though she’s a semi-retired smoker, whenever she has a chance she still likes to break out her butterfly stroke.
But in Denver, she feels uncomfortable. She wonders what the girls by the pool do to afford the rent and why they are so unfriendly. Their blank stares make her feel uncomfortable. And I think back to a week before, visiting a former editor from Dazed who relocated to Liverpool. The city has seen better days, even though between the coal-stained brickwork and the weeds peaking out of the cracks, condo towers loom.
Still, the people—especially in the pubs—are so affable. True even in stuffier, much wealthier London, where pub rules dictate you really can talk to anyone. I tell her she would like it here, that in England people love beer and friendly chats with anyone who might be nearby and glances up with a smile.
She’s not unhappy though. When my brother isn’t working they go into the mountains, up to the hot springs, into nature, which is the real reason my brother lives in Denver anyway. The blank stares and the blank spaces are the factories of our times. An aesthetic blight. They are cleaner than the coal mines and the smoke stacks, but just as hard on the human soul. The Gen Z state is the face of someone who grew up seeing more faces on screens than faces in real life.
It’s post-human, not that the Silicon Valley strivers care, even think that’s a bad thing. That’s their aspiration after all. Which sometimes I think comes more out of resentment than anything else. “If all the rules that you followed brought you here, of what use are the rules?” So much wealth and yet no idea how to live.
They see the happy boy in the window earning a pittance, and his breezy demeanor doesn’t charm them, it pisses them off. Who is this loser to be so happy? They don’t want to confront the question, how is it I have so much, yet am so sad? All the money and goon caves and brain implants in the world can’t save them from themselves. It can only distract them.
The American economy booms with AI growth and we enjoy the highest salaries in the world and President Trump is setting a new course for American power, American empire. But the people are leaving. In dribs and drabs, here and there. For the first time in history, more Americans are moving to Europe than the other way around. It’s the end of the American story, the nation of immigrants.
At a dinner at a billionaires house, I talked about this when he pressed me for ‘new trends.’ When he asked why? I said for the lifestyle, which can sound kind of snotty, like everyone who moves abroad is an influencer cramping the steps of Capri, waiting for their a meme shot. But by lifestyle, I mean, they move abroad to live. Because in America, it has gotten so hard to live.
Consumption isn’t living at the end of the day. Like the goon caves, it’s mostly just a distraction. As the American millennials wake from their Peter Pandemic, they want to live, too. Whether they’re nostalgic for the Obama years or the Clinton years or the Reagan years doesn’t really matter, because they all sense something unfathomable has been lost and something dark might await us in the future.
The teen angst extremism is falling away, because you may sympathize with ICE or you may sympathize with DEI; you might even have some strong evidence that one, either, or both, have destroyed lives and harmed people, but there’s some bigger question coming that we all struggle to articulate. And we know on an instinctual level that AI won’t live for us.
We don’t want to die in the white tombs. To do that, we will have to remember how to live; and we will have to live together, even if we still struggle with figuring out how.
