But lately, even I have been losing the plot.

A few months ago, I paid $35 for tortellini at a restaurant and received four pieces of tortellini. I recently saw supermarket strawberries listed for $15. The other day I was shopping for a trash can and discovered that a distressing percentage of them cost more than $100.

And even outside the confines of New York, my sense of what constitutes a normal price seems to melt away: replacement charging cables, drugstore skincare, streaming subscriptions, concert tickets, luggage, any piece of furniture. I encounter perfectly ordinary things and think, Wait, is that actually what this costs now?

At this point, the problem goes beyond things simply becoming more expensive. I increasingly have no idea how much any of this is supposed to cost.

Inflation alone doesn’t really explain the experience of being a consumer right now, which increasingly involves paying more for something that is smaller, worse, harder to buy, harder to return, attached to three separate fees, priced differently depending on where you look and possibly being recommended to you by a person who does not actually exist.

We have officially lost the price

Us humans are not particularly good at evaluating prices in isolation.

When you see a $22 sandwich, your brain is not conducting an independent analysis of bread costs, commercial rent, restaurant wages, profit margins and the current wholesale price of turkey before arriving at the fair market value of lunch. You are comparing it with something: maybe what a sandwich cost last year, what the place down the street charges, what you usually spend on lunch, and so on.

Behavioral researchers call these reference prices, the internal and external benchmarks we use to decide whether something feels cheap, expensive or fair. Those reference points influence how we judge prices and ultimately what we are willing to pay.

Which makes sense. Most of us don’t want every trip to CVS to become a market research project.

The entire point of having a functional consumer market is that you can develop shortcuts. You know, roughly, what toothpaste costs. You know that one grocery store tends to be cheaper than another. You know that if a sweater says “was $120, now $70,” $120 is supposedly the normal price and $70 is the deal.

Those shortcuts save an enormous amount of time and mental energy. And increasingly, they no longer work.

I’ve written before about surveillance pricing, where companies can use information about you and your behavior to estimate what you personally might be willing to pay; tierification, where the same basic product gets split into an increasing number of price and access levels; and dynamic pricing, where the number itself moves around according to demand, timing or whatever other inputs the algorithm is using.

Then you add shrinkflation, where the price stays familiar while the amount of product quietly declines; skimpflation, where quality or service deteriorates instead; “sales” built around dubious reference prices; and the ever-expanding universe of fees that reveal the actual cost only after you’ve emotionally committed to buying the thing.

The tactics are different, but the consumer experience is quite consistent: the number you initially see becomes less and less useful as a piece of information.

This pricing complexity does not merely annoy us (Which, oh boy it does. I’ll get to that in a second). It actually changes what we pay. In an experiment from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, buyers had a harder time comparing sellers and ultimately paid more when one total price was broken into smaller components.

In other words, confusion can be profitable.

The sale is fake. The price is fake. The thing might also be worse.

Once price stops functioning as a trustworthy signal, the uncertainty starts spreading to everything around it.

A sale doesn’t necessarily tell you that you’re saving money. A higher price doesn’t reliably tell you that something is higher quality. A familiar brand doesn’t guarantee that the product is being made the same way it was five years ago. A five-star review might have been purchased, generated or manipulated. And a “marketplace” that appears to offer 30 different options may actually just be the same two brands offering the same product under different names.

Let’s go back to my trashy example and say you wanted to wait for a sale to buy a trash can, taking a page out of the Responsible Consumer handbook. You wait until Prime Day, where you see that the can you want has been marked down 17% (!). A deal, right? Maybe not.

A Washington Post report tracked nearly 50 products during Amazon’s 2025 Prime Big Deal Days and found that many brands artificially inflated their prices the weeks leading up to Prime Day so the “deal” looked much more dramatic than their actual price history did.

So naturally, the solution is to open a third-party price tracker to determine whether the sale is a real sale, which is obviously exactly how I wanted to spend my limited time on earth.

And then, after doing all of that work, the thing may simply suck.

Companies can improve margins by raising the price, but consumers are price sensitive and rising prices are easy to notice. So instead, many companies improve margins by taking value out of the thing you were already buying. Maybe they replace the material with a cheaper one, or reduce the portion, or make customer service harder to access, or turn a previously standard feature into something available only on the premium tier.

The Guardian profiled consumers who have begun building literal databases tracking formerly trusted brands whose quality deteriorated after acquisitions or increasing financial pressure. Three-quarters of Americans reported experiencing a product-quality or service problem in 2025, roughly double the rate measured when the National Consumer Rage Study (obsessed with the title) began decades ago.

Inflation can explain why something costs more, but it does a much worse job explaining the extremely specific consumer experience of paying more for something you are fairly certain used to be better.

No one wants to feel screwed over, so there’s something especially rage-inducing about feeling screwed over, again and again, by every product or service you interact with. And on top of all of this, the systems we rely on to figure out whether something is worth buying have become less trustworthy, too.

Influencer marketing already required the consumer to figure out whether a recommendation was real or sponsored, and now generative AI adds the possibility that the person enthusiastically demonstrating the product may not even exist. Some brands are already experimenting with synthetic characters and AI-generated product videos because they can produce huge amounts of advertising content cheaply and quickly.

The price is unstable, the quality is unstable, and now the information you’re using to evaluate both can be unstable too.

So … is any of this even real?

Free market, hello???

In theory, capitalism has a very obvious response to all of this. If a company charges too much, makes its product worse or treats you badly, you take your money somewhere else.

Competition is supposed to discipline this kind of behavior. The shitty company loses customers, a better competitor wins them, everybody learns a valuable lesson about capitalism, Adam Smith smiles down upon us, the end.

But this entire mechanism depends on there being somewhere else to go.

Over the past several decades, huge parts of the American economy have consolidated through mergers and acquisitions, including the private-equity strategy of buying up lots of smaller businesses in the same industry and combining them into a larger company. The FTC and Justice Department have specifically raised concerns about these kinds of “roll-ups,” noting that a company can accumulate significant control over a market through a series of smaller acquisitions, some of which are too small to trigger traditional federal merger review.

I wrote about this more extensively in Everything Is Private Equity <3, but the consumer consequence is that there are often fewer genuinely independent alternatives than it looks like there are.

You might see 20 brands on a shelf, or five companies pop up when you Google a service, but that does not necessarily mean you are choosing among 20 or even five businesses with meaningfully different incentives. Sometimes several of them have the same parent company. Sometimes a fragmented local industry has been rolled up into a handful of much larger operators. Sometimes the competition is technically still there, but every company has discovered the same profitable playbook.

So even when you can switch, switch to what?

If one airline discovers passengers will tolerate a new fee, the incentive for its competitors is to charge the fee, too. The same logic shows up in subscription tiers, worse customer service, smaller packages, premium upgrades and all the other little ways companies have learned to pull more money out of the same transaction.

Corporate greed is not a new phenomenon; companies have always been pretty into making money. What’s changed is the amount of leeway some companies have to make the product a little worse, the service a little more annoying or the price a little higher without losing enough customers for it to matter.

Inflation created unusually good cover for repricing because consumers already expected prices to go up. Once everyone’s internal reference point moves higher, there is no natural mechanism that automatically moves it back down when a company’s own costs improve, particularly if demand remains strong and competitors are charging something similar.

Which gets closer to what I think people actually mean when they say they feel “price gouged.” It’s not just that something costs more than it did five years ago, it’s that every transaction has become a test of the maximum amount of bullshit and money you’re willing to absorb before giving up.

Being a consumer now requires vigilance

Nearly 80% of Americans reported experiencing a product or service problem in 2025 and about two-thirds of those consumers said the experience made them feel “rage,” according to the National Consumer Rage Survey. Customer complaints have since continued hitting record levels.

Not only is there higher prices and worse service, being a competent consumer now requires a remarkable amount of unpaid administrative labor. From comparing prices to checking warranties and cancellations to researching quality reports to reading reviews to contacting customer service and begging for a human.

The Groundwork Collaborative estimates that Americans lose at least $165 billion every year in money and time to what it calls the “annoyance economy,” including hidden fees, spam, healthcare administration and the hours people spend trying to to fix things that should have worked correctly in the first place.

I’ve written before about what living in a low-trust environment does to us: the hypervigilance, the constant verification, the belief that if you don’t pay attention you will get screwed. But there’s another piece to this, too: It makes delayed gratification substantially less gratifying.

A lot of conventional financial advice is built around a very simple psychological bargain. You do not buy everything you want today. You save for the vacation, the furniture, the nice dinner, the concert, the nicer coat, whatever the thing is, and eventually you get the reward (the thing!) for having waited.

That bargain works much better when you have some confidence that the reward will actually feel rewarding.

It becomes considerably harder to get excited about diligently saving for the vacation when the hotel reveals another $300 in fees, or buying the expensive appliance when reviewers say the old version lasted 15 years and the new one lasts three, or finally splurging on the restaurant only to discover that your $35 buys four little pieces of tortellini.

You can do everything personal finance tells you to do (research, wait, save, spend intentionally) and still walk away feeling like an idiot.

And I think that matters. Saving is already psychologically difficult because the reward lives in the future. If the future reward itself starts feeling overpriced, degraded or scammy, the entire emotional case for waiting gets weaker.

You cannot comparison-shop your way out of a structural problem

So what are you actually supposed to do with any of this? Because not all of us feel like spending time Googling “best trash can 2026”.

There are a few places where I think individual behavior can help:

• Build your own reference points. For expensive or recurring purchases, look at the all-in price rather than the teaser price (how much does this subscription annually? What’s the cost per use of this item), check the actual price history when it is easy to do so, and know roughly what you consider reasonable before shopping so the psychological tricks retailers use have less power.

• Put a limit on how much attention you are willing to spend saving money. Adding a little friction before a large impulse purchase is useful; spending 45 minutes tracking down a coupon to save $6 is just another way the annoyance economy steals something from you.

• Actually leave when you have a meaningful alternative. If a product materially deteriorates, stop rewarding the brand. Buy secondhand if possible, but keep in mind that secondhand doesn’t always mean “high quality.” Brand loyalty is only useful when the brand gives you something worth being loyal to.

But there are extremely obvious limits to all of this.

You cannot meaningfully comparison-shop your internet when only one provider serves your building. You cannot personally create an airline competitor because every existing airline is charging you extra for an overhead bin.

Consumer protection, antitrust enforcement and transparent-pricing rules are also personal-finance issues because they determine how much individual effort the rest of us have to expend just to participate in a market. The Guardian’s reporting on consolidation makes the same point: switching only gives consumers power when there is actually somewhere useful to switch to.

Individual consumers can push back around the edges, but we cannot personally restore competition to an industry.

And I think knowing that matters because otherwise we turn yet another structural failure into a problem for the individual: just download these four apps, learn these five tricks, spend another hour comparison shopping, become better at spotting the scam.

I would argue an efficient market means you’re not supposed to need a finance degree, a spreadsheet, three browser extensions, Reddit and the investigative instincts of Bob Woodward to buy yogurt.

I will probably continue paying absurd amounts of money for things because I live in New York. And that’s fine. I don’t need everything to be cheap. In fact, I would be willing to pay more, in some cases, for a higher quality product or service. But if I’m spending $35 on tortellini, I would like the $35 to mean something.

Inflation is still outpacing worker pay for most Americans, consumer sentiment is still quite low (and dropping for conservatives), and the AI boom continues to benefit capital over labor. On the job market front, the WSJ just ran a piece titled, “The Jobless Boom Has Arrived.”

So: is the K-shaped economy gone? Or did we just stop looking at the right K?

The way I see it, there are two major divides running through the economy right now. The first is labor vs. capital. Corporate profits up, wages flat, the gains going to shareholders and owners. The second is older vs. younger. Many Boomers have assets, home equity, pensions, and decades of compounding behind them. Many young people has student debt, a frozen entry-level market, and a TikTok feed full of people telling them to bet on sports. Calling either one “over” because one chart converged is — and I’m being generous here — premature.

Onto the stories.

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These women are paying for dates, sure. But they’re also sending their boyfriends job listings and editing their résumés. They’re planning the trips, remembering the birthdays, initiating the conversations about where this was going and what the next five years might look like. One woman described running what seemed like a one-person career services company for a man who did not appear to be applying to anything.

There’s been a lot heterosexual discourse that has taken over the internet over the past few years. Women complain that men don’t plan anything, don’t know how to clean, don’t have ambition, don’t remember birthdays, don’t make reservations and have made “having a job” their single contribution to the household. Even though women also … have a job.

Men complain that women are expecting too much.

I have no desire to referee heterosexuality. Godspeed to everybody involved. But I do think the argument is much more interesting when you look at it economically.

For most of modern American history, heterosexual relationships ran on a fairly explicit trade. The man earned the money and the woman maintained the home, raised the children, managed the social calendar, cooked the food, remembered everyone’s doctor’s appointments, and did the thousand other tasks required to keep a family functioning.

This was not a very chill nor fair arrangement for women. It financially trapped generations of women inside bad marriages and treated an enormous amount of female labor as though it had no economic value. But it was a legible one, in a way. Everybody “knew” what they were supposed to be doing.

Then women started earning their own money and the financial side of the deal changed dramatically. The rest of it did not change nearly as fast.

And I think a lot of what gets read as women suddenly having impossibly high standards is really frustration with that gap. Women increasingly don’t need a man to financially provide for them. They do, however, want someone who contributes something meaningful to the life they’re building.

The question underneath all of this is pretty simple: If I’m earning the money and planning the future and managing the house and doing the emotional labor, what exactly is your job here?

Women got the breadwinner role and kept the housework

Women have made real gains, particularly educated urban women in their twenties and early thirties. In 2025, 49.6% of employed women over 25 held at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 41.7% of employed men. Young women ages 25 to 34 are earning about 95 cents for every dollar earned by men, much closer to parity than the workforce overall. And recent job growth has been concentrated in sectors like health care and education, while several traditionally male-dominated industries have contracted.1

So we now have a lot of young women entering relationships with equal or greater financial power while still carrying expectations inherited from an economy where they had almost none.

If household labor worked like a simple economic model, earning more money should give you some leverage to do less of everything else.

This does not appear to be how heterosexuality works.

A 2025 NBER paper (with the incredible title “Winning the Bread and Baking it Too”) found that female breadwinners performed more home production than their male partners, particularly cooking and cleaning. Pew found something similar: In marriages where wives were the primary earners, women worked more paid hours than their husbands but also did more caregiving and more housework. Their husbands, meanwhile, got about nine additional hours of leisure per week.

Which maybe explains where the resentment is coming from. These women are earning more and planning more and worrying more and initiating more, and they’re tired.

Ambition stopped being aspirational

I notice pretty consistently that the average woman I talk to seems more ambitious, and more anxious about her future, than the average man. I think part of that is that a lot of women can’t really afford not to be.

For women, earning money has always carried a meaning beyond consumption or status. It's protection. The goal is to earn and save enough that you never have to stay somewhere because you can't afford to leave. That you have autonomy your mother or grandmother didn't. Some of the current focus on financial independence is aspiration, and some of it is just the accumulated knowledge that dependence has historically been a bad bet for women.

The economy has made this worse. Housing, health care, education, retirement, child care—none of it is affordable without steady income growth and a lot of forward planning. Ambition has become more about keeping your life from becoming more precarious, which is a very different emotional relationship to have with your own drive.

Plus, the earning power a lot of women have right now is temporary. The earnings gap increases with age, and it widens dramatically with motherhood. A 29-year-old woman aggressively building her career may therefore have a very rational sense that this is the period when she needs to accumulate as much economic power as possible.

Her boyfriend saying, “I’m sure it will all work out,” may genuinely believe that, but she’s hearing something very different:

If it doesn’t, you’re going to be the one who figures it out.

Men are dealing with a broken bargain too

Did all men wake up and decide to become useless? Maybe a few (I’ve met some of them). But the economy hasn’t been exactly kind to men either.

Men are dealing with the same high cost of living, impossible housing market and unstable labor market everyone else is. Some traditional male paths into economic stability have weakened. Labor-force participation among men has declined substantially over the long term, and recent job growth has been unusually concentrated in sectors like health care that employ more women.

At the same time, men have inherited a very narrow definition of what successful masculinity was supposed to look like. Provide.

Male economic value and male social value are often tightly connected. Now that relationship is weaker, and culturally we haven’t done a particularly good job replacing it with anything else.

Caregiving is still frequently treated as feminine, domestic work doesn’t carry much status. Emotional competence is rarely presented to boys as a serious contribution to a future household.

Many of the problems men are facing are therefore downstream of the same patriarchal bargain that constrained women. Patriarchy gave men more economic power, but it also gave them an incredibly narrow way to prove their worth.

Shame is a pretty predictable response here. Sure, some men adapt and become stay-at-home dads and become the person making dinner or remembering the pediatrician appointment or holding things together during a difficult year. Others lash out and blame women instead of the system that created these issues in the first place.

But I would argue many men have lapsed into a form of learned helplessness, experiencing the same financial nihilism everyone else is, and where a lot of women responded with hyper-independence, responding with apathy.

Many of the women in the Cut article weren’t upset that their boyfriends didn’t make money. They’re upset that their boyfriends don’t do anything.

What this does to how women handle money

Eventually this shows up in the actual financial decisions people make. If you keep learning that depending on someone creates more work for you, the logical move is to stop depending on people.

Maybe you don’t combine bank accounts with your partner, or insist on a prenup, or delay things like marriage or having children until you (and you alone) feel “financially ready”. Some of this may be a solid financial choice. But some of it is self-insurance against the relationship itself, which is a different thing, and it tends to calcify. You end up financially resilient and also fairly convinced that needing anyone is a risk you can't take.

Money also starts carrying an additional emotional meaning that isn’t really about money. If one person always pays, always plans, always remembers and always anticipates, resentment may attach itself to the bill even if the bill isn’t the problem.

It turns money into a proxy for love. Do you value me, or do you value everything my competence does for you?

The internet is not helping

Young women absorb an incoherent set of messages about money and romance online: be financially independent, never depend on a man, refuse 50/50 relationships, date a provider, embrace the soft life, get a prenup, and also maybe consider becoming a tradwife.

These look contradictory but they’re mostly responses to the same fear, which is: what happens if I contribute equally financially but stay unequal everywhere else?

The endless discourse about who pays for the first date is a crude proxy for a much bigger calculation, one that includes beauty labor, emotional labor, domestic work, pregnancy, caregiving, and career sacrifice (fun first date topic!).

Few people are actually arguing about $60 worth of pasta. They’re trying to use one observable financial behavior to predict an entire future relationship, measuring ambition, generosity, reciprocity, etc.

All totally normal things to determine over a bowl of rigatoni.

Money becomes the stand-in because it’s one of the few forms of contribution that’s easy to measure. But of course, a partnership contains a lot of things that are much harder to measure than how much money you make.

So what would actually help?

I don’t think the answer is (always) finding a man who earns more. I think it’s changing what we’re actually measuring.

• Stop evaluating contribution through salary alone. Someone can be deeply ambitious about things that don’t produce income. And someone can make a lot of money while contributing almost nothing to the actual functioning of a partnership. If you're using income as a shorthand for whether someone's going to show up, you're going to be wrong a lot.

• Fair doesn’t mean 50/50. A perfectly split check can coexist with a wildly lopsided relationship. Ask instead: Is this this person carrying their share of the life? Aka the paid work and the domestic labor and the caregiving and the planning and the admin and the emotional support and whatever career sacrifices are getting made.

• Potential is not a contribution. Women get encouraged to evaluate men generously: focus on who he could become, he’s still figuring it out, help him get there. But potential is not an asset. You can support someone without becoming his career coach, therapist, mother, and revolving line of credit. Is he driving his own development or letting your belief in him do the work instead?

• Caring about money doesn't make you shallow. A lot of women worry that paying attention to a partner’s debt or earnings or work habits is materialistic. It isn’t. Money is just where the abstract stuff becomes concrete: A conversation about money is also a conversation about time, risk, responsibility, kids, freedom, and whose life gets prioritized when there isn’t enough to go around.

Financial independence gave women the ability to survive outside a relationship, but survival was never supposed to be the destination.

What I personally want (and what I think a lot of women want) isn’t a return to dependence, and it isn’t permanent self-protection either. It’s the kind of interdependence where nobody has to become the other person’s mother in order to feel safe.

The AI trade continues to drive the S&P 500 to new highs while grocery prices remain stubbornly unaffordable for a huge chunk of the country.

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July was a month. I stayed in New York, despite the humidity. The city empties out just enough that you can actually get a table somewhere and everything feels slightly unhinged in the best way.

Work-wise, I’ve been trying to intentionally scaling back on some of my other work to focus on content. I’ve been a bit burned out, and in trying to do all things was, actually, doing nothing that well, IMO. So I’m hoping August will be a continuation of me being a little bit more deliberate with my time.

Other highlights: I dog-sat a golden retriever, took the ferry to the Rockaways, and had a bunch of really good oysters. Sometimes a month doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

Welcome is the July edition of my monthly roundup: everything I wrote, everything I watched and read, the best and worst things I bought, and more. Let’s go.

What I wrote this month

Hey … can you pay me back now?

We’re in the summer of financed fun, where the rising cost of having a social life has turned friend groups into informal credit markets. Because, if you think about it, the person who fronts the bill is essentially providing unsecured, interest-free loan backed by nothing but the friendship.

Love Island is the highest form of capitalism

Love Island is inescapable right now, and what strikes me watching it is how obvious it’s become that most of these people are there for the brand deals. Love Island has become this perfect embodiment of the attention economy and what precarity does to our sense of security. The self becomes the product, attention makes it feel legitimate, and thus fame becomes a viable financial path.

The economy is just a VIP list now

The economy increasingly rewards people who can afford to never wait, mix, or be observed. Covers everything from concierge TSA services to private internet to the fact that someone is building a luxury theme park in Mexico. (We are living in a dystopian novel and no one seems concerned.)

To be an American, revisited

America turned 250, so I did what any normal person would do and wrote about the psychology of the American Dream and why it’s making us miserable. Also in this issue: student loans just got way more confusing, a reader question about whether to panic about the AI bubble (no), and the secret reason your boss wants you back in the office (narcissism).

Over on social …

From the archive

Is money secretly ruining your relationship?

Money is the number-one predictor of divorce, and yet most couples would rather talk about literally anything else. How financial dynamics create invisible power imbalances in relationships and why being honest about money with your partner is both the hardest and most important conversation you can have.

Is it possible to be financially happy?

What financial happiness actually means (spoiler: it’s not a number), why most of us are chasing a feeling of security that keeps moving further away, and what the research says about the relationship between money and wellbeing.

What else is going on?

Reading.

• Discontent — Oh baby, if you feel existentialism and nihilism about the white-collar workforce, you will love this. Wonderfully written.

• Say Nothing — A gripping nonfiction book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland that reads like a thriller.

• Swimming in the Dark — beautiful prose, atmospheric, for me a little slow in the middle. If you like this style of book I highly recommend Cleanness by Garth Greenwell.

Watching. I saw The Odyssey in theaters. Or more accurately, I felt The Odyssey in theaters, because the speakers were blown out and the entire auditorium was just vibrating on bass for two and a half hours.

Listening to: Crybaby

The best thing I bought this month

A flight to Amsterdam in October to see my best friend, who is having a BABY!!!

The worst thing I bought this month

A TEN DOLLAR soda at the movie theater. I panicked at the concession stand and asked for a large, and the cashier then handed me a SIXTY-FOUR OUNCE cup that I had to carry into the theater with two hands.

Thanks for being here, for reading, for sending these to your friends, for supporting my work! If you’re not subscribed yet, this newsletter is free every Wednesday. And if you want access to the full archive (including the paid essays above), you can become a paid subscriber below.

See you next month.

Hanna

One involved lots and lots of lines: for the subway to Penn Station, where you stood in the sun waiting for a yellow school bus to come pick you up to take you to the Meadowlands, where you waited in another long line to get in. There, you waited in even more lines, for the bathroom, for food, for drinks.

The other way involved meeting a group of men in matching suits in Midtown who whisked you to New Jersey in a guarded Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van, past all the checkpoints, where you entered the stadium from the basement level and walked directly into a private suite. Or maybe you didn’t even have to get in a car, opting for a helicopter instead.

Like most thing in life have become, the event itself was the same, but the entire experience surrounding it, everything from how you arrive, to where you wait, to who you sit beside, to what you eat, to which rules apply to you, was sorted by how much you could pay.

“It’s the Super Bowl for the ultraprivileged,” one investor told The New York Times. “Inequality is taking it right in the face right now.”

Having wealth is increasingly about the ability to control how exposed you are to the world around you. And many rich people are bypassing public life altogether.

Privacy, in this context, is beyond just solitude or secrecy. It’s selective accessibility, the power to decide who and what gets access to you.

Status used to mean being seen

Status spending, in the past, required visibility. But what happens when the performance of wealth is available to almost everyone? Thanks to social media, you can rent the fancy apartment, buy the fake designer bag, put the vacation on Afterpay and construct an online life that looks much more expensive than the one you actually live.

I wrote about this earlier this year in “New Status Symbols”: in our modern economy, looking rich has become easier, while actually feeling financially secure has become much harder.

The signals of wealth have shifted from what you can buy to what you can afford to opt out of. Privacy becomes a luxury good.

That doesn’t mean wealthy people don’t want attention. They just want control over the attention. They can (and often wish to) be photographed at the event but disappear after dinner. They can use their visibility when it creates influence, status or income, then retreat when being perceived becomes annoying or inconvenient for them. The inherent luxury is the ability to choose.

The rest of us have much less flexibility, as our world turns more and more into what feels like a surveillance state. In fact, most of us have to remain visible to make money at all. We build personal brands, submit to workplace monitoring, give up our data for free services and make ourselves “searchable”. We often don’t have the ability to opt out.

A private version of everything

I would definite privacy, in this context, in three interconnected ways:

1. Physical privacy: freedom from crowds, lines, shared entrances, public waiting rooms, and uncontrolled encounters.

2. Social privacy: access to rooms where the people around you have been financially or socially selected.

3. Informational privacy: control over who tracks, records, or sells information about you.

Rich people can increasingly buy all three.

At home, physical privacy may mean a gated community, private island, or private elevator that travels directly from a garage into an apartment.

Or it could be “landmaxxing,” where wealthy homeowners buy the surrounding properties to create a larger buffer between themselves and everyone else. Rich people are spending hundreds of thousands on turning their homes into private security states, with retina scanners, facial recognition, safe rooms, and drones.

The parallel infrastructure extends well beyond the home.

• At the airport: There are private planes, of course, but there are also increasingly semi-private planes and concierge services for commercial flights. For roughly $1,300 per person, you drive into a gated facility away from the main airport, eat in a private lounge, clear TSA in a separate screening area and be driven across the tarmac directly to a commercial flight. The CEO of the company, PS, describes it as occupying the space between commercial and private air travel.1

• At the doctor: Concierge practices charge an annual retainer for faster appointments, longer visits and more direct access to a physician. The market is now a multi-billion-dollar industry and may already account for 10 to 20 percent of primary-care physicians. Luxury hospital wings gives wealthy people separation from other patients.

• At the club: More than 30 new private members’ clubs have opened in New York alone in the past few years, spanning bathing clubs, coworking spaces, wellness facilities, family clubs and ultra-luxury institutions with five- or six-figure fees.

• At the park: The first “luxury theme park“ is opening in Mexico this fall, designed explicitly around exclusivity, with access limited to resort guests and an emphasis on fewer visitors and shorter wait times. Guests stay in five-star hotels, eat gourmet meals, and take private gondolas in and out of the park. Disney has also been increasing its premium offerings for years.

• At the mall: Many brands have invitation-only shopping suites where clients enter separately and have merchandise brought to them.

• On the go: If you’re wealthy enough, you can rent out an entire safari, an entire beach, an entire ski mountain. You can watch sports games in private sections and get exclusive access to restaurants.

Informational privacy, I think, is the lesser-discussed form of privacy, and is becoming even more relevant in our digital world.

The free version of digital life runs largely on surveillance: every click, location, purchase and search becomes information that can be analyzed and sold. You can reduce some of that exposure through paid, ad-free products, data-removal services, private cybersecurity and reputation management, though products are imperfect and this assumes you have the money and knowledge to do so.

In case anyone was curious (like I was) here are a couple ways in which wealthy people access and leverage informational privacy:

• Using a family office as an intermediary to avoid giving personal details to companies (like addresses, banking information, etc).

• Hiring private cybersecurity teams to do dark-web monitoring, improve home network security, and provide deepfake protection.

• Can use an adviser to make pricing requests, arrange off-market rentals, negotiate on their behalf, etc. This helps rich people avoid things like surveillance pricing.

I was most shocked to discover that there are now private internet services that allow you to curate your own internet for a price.

As I wrote in “The Tierfication of Everything” that companies increasingly design around two consumers: the premium customer and the budget customer, with less and less in the middle. I was mostly writing about airline seats, groceries and streaming subscriptions, though this model being applied to public life itself.

At the highest levels of wealth, privacy stops being an amenity and becomes an entire way we move through the world. You no longer have to be in reality, if you don’t wish to.

So what happens to the rest of us?

Companies have become quite good at identifying which parts of an experience people hate and charging them to avoid those parts.

The classic example is airlines, which make the seats smaller, then sell legroom. Theme parks produce long lines, then sell expedited access. Concert venues create VIP sections with private entrances, bathrooms, and bars. The product at the top is often less about receiving more than being subjected to less.

This is the logic of tierification: the ordinary experience becomes difficult enough that relief starts to feel worth paying for.

Bloomberg recently described an American “fun shortage,” driven by the disappearance of affordable places to relax and socialize alongside rising prices for the remaining options. Rising inequality compounds the shortage because businesses naturally orient themselves toward the consumers who can pay more.

What replaces the third space isn’t nothing. It’s usually a membership, a premium tier or a private version of whatever’s disappeared.

Take a hometown example: Jacob Riis Park in Queens, also known as “the People’s Beach” and an important part of New York’s LGBTQ+ history. The beach houses an Art Deco bathhouse (stunning architecture IMO), which sat closed for more than five decades. This summer it is reopening after an $88 million renovation as the Rockaway Ocean Club.

The beach remains public, and the development says more than 60 percent of the building, including food vendors, shops, bars and a courtyard, will remain open to everyone. The pool, outdoor lobby and future second-floor lounge are reserved for members and hotel guests. Memberships currently range from $1,000 for Rockaway residents to several thousand dollars for families.

I use this example because I think it shows how public infrastructure is increasingly being redeveloped into private infrastructure, available to those who can afford the membership fee.2

Why do people spend so much money to avoid other people?

Private clubs and country clubs have existed for centuries, so none of this is entirely new. Wealth has always been able to provide a level of distance from things you didn’t want to do. But what feels new is how many ordinary experiences are now being rebuilt around the promise of escape.

Crowds are annoying and unpredictable, and uncertainty can be psychologically expensive. In a public space, you monitor your belongings, read social cues, search for a seat, wait your turn, tolerate noise and accept that another person’s behavior may change your experience. Money can reduce that range of possible inconveniences.

What the premium tier sells is (in part) an elimination of friction. And that transaction is increasingly the defining feature of the whole economy. Not just what you can afford to have, but what you can afford to never experience.

The world around us often feels very uncertain and precarious. A premium service offers predictability, a world less at the mercy of strangers or systems you cannot control.

Privacy also communicates exclusivity and scarcity, the key components of status. Rich people have social needs, too, and these spaces offer the ability to meet and interact with other people, narrowed through price, profession, taste, etc. Many of these clubs also prohibit photography and require NDAs, which has become especially appealing in a culture where nearly any dinner or conversation can be filmed and posted without your consent.

The membership buys both access to the people you want and protection from everyone else.

Friction is where public life happens

I don’t mean that in some romantic, “isn’t it beautiful to suffer together” kind of way. The airport terminal, the general-admission concert, even the crowded train to the stadium…these are places where you encounter people you didn’t filter for.

When you’re in public, you’re naturally going to come into contact with people who aren’t in your income bracket or your professional network or your algorithmically-curated social circle. While engaging with people who are different than you can sometimes be awkward or uncomfortable, it can also be enormously fruitful. You are exposed to new ideas, form new ways of thinking. Diversity is the connective tissue of living in a society.

Conversely, the more time you spend in homogeneous circles (and that goes for wealth and class circles), the more close-minded you become. This is happening at a moment when Americans are already spending less time together.

What happens when wealthy people no longer have to experience public infrastructure on the same terms as everyone else?

Rich people can skip the airport terminal, leave the public school system, avoid the crowded hospital, join a private park or pay for a separate space inside a public one. They still rely on roads, utilities, workers and public institutions, but increasingly encounter them through layers of insulation.

It becomes a feedback loop: public infrastructure deteriorates, private alternatives expand, and shared investment becomes harder to justify. What is public life when the people with the most power no longer need to participate in it?

A society becomes easier to neglect when these people no longer have to experience it. It also erodes our collective empathy and civic identity.

Wealth as reduced dependence (a caveat, if you will)

We tend to describe financial freedom as the ability to stop working, but the fantasy is often broader than that. It’s the ability to not need anyone or anything, to not be inconvenienced or delayed or controlled by something else.

We build “fuck-you funds.” We aspire to hire assistants and outsource chores. I’m personally a big fan of this way of thinking, as money can be a tool to help you make decisions without financial hindrance and live the life you want to live. Having money can do things like let you leave a bad relationship, say no to work that’s corrosive or survive an emergency.

But we shouldn’t confuse our desire for financial freedom with ultra-independence, where other people become sources of friction to manage away.

When privacy becomes a luxury good, we start ignoring the systemic problems that got us here. The train is unreliable, so we buy a car. The public school is underfunded, so we send our kids to private school. The neighborhood doesn’t have any third spaces, so we join a club.

The purchase solves our immediate, individual problem, but it reinforces the idea that security comes from earning enough to escape the system rather than trying to improve it.

It also changes our definition of success, where wealth becomes less about having enough and more about becoming untouchable. And for everyone who is below that level (which is pretty much everyone), the economy keeps dangling the possibility that one more raise or upgrade might finally place us on the other side of the velvet rope.

But the relief is temporary because privacy is positional. There’s always going to be something that seems to be better, just waiting around the corner. The access economy turns our human desire for safety and autonomy into an endless ladder of escape.

Quick economy check-in.

Consumer sentiment ticked up slightly before the latest oil-price shock knocked it back down. Inflation is still sticky, growth is still solid, and the Fed is holding steady. The war is expected to leave the economy with more stubborn inflation than we had before, which is not the news anyone wanted heading into fall.

Meanwhile, the stock market had a wild week around AI, driven almost entirely by a handful of companies whose valuations are now larger than many countries. The AI boom continues to mint millionaires at an extraordinary pace. Whether any of that is reaching you is a different question, and it’s the one I want to talk about this week.

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And what strikes me, watching this kind of reality TV, is how obvious it’s become that most of these people are not going on the show for love. They want to become famous. And fame, in this economy, is a money strategy.

Sure, people have been using reality TV as a launchpad for at least a decade. But in the past few years there’s been a palpable shift in how visibly the contestants perform for the camera. A recent piece in Trill Mag described this season’s cast as having “an acute awareness that they are not just playing a dating game but are managing a public identity that will outlast the season by years.”

Love Island is a dating show on paper. But in practice, it’s capitalism in a bikini, a show that takes a basic human desire and turns it into a competition for visibility. The self becomes the product, attention becomes legitimacy, and fame becomes the end goal.

Supply, demand, and a villa in Fiji

Here’s how Love Island works, for the uninitiated: a group of hot people (Islanders) live together in a villa. People couple up based on first impressions. New entrants (bombshells) disrupt existing relationships by introducing competition, and the public votes on who stays. There are ridiculous challenges, tears, drama, etc. When someone’s perceived desirability drops, they get dumped from the island.

The winning couple (again, voted by the public) gets $100,000 with a “split or steal” trust test. Which, is good money, but certainly not quit-your-job and retire money.

Dating has always been somewhat of a market, but what makes Love Island (and shows of that ilk) different is that this market is actively being filmed, consumed, and monetized in real time.

And ultimately, the public is the ones who decide who stays and who goes. And they’re not always voting for the couple that seems the most in love. Oftentimes, they vote for the people they like watching. The people who are funny, chaotic, loyal, wronged, hot, dramatic, relatable, or [insert adjective here].

This incentive structure rewards attention-seeking behavior the same way a social media algorithm does.

So you see contestants approach the show with boardroom-level strategy, curating whatever personality they think will get them the most air time, eyeballs, fan edits, and memes.

Despite the tracking shots of beaches and slow-mo pool shots, these shows do not look like fun to be on. Love Island particularly feels to me like a tropical Stanford Prison experiment, where no one has access to the outside world, never knows what time it is, and are constantly being surveilled by what I assume are hundreds of cameras. You’re in a controlled environment designed to produce maximum emotional volatility for entertainment purposes.

So why are people lining up to do it?

Because it’s not about the $100,000. It’s not even about the $50,000 (which is closer to $30K after taxes). It’s about what comes after.

The real prize is what comes after

Brand deals, podcast invites, fashion partnerships, a pivot from whatever job you had before into a career where your personality, face, and following are the product. Going on reality TV can now catapult you into serious wealth: former islanders are regularly making six figures for a single sponsored post. Leah Kateb, who came in second on Season 6, reportedly earns $1.6 to $2.7 million annually from Instagram alone.

And boy, is there money in the apparatus around them. This season alone has 21 brand partners — CeraVe, Maybelline, Coffee Mate, Motorola, Poppi, Cuervo, Smirnoff. The contestants are literally living inside a branded environment, using sponsored skincare, drinking sponsored coffee, and participating in sponsored date nights. (Truman Burbank would have loved Love Island.) Season 8 debuted with 824 million minutes watched in three days, making it Peacock’s biggest original launch ever. Over 2.3 billion minutes in its first two weeks, up 50% from last year. 59% of viewers are 18–34. This is a multi-billion-dollar attention machine.

I’ve written before about the commodification of self, the idea that we’re all startups to be iterated on, the gospel of “personal brand.” Love Island is the most vivid, almost grotesque illustration of this because you can literally watch it happening. These people are building their personal brand on camera, in real time, with the explicit goal of turning attention into money.

Fame as a financial plan

I don’t think the contestants on these shows are all stupid, or shallow, or incapable of genuine feeling. Some of them are there for a mix of reasons, and maybe one of those reasons includes actually wanting to meet someone. But I do think that going on Love Island (or The Bachelor, or Perfect Match, or Too Hot to Handle) at a minimum, is about wanting attention.

They want to be perceived, to be visible, to matter in the specific way that social media has taught us that mattering looks like. Which, in this economy, is not an unreasonable thing to want.

We’re in an environment where visibility can function as a form of career protection, where a large following gives you options that a regular job increasingly does not. That might explain why more than half of Gen Z says they’d become an influencer if given the chance, and why kids now list it as their dream job ahead of being a doctor, lawyer, or teacher. (More recent surveys suggest this may be starting to shift, but the underlying logic hasn’t changed.)

Are the kids just delusional? I think they’re looking at the current economy and drawing conclusions. (The old appeal of the 9-5 was stability and autonomy, and for a lot of young people, that deal no longer holds.) When you can see that the “traditional” path doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, and the influencer path at least looks like it leads somewhere exciting, you wonder if it’s time to pick up the camera and start filming.

The amount of aspirational labor that goes into this is staggering. Love Island contestants reportedly spend thousands of dollars on their appearance before the show. They take weeks or months off work. Many leave their current jobs entirely (most employers don’t let you take six weeks off to go to Fiji). All of this happens before they’ve earned a single dollar.

I get the appeal of it all. Fame looks fun. The parties, the travel, the gifted clothes, the VIP access: there’s a fantasy of a life where money, status, and enjoyment converge, and that fantasy is tantalizing because ordinary life for most young people is expensive, precarious, and exhausting. If someone offered me a villa in Fiji and the chance to never think about my rent again, I’d at least consider it.

But there’s a real risk to pursuing attention and fame that’s harder to measure. Contestants are gambling with their privacy, reputation, and dignity when they sign away control over their image to production companies. Fame is a depreciating asset, and the window between relevance and irrelevance is shrinking. The creator economy is also oversaturated: Most people who go on Love Island will not become Molly-Mae. But even the ones who do are trading something they can never fully get back.

@vicesounds like the love island > influencer pipeline is running dry #loveisland #tv #realitytv #wesnelson #paigeturley

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When attention becomes the economy

You don’t have to go on Love Island for Love Island to affect how you think about money.

Just watching it, or seeing clips of it, or consuming the discourse around it, does something to your relationship with spending, ambition, and worth.

These shows teach us that visibility is a prerequisite for a good life. If you want to build wealth, escape the grind, or access something better, you’re pushed to commodify yourself, brand yourself, perform yourself. The contestants who “win” Love Island are not necessarily the people who had the strongest relationship. They’re often the people who became the most watchable. Our culture has normalized this logic, and Love Island is just a dramatic, bikini-clad version of what’s happening on every platform.

This changes how people spend. If your face, body, lifestyle, and personality can all become part of your “brand,” then spending on yourself starts to feel like investment rather than consumption. Comparison culture intensifies as people chase certain aesthetics or lifestyles to gain visibility online. Virality becomes the get-rich-quick scheme of the attention economy, and if traditional wealth-building feels too slow or too impossible, the appeal of a shortcut grows, even when that shortcut is statistically unlikely to work.

All of this reinforces the idea that attention is one of the most valuable things a person can have. Is that true? Arguably, in this economy, sometimes. But a culture that rewards visibility above everything else is a culture that teaches people to optimize for being watched rather than for being good at anything. And it produces an audience (all of us) that has internalized those same values, even if we’d never go on the show ourselves.

Who are you when the cameras aren’t on?

Unless you live in the woods without a phone, you have a digital version of yourself. We’re all, to some degree, performing versions of ourselves for an audience.

Your personality, your appearance, your relationships, your sense of humor, your vulnerability … all of it can become part of the portfolio if you let it. But what do you lose when your identity becomes a product? Is the version of you that’s optimized for attention is the same person you are when nobody’s watching?

Perhaps the economy we’ve built (one that increasingly rewards being seen over being good) is producing people who know how to perform a self but not how to have one.

Maybe I sound like a broken record, but headlines don’t do much to explain the individual experience of the economy. I believe a lot of the increased consumer spending is propped up by short-term debt: People spending not because they’re earning more, but because they’re borrowing more. And just because lower- and middle-income earners are spending more, doesn’t mean most economic activity isn’t propped up by the rich. This may explain why the stock market and the economy are out of sync.

And even if wages are growing, that tells you nothing about how people feel about their long-term financial security. You can get a 4% raise and still feel like the floor underneath you is made of paper. White-collar job postings are still way down, and some people are leaving the workforce entirely and not coming back.

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Part of this commitment is a monthly roundup of everything I wrote, everywhere I showed up, some older pieces worth revisiting, and whatever I’m reading, watching, and listening to. Let’s go.

What I wrote this month

The American Dream is to leave

I wrote about what we’re actually romanticizing when we romanticize walkable cities and café culture (spoiler: a functioning safety net), and about the summer I spent in Amsterdam convinced that moving abroad would fix my personality. It did not!

Is spontaneity a luxury good?

I live in a neighborhood where people routinely wait in line for two hours on a Saturday morning for frozen yogurt, and it annoyed me enough to write about it! This one is about line culture, algorithmic curation, the death of wandering, and why we’ve let TikTok decide where we eat.

Can you buy taste?

I wrote about tasteslop, the algorithmic content that looks like taste but feels hollow, and why not knowing what you actually like is one of the most expensive problems you can have. If you’ve ever bought something because your feed told you to and then couldn’t explain why, this one’s for you!

The burnout economy & my quest for a good night’s sleep

This started as a piece about the sleep industrial complex and turned into a reckoning with my own relationship to work and productivity. Also features the phrase “morning sheds,” which refers to people waking up and removing the masks, wraps, patches, chin straps, and pieces of tape they applied before bed. We have made rest very complicated.

Where I showed up

🎥 Dynamo: Why America’s Population Crisis Could Be the World’s Worst

I hosted a video for Dynamo about what happens when America stops growing. Three forces — falling birth rates, a shutdown of immigration, and a rising wave of Americans leaving the country — are reshaping everything from housing to retirement.

🎙️ The Time Freedom Podcast
I sat down with my friend Brian to talk about how twenty-somethings think about financial freedom, why rest is productive (something I clearly need to hear myself say more often), and why the “savings mountain” can actually paralyze people into doing nothing. We also got into comparison culture and how much of what you see on social media is aspirational marketing — or just straight-up fake.

📰 HuffPost: The Taylor Swift wedding prediction market piece
I was quoted calling the pregnancy bets “super gross,” because they are! The piece is about what happens when prediction markets stop being about elections and start being about someone’s intimate life decisions.

📰 Quartz: AI and white-collar America’s nervous breakdown
Quartz ran a long piece about the anxiety AI is causing among white-collar workers, and included some of my musings about the middle class — specifically the part about how people earning $50K–$100K are watching the things that middle-class life used to include just … slip away.

From the archive

If you’re newer here (hi, welcome, I’m glad you’re here), there’s a whole back catalog of essays about money psychology that I think are worth your time.

It’s your brain’s fault
The five cognitive biases that are probably costing you money — present bias, anchoring, loss aversion, overconfidence, and the sunk cost fallacy — and why knowing about them is the first step to not falling for them.

Why are we so bad with money?
Why do we struggle so much with money when we know, intellectually, what we’re supposed to do? It comes down to childhood, emotion, shame, and a culture that ties your net worth to your self-worth.

Broke, burned out, and anxious: Our money & our mental health
Money and mental health are a flywheel — each makes the other worse. This essay digs into the research on how financial stress leads to depression, addiction, and suicidal thoughts, and why the shame and silence around debt often does more damage than the debt itself.

Life lately

Traveling. I spent the Fourth of July in Pennsylvania shooting off fireworks and eating pulled pork and mac and cheese. I’m going to the Hamptons next weekend (my first time in … 5 years?) and down to visit my parents in August.

Reading. I’m currently juggling three books, which is either ambitious or a sign that I can’t commit to anything. Pale Fire by Nabokov (chaotic, obsessive, confusing, incredible), A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (devastating — I keep having to put it down and stare at a wall), and The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (epic Irish family drama).

Watching. The World Cup. I have no real allegiances so I’m just rooting for underdogs and chaos, which is frankly the most fun way to watch any sporting event.

Listening. Is it a Michael Cera summer??? I think it might be a Michael Cera summer.

Thanks for being here, thanks for reading, thanks for telling your friends. If you’re not subscribed yet — this newsletter is free and lands in your inbox every Wednesday. And if you want access to the full archive (including the essays above), you can become a paid subscriber below.

See you next week.

Hanna

It had me thinking more broadly about how we pay for things, or more accurately, how we pay for things through each other.

I have paid for hotels, flights, dinners, and tickets for groups of people more times than I can count. The highest amount I remember fronting was a $2,000 Airbnb for a bachelorette party, which I then spent the next few months hitting the “remind” button on Venmo requests and sending increasingly passive aggressive texts. One person paid me back in $50 installments that I had to manually track.

The idea of owing someone money is horrifying to me, maybe because I’ve never carried debt, or because of my social anxiety, or a rigorous adherence to social conventions. Which is perhaps why I find it genuinely baffling that there are people who just … don’t seem to care?

But this isn’t about a few flaky friends or bad Venmo etiquette. It’s about how the rising cost of maintaining a social life has turned friend groups into informal credit markets. We already live in an economy where everyone feels like they’re getting nickel-and-dimed by every company, product, and service they interact with. We do not expect to feel the same way about the people we love. But increasingly, we do.

The summer of financed fun

Having a social life has gotten dramatically more expensive over the past few years (aka funflation), but this summer in particular is testing everyone’s limits.

I’m personally watching it play out in real time in NYC. Average tickets to see the World Cup at MetLife Stadium are around $1,300, with finals tickets starting at $10,000. Ariana Grande tickets at Barclays are averaging $2,500. Harry Styles’ residency at Madison Square Garden ranges from $800 to $1,500. U.S. Open passes are averaging around $600 (something I’m especially sad about). Festival weekends, destination bachelorettes, weddings, movies, flights, hotels — things that used to be a normal part of summer fun now require the kind of financial planning that used to be reserved for, like, buying a car.

And Gen Z is still paying for all of it in part because they’re coming of age in a period marked by high rents, student debt, and income growth that hasn’t kept pace with the cost of living, and in part because everything feels like a once-in-a-lifetime event now.

The World Cup is being hosted in your city. It’s your favorite artist’s first tour in years. It’s your best friend’s wedding. It’s the group trip everyone has been talking about for months. There’s an urgency to all of it — a FOMO that’s partly real and partly manufactured by social media — so people spend money they don’t have because opting out feels worse than going into debt.

Many young people treat live events as social currency, something you post, share, and build identity around. 86% have admitted to overspending on live events. And increasingly, the way they’re financing these experiences is through each other.

Payment apps like Venmo position themselves as a convenient way to split costs (and they can be). But what’s the price of that convenience?

The friend who fronts the bill is providing an unsecured, interest-free loan backed by nothing but the value of the friendship. These apps have essentially created a lending network, where one person supplies the liquidity, everyone else gets to consume now and pay later.

This may sound like a dramatic take. But in a culture where debt has become so normalized, owing someone money can start to feel like no big deal. Until it is.

“Sorry, just seeing this”

Friend-to-friend debt doesn’t feel like real debt, which is partially by design and partly because of the social norms that make it weird to ask for your own money back.

When you owe a credit card company money, you know it. You signed an agreement (which you probably skimmed, but regardless). There’s a balance, a due date, a minimum payment, interest that accrues, etc.

But when you owe a friend money, none of that infrastructure exists. The only record might be a Venmo request or a text. And because most friend-to-friend transactions are smaller than your monthly credit card payment or student loan installment, they carry less mental weight.

@thejeanluc“I got you when I get back” 😂😂 #nyc #fashiontiktok #ootd #style

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Behavioral economists call this mental accounting, or the tendency to treat identical amounts of money differently depending on which psychological “bucket” they belong to. A $400 credit card bill often feels more urgent than $400 you owe your friend, because there are more tangible consequences for not paying on time.

And the fact that friendship is wrapped up in it makes everything fuzzier. Your friend (likely) isn’t going to charge you interest or send you to collections. The enforcement mechanism is the relationship itself, or the guilt, obligation, the fear of being seen as the friend who doesn’t pay. The “penalties” for not paying are entirely social, which makes them feel less real than other kinds of debt.

If you don’t pay your friend $200 back for that dinner, they probably aren’t going to come repo your couch. But they might stop inviting you out.

The money we borrow from our friends is almost never for something emotionally neutral. It’s for a birthday trip, a wedding, a concert your whole friend group is going to. Opting out of going (and paying) can feel like opting out of belonging. The social cost of not participating is often high enough that people spend money they don’t have just to show up. And then they can’t pay their friend back, which starts a whole different kind of social cost.

Meet the bank of the friend group

I’ve written before about how money makes friendships weird: how financial dynamics bring status, fairness, and entitlement into relationships that are typically supposed to be about trust and affection. Group expenses take all of those dynamics and put them on steroids.

When someone fronts the money, they become the group’s unofficial lender, whether they signed up for it or not. They take on the financial risk, the administrative work of tracking who owes what, and the uncomfortable job of chasing people down for repayment. And in some cases, they get punished for it — viewed as demanding or uptight for asking to be repaid for money they didn’t intend to loan out in the first place.

The person who owes money is often dealing with their own discomfort. They may feel ashamed, or defensive, or like their friend is keeping tabs on them. It creates an uneven power dynamic inside the friendship that neither person asked for and that neither person really knows how to talk about. There’s not really a script for “hey, I love you, but you’re making me feel like a collections agent.”

Money avoidance is a super common behavior, and it plays out here. Someone can’t afford to pay back right away. They feel embarrassed about it. The embarrassment makes them avoid the request. The person waiting for the money interprets the silence as disrespect. The borrower feels even more ashamed and pulls away further. You can see how one transaction can quickly spiral into a larger relationship rift.

Once you get burned, it’s hard to feel generous again. 35% of Gen Z say they’ve chosen not to front money for group expenses because of past payment issues. Which means they may be opting out of the experiences altogether, because nobody wants to be the bank anymore.

I have friends who I would not lend money to under basically any circumstance, because I know from experience that getting paid back will be a months-long ordeal. And that sucks, because it changes the friendship, introducing a calculation into a relationship that’s supposed to be free of calculations.

The low-trust group chat

We already exist in an economy where people constantly feel like they’re being taken advantage of. Corporations use surveillance pricing to charge different people different amounts for the same product. Dynamic pricing means the cost of a concert ticket or an Uber changes depending on how badly you want it. Loyalty programs get worse every year. Every company seems to be searching for one more way to extract value from the transaction: a new fee, a smaller portion, a subscription that’s harder to cancel.

We can tolerate a certain amount of financial bullshit from Ticketmaster because we already believe Ticketmaster is trying to screw us. We do not expect to feel the same way about our friends.

But when social participation increasingly requires consumption, relationships start to feel more transactional. You start keeping score, noticing who always offers to pay and who always waits. You start calculating whether this friendship is worth the back and forth of someone owing you money.

Money has always been a part of friendships, but it’s become more overt: more tracked, more visible, and therefore more loaded. Partly because of the economy, where most people feel financially precarious enough that every dollar carries more weight. And partly how current technology has made every transaction logged and timestamped and visible.

When friendships become transactional, they weaken. And we genuinely need our friendships more than ever. Your friends are one of the most important buffers against loneliness and isolation (which are bad for us mentally and emotionally but also financially!). So it’s even more concerning that certain financial dynamics can actively erode the trust that holds those friendships together.

What’s the point of having friends?

Some lost money is just the cost of having friends. If you’re going to have real, close friendships with people, a certain amount of financial imperfection is going to come with the territory, and trying to eliminate it will make you the kind of person nobody wants to go to dinner with. But not everyone sees it that way.

But it’s harder to embrace a certain level of generosity when everything has gotten more expensive and most people’s financial margins have gotten smaller.

But the answer isn’t to stop being generous or to start Venmo-requesting your friends for $4 coffees. I think it’s to be more honest, sooner, about what you can and can’t afford — and to treat the moment you put your card down for a group as what it actually is: a loan. I wrote about this in an earlier essay, how the best thing you can do for your friendships is be direct about money, even when it’s awkward, because the alternative is resentment that builds silently until the friendship is permanently damaged.

Talk about the timeline for repayment. Be honest about your budget. Pay people back promptly and without being chased. And if you’re the one fronting money, it’s okay to set terms: “I need everyone to Venmo me by Friday,” for example.

The experiences we have (the trips, the concerts, the weddings) are supposed to be the best parts of life. It would be nice if we could figure out the money part without letting it ruin them.

The labor market is cooling — not crashing, but clearly less hot. June’s jobs report came in fine. Hiring is stable but not growing. Nobody’s getting laid off en masse, but nobody seems to be getting poached for a raise either. The vibe from consumer sentiment is the same: fine, but not great.

Meanwhile, Trump said this week that “everybody’s profiting” from market gains, which is technically true if “everybody” means the 1%. Mortgage rates are still stuck in the mid-6% range with no real relief in sight — the Fed may actually hike rates later this year if inflation doesn’t cool, which is the opposite of what most buyers were hoping for.

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Intellectually, I am aware that searching for the long-term health consequences of not sleeping (surprise, they’re negative!) is unlikely to help me fall asleep. But this has become a fairly regular part of my nighttime routine. I work too late, or stay up consuming short-form content on my phone in an effort to “relax,”1 become anxious about how little time I have left to sleep, and then spend the next several hours calculating the damage I am doing to my body by still being awake.

I think of my glorious, never-ending to do list. The emails I didn’t send, the text message I forgot to answer, something vaguely embarrassing I did two years ago. I do defensive simulation2, and consider the possibility that I am falling behind everyone I know, although on what exactly, I couldn’t tell you.

Then I become aware that I am thinking too much, which introduces a new layer of thinking about how I should stop thinking.

I have always been a bad sleeper. Even as a kid, it took me a long time to fall asleep, but during COVID it turned into full-blown insomnia. Some nights, I slept for 45 minutes. Since then, I have tried most of the things you are supposed to try. None of it ever felt like it actually solved the problem.

I often fantasize about being professionally put to bed. I think about those beautiful, mysterious facilities celebrities check into when they are “overwhelmed,” where someone confiscates your phone, cooks all your meals, and tells everyone in your life that you are unavailable until further notice.

You … may be wondering what this has to do with personal finance. Quite a lot, actually.

The burnout economy & you

We’re currently living in what Vox recently called the “burnout economy”. Burnout, importantly, is not simply feeling tired after a difficult week. Jonathan Malesic, author of The End of Burnout, describes it as chronic exhaustion accompanied by cynicism and a sense that your work is no longer accomplishing anything. AKA it’s not something that just magically clears up after one restful weekend.

@zachary_abroadBurnout culture has reached all time levels in the USA, causing people to take vacation days to just … sleep. #burnout #costofliving #broke #movingabroad #jobs

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Burnout has become so widespread that we use the same word to describe both occupational collapse and feeling sort of annoyed on a Tuesday. But the conditions are quite real: growing workloads, chronic understaffing, financial insecurity, fragmented attention and a workday that has expanded far beyond the hours for which most people are technically paid.

This explains why sleep is becoming the health and wellness industry’s newest consumer category (and status symbol). The fantasy of being professionally put to bed has, conveniently, become much easier to buy.

So you want to sleep better. It’s pretty simple. You just need to buy a weighted blanket, sleep mask, blackout curtain, cooling pillow, sleep tracking ring, smart mattress, sleep supplements, meditation app, air purifier, and maybe a white noise machine.

Still struggling? Maybe you need to hire an executive function coach to help you rebuild your planning and focus — abilities prolonged stress tends to destroy. Or maybe you just need a break. Hotels are increasingly offering “sleep tourism” packages built around the promise of doing almost nothing: soundproof rooms, pillow menus, weighted blankets, sleep doctors, AI-powered beds, special teas, breathing sessions, guided meditation and turndown rituals designed to gently escort you into unconsciousness.

We’ve essentially built an economy that works people past their capacity and then asks them to pay for their own rest.

A bad night of sleep has a financial afterlife

My insomnia does not end when I get out of bed. It follows me through the next day, changing what I am willing and able to do.

After a bad night, I am less patient, less organized and much less willing to tolerate inconvenience. I have less energy to cook, compare prices, make decisions, exercise restraint or handle any of the small administrative tasks required to keep a modern life running.

I’ve written previously about the adulting tax: the money we spend buying back the time and executive function that modern life consumes. Exhaustion makes this business model work better. Companies have learned that if they add enough friction, a tired customer will eventually accept the default, pay the fee or simply give up.

That maps pretty neatly onto my own financial behavior. When I am tired, I order food delivery because making dinner — checking what I have, going to the store, cooking and cleaning — feels impossible. I often impulsively book vacations because I am convinced that if I can just get away from my life for a few days, I will return as a fundamentally different person.

I have probably spent thousands of dollars trying to make my exhaustion more manageable, through the accumulated cost of delivery fees, transportation, abandoned returns, trips, supplements, apps and small conveniences that become increasingly easy to justify when I am running on fumes.

Burnout also changes our financial behavior in other ways. People avoid, they procrastinate, they struggle to initiate tasks, they numb themselves or engage in unhealthy coping mechanisms. Or, in my case, they try to work through it, which can temporarily look productive while making everything worse.

The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety cost the global economy 12 billion working days and roughly $1 trillion in lost productivity each year. But individual households absorb the costs first, through lost income, convenience spending, medical care, therapy, time off and all of those small purchases you made.

The job follows you into bed

So why are so many of us willing to keep operating this way?

I have written before about workism, the American belief that a job should provide not only money but proof that we matter. I work, therefore I have value.

Work takes up an enormous amount of our mental and emotional bandwidth. We rely on our jobs for income, healthcare, status, identity, purpose, and future security, so even when we’re not working, we’re often thinking about work, worrying about work, or measuring ourselves through work. This is why burnout is so common.

Plus, in recent years, the modern workday has bled into most of our day. Microsoft described what it calls the “infinite workday”: employees checking email early in the morning, moving through a fragmented day of meetings and messages, and then returning to their inboxes late at night.

Jonathan Malesic, author of The End of Burnout, told me in an interview that we often describe nearly every valuable part of life using the language of employment. Marriage is work. Parenting is work. Mental health is work.

Obviously, all of those things can require enormous effort. But, as Malesic put it, understanding them as valuable only to the extent that they resemble employment is “a real failure of imagination.”

I am a prime example of this. I regularly work 12- or 13-hour days. I work on vacation. When I am not working, I am often thinking about work, which means I can be physically present with my friends while mentally rearranging the next day’s to-do list.

While there are some external pressures driving my workaholism, most of it is internal. I want very badly to be perceived as someone who can do it all: productive, informed, financially responsible, physically healthy, emotionally self-aware, socially engaged, responsive to email.

The problem with wanting to do it all is that “all” does not exist. There is always something else you could be doing, improving, answering, organizing or turning into evidence that you are a serious person.

The economy that exhausts you also sells you the cure

America’s answer to burnout is largely market-based.

You work until you cannot focus, and then hire an executive-function coach. You lose the ability to sleep, then book a sleep retreat. You spend the day sitting under artificial light and the evening under red light because somebody on TikTok told you it will fix your mitochondria or whatever.

Last year, I was talking to a Dutch acquaintance who told me she was on paid burnout leave from her job in Amsterdam. I was shocked that this was even an option.

She was equally confused by my reaction and asked, What do Americans do when they burn out?

I thought about it.

“Keep going?” I said.

In the United States, recovery from burnout often happens while you continue performing the work that caused it, unless you are financially secure enough to quit, take unpaid leave or temporarily remove yourself.

Malesic told me that many people often start focusing on compensation when something else in the job has gone deeply wrong. But “you can’t earn your way out of burnout,” he said.

More money can solve many real problems. It can provide housing, safety, childcare, health care and the financial ability to leave. But it cannot necessarily compensate for work that consumes your identity, violates your values or leaves you unable to participate in the rest of your life.

Some of the most miserable working periods of my life were also some of the most lucrative. Earning more didn’t make me happier, it just made it easier to pay for delivery, vacations and conveniences that helped me maintain it.

We’ve created an economy often built around long and unpredictable hours, understaffed workplaces, financial insecurity, constant availability and a culture that treats exhaustion as a sign of importance. Then we built a consumer market around helping individuals deal with it.

The WHO identifies excessive workloads, understaffing, inflexible hours, low control, inadequate pay, job insecurity and conflict between work and home as major risks to mental health. The logical response would be to change working conditions, and yet most of the cultural messaging is aimed at the individual. You just need to set better boundaries. Or meditate. Improve your morning routine. Buy this red light lamp! Buy this wellness app! Everything will be OK.

Everything feels like a job

Once recovery becomes something you buy, it is only a matter of time before it becomes something you optimize.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the way we have begun treating the self like a startup in need of continuous iteration. The body, in this way, has become the last investable asset. Your appearance, diet, fertility, focus, energy, longevity and sleep are all variables that can allegedly be measured, improved and monetized. There is always another habit to adopt, metric to watch or product to buy.

Sleep may be the purest expression of this logic because it is one of the few things humans are supposed to accomplish while unconscious. And boy, have we managed to make it complicated.

There are readiness scores, sleep scores, sunrise clocks, cooling systems, mouth tape, magnesium drinks, sleepmaxxing routines and “morning sheds,” in which people wake up and remove the masks, wraps, patches, chin straps and pieces of tape they applied before bed.

This is essentially what happened when I tracked my sleep. Every morning felt like I was getting a graded test back. I could wake up feeling physically fine, see a bad score and immediately begin spiraling about what it meant for the rest of the day. Sleep doctors call this orthosomnia: The pressure to improve the numbers can itself create anxiety and worsen insomnia, particularly for people already prone to perfectionism.

The harder I tried to optimize rest, the more work I created for myself.

I used to joke that if I could choose any superpower, I would choose not needing to sleep, like Edward Cullen. Just eight additional hours every day, so I could get more work done. Even in my fantasy of becoming superhuman, the only thing I could imagine doing with the extra life was working more.

How sad is that?

What counts as rest?

I spend most of the day looking at a medium-sized screen and then “relax” by alternating between a smaller screen in my hand and a much larger screen mounted to the wall.

I lie down because I am too tired to do anything else, then spend 45 minutes watching other people reorganize their apartments, perform their routines, improve their bodies and tell me what I should buy.

@katieehann#worklife #office #corporatelife #corporategirlies #9to5

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Because this requires very little physical effort, it feels like rest. But my brain is still taking in information, comparing, deciding and being advertised to. Even outside work, my attention remains economically productive: I am an audience member, a consumer, a data point and a potential customer.

This is not an argument that scrolling is morally inferior to reading Tolstoy beside a lake. Sometimes watching four hours of television is exactly what I want to do, and sometimes that’s fine. But low-effort consumption is not automatically restorative.

I have been thinking about the difference between collapse, numbing and rest.

• Collapse happens when you have exhausted your available capacity and your body effectively refuses additional demands.

• Numbing temporarily makes the exhaustion less noticeable.

• Rest gives some portion of your capacity back: your curiosity, patience, creativity, attention or desire to be around other people.

The same activity can perform any of those functions depending on the person and the day. The question is how you actually feel after you do something. I think for most people, consuming hours of short-form content does not make them feel more alert and awake after.

There’s also a difference between resting and being idle. As one recent essay in The Idle Gazette argues, capitalism can tolerate rest because rest can be justified as maintenance: you recharge now so you can work better later. Idleness is more threatening because it does not promise a return to working. It’s time that does not need to make you healthier, more creative or more productive.

I am not particularly good at that kind of time.

On the rare occasions when I feel genuinely restored, I am calmer and more creative. I am more interested in other people. I can sit through dinner without half my brain shuffling through tomorrow’s to-do list.

I often feel this way on vacation, partly because distance disrupts my routine, but also because vacation provides a temporary narrative that makes rest feel earned. I am allowed to stop because stopping is the official purpose of the trip.

But vacation is not reality. Eventually, I return to the same life, the same habits and the same belief that time not visibly used is time I have somehow wasted.

Going on a sleep vacation is less about lying on a better mattress than it is allowing yourself silence, privacy, time, autonomy and unavailability — the conditions many people need to rest. Except now you have to pay a premium for it.

The unresolved question

I wish I could tell you that researching this changed my behavior. Because as of writing, it has not!

I still work too much. I still interpret a day without visible output as a day I failed to use properly. I still understand exactly what I am doing while apparently remaining unable (or perhaps unwilling) to stop doing it.

The recovery economy is not imposed on us from some random, far-off location. It works because it gives people like me an appealing compromise. I don’t have to actually work less; I can buy something that helps me withstand working more.

I don’t have to question why productivity makes me feel valuable. I can just optimize my sleep, book a vacation or pay for enough convenience to make the whole arrangement temporarily sustainable.

I can criticize the system while continuing to receive status, money and identity from succeeding inside it. In fact, the more successful I become inside that system, the more resources I have to purchase relief from its consequences.

I know by now that my problem is probably not confined to my bedroom. It’s so much larger than that — my relationship with ambition, my feelings about productivity and value, and what defines a truly successful life.

So I’m sort of left with a question I don’t yet know how to answer:

If I know that I need a different relationship with work, am I actually willing to change the life I have built?

Or am I going to just book the sleepcation?

Onto the stories.

Below the paywall:

• They thought they were getting rich on Polymarket, but it wasn’t real

• Brands are hiring people who don’t exist to sell you things

• Should you raid your 401(k) for an emergency?

• A defense of living like Costco people

• Millennials are starting to resent their wealthy boomer parents

• Yes, the Aperol Spritz index exists

• & Applebee’s dollaritas are back. LFG

Read more

This is an objectively stupid concept (and based on the amount of replies, an opinion shared by most of the internet) because taste is not something you can automate or scale. You can’t extract it, codify it, or train a model on it, because taste isn’t a pattern you can reverse-engineer from a dataset of things that have been labeled “good.”

This attempt to automate and commodify taste has released a flood of algorithmically-generated aesthetic content that looks like taste lacks the substance. In the words of writer Emily Segal, it’s tasteslop.

And this flood of slop is making it harder for people to develop the kind of independent judgment that would actually help them spend better, buy less, and stop cycling through consumer identities every 18 months.

Taste is having a fun little moment in Silicon Valley

When AI can seemingly generate most things, what human output is left? The differentiator, says the tech bros, is judgement, or taste, writes Kyle Chayka in the New Yorker.

This is ironically the same industry that has spend decades telling everyone humanities degrees were worthless and that creativity was a nice-to-have in a world that really needed engineers. Our society leans towards tangible, quantifiable metrics of success like profit or utility over creativity and art, which are harder to measure. This is the same logic that powers optimization culture or the focus on income as a sole measure of success.

The more sinister reason behind the Silicon Valley’s desire for taste, Chayka writes: People hate AI and see it as a direct threat to their creativeity and livelihoods, so giving “anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism” helps AI tools seem more palatable to the masses.

So enter tasteslop, or algorithmically generated content that mashes together things that are considered tasteful without any understanding of why those things were considered tasteful in the first place. It’s a veneer, writes Emily Segal, the writer who coined the term.

So what is taste, really?

Taste is discernment. It is your ability to perceive quality, to tell between things that work and things that don’t, and to know why, based on quality and your personal preference (both of which are subjective). Taste is an internal experience, and is cultivated over a long period of time.

Having taste isn’t the same thing as having style, necessarily. You can hire a stylist, you can copy a mood board, you can assemble a nice-looking outfit without having any understanding of why it works. And having taste definitely isn’t always having wealth. We’ve all seen rich people with terrible taste.

Many people misconstrue taste with aesthetic, which I see as the flashy, materialistic, superficial cousin. An aesthetic is a visual or sensory wrapper — a look, a vibe, a style. You can easily adopt an aesthetic simply because it looks good. But your taste is how you make that aesthetic your own. In other words, you can have aesthetic without taste.

Segal defines taste as requiring three things: discernment (can you tell things apart?), pattern recognition (do you know enough history to sense when something is new vs. derivative?), and idiosyncrasy (is your taste connected to specific, personal experiences that can’t be easily replicated?). Taste, she argues, is not a property of objects. It’s a relationship between objects, people, histories, and timing. And it needs to be socially validated (AKA nothing in a vacuum).

Tasteslop is the uncanny valley of taste. It has the right objects, the right color scheme, the right aesthetic — but it just feels a bit hollow, because it is. You see someone’s apartment or outfit and you read it as taste, but what you’re actually seeing is a set of signals that were algorithmically assembled. In other words, you can perform taste without actually having it.

Aesthetic is rooted in consumerism, taste inherently is not. You can buy an aesthetic. You literally cannot buy taste. But our consumer economy is structured to convince you that they’re the same thing.

The reason tasteslop can never actually be taste (no matter how much money you throw at it) is the copying and pasting things that look tasteful is OG the hallmark of bad taste. The whole point is that you figured it out yourself, through a process that can’t be replicated or scaled.

Building taste takes time, which is antithetical to how algorithms work. So what happens is you get a bunch of things that look like taste, which then becomes a commodified, which then becomes oversaturated as thousands of people adopt it as aesthetic, which causes it to lose its original meaning.Tasteslop exacerbates this culture “sameness” Chayka writes about, from the clothes we wear to the buildings we live in to the media we consume.

Concerningly, the online ecosystem could have become so polluted — so full of algorithmically generated content — that it may be eliminating our ability to build taste at all. We’re basically getting incepted 24/7. This, essentially, is the basis for the dead internet theory.

What tasteslop does to your money

Think about how much time you spend on your phone. Now think about what your phone is doing to your sense of what’s good, what’s desirable, what you “need.” Most apps that we interact with have some sort of algorithm, and those algorithms are pushing a constant stream of content (often aspirational, aesthetically-pleasing content) that is influencing our preferences, whether we realize it or not.

What’s insidious about this is that it makes you feel like you’re developing discernment when really the point of view was built personally, for you, by a system that studied your engagement patterns and served you more of what kept you scrolling. It eliminates our ability to develop independent value about what we really value, which is the whole baseline for how we set financial goals and spend our money.

Having taste helps reduce impulsive spending

I’ve written about how so much of our spending is identity spending — buying things not because we need them but because they reinforce a image we have of ourselves or who we want to be. Taste often helps provide a filter to help tell when you actually want an item or when you’re being influenced. When you know what you actually like, you buy things that serve your real life. When you don’t, someone else decides for you. That someone else is often the algorithm.

When you haven’t done the work of figuring out what you actually value, what genuinely interests you, you are extremely easy to sell to. The economy runs on these trend cycles, which essentially depend on people not knowing what they want, whose preferences are responsive to external signals rather than internal ones.

That’s how we get a world where everyone’s apartment looks the same, everyone’s wearing the same five brands, and every six months the whole aesthetic resets and you’re supposed to buy your way into the new one.

People with genuine, independent taste don’t need a trend to validate a purchase and they tend to buy fewer things and keep them longer.

Friction is how you develop taste (and make better financial decisions)

The antidote to tasteslop is friction, or the slow process of wandering, of serendipity of mulling over, of forming opinions, of being wrong sometimes. It develops on a long walk, or in a conversation with a friend, in the middle of a book, during a movie, when you’re bored. Chayka made this point in his New Yorker piece — it’s vital now to actively think about your own taste and separate it from the influence of digital machinery. But that separation requires time, discomfort, and a willingness to not know what you think yet.

Friction also produces better financial decisions. So much of our system is designed to make spending frictionless. Introducing friction back into your financial life is one of the most effective things you can do.

Some of this is practical: deleting saved payment info from your computer or phone, unfollowing accounts that consistently make you want things you didn’t want before you saw them, building a 48-hour rule for any non-essential purchase over a certain amount.

It’s also about how you spend your time. A huge part of developing taste is by spending unstructured time in the world. This is the opposite of optimization, which is why it feels unproductive. Taste requires time that doesn’t have a measurable outcome. And in an economy that has trained us to believe every hour should be monetized or optimized, that kind of time is often difficult to find. You can’t scroll your way into knowing what you like.

So — do you know what you like?

I am certainly not immune to any of this. For one, I make content for algorithms for a living, so I’m constantly navigating the gap between what I’d choose for myself and what I know will perform. I notice the sameness in my own consumption and I participate in it, sometimes consciously and sometimes not. Taste is something you have to keep working at, and the algorithmic environment we live in makes that work harder every day.

Do you know what you like? Can you say why? And did you figure it out yourself or did a feed decide for you?

If you can’t answer that, that just makes you a normal person living inside a system that profits from your uncertainty. But it does mean your spending is being shaped by someone else’s incentives, and you will keep cycling through identities and aesthetics without fully understanding who you are.

The thing that would actually help (slowing down, building friction) is free. It just takes time and friction and the willingness to be bored for a while. Which, in an economy that monetizes every second of your attention, is pretty expensive.

Below the paywall:

• One. trillion. dollars.

• The real reason I think Elon wanted SpaceX to go public

• The joy of missing out on investing

• Polymarket is paying creators to post deceptive videos (shocker)

• A GQ writer bet against her own husband on a prediction market

• Some people are cataloging every single thing they own

• Retired boomers are extremely online

• Rent is so high New Yorkers are living with nuns

• There are seminars for rich kids on how to be rich

• The ultimate recession indicator

Read more

Waiting in line, of course.

I’m already an impatient person, so the epidemic of line culture has become a personal affront. Maybe it’s my fault I live in a neighborhood that’s a cultural destination for pop-ups and trendy restaurants.

But I struggle to fathom that what appears to be a large cohort of the city wakes up in the morning and says to themselves, Wow, it’s so nice outside. You know what I want to spend multiple hours doing today? Waiting in line.

@bentonmcclintockHow long would YOU wait on line for matcha ?! #nyc #lines #matcha #newyork

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It doesn’t matter what they’re waiting in line for, really. It could be frozen yogurt, or venture-capital coffee chain, or stuffed animals, or bagels, or tea or pizza1. If there’s a consumer good that’s algorithmically amplified, someone is going to spend their precious time on Earth standing and waiting to pay for it.

The most egregious example I saw recently was the Rhode pop-up, where people waited for over 10 hours to (unless I’m horribly mistaken) be able to buy a sweatshirt.

Line culture is at best, unbelievably annoying, and at worst, a huge economic problem that’s rooted in the loneliness epidemic and convenience culture, and (yes) has fully reshaped how we spend and value money. Let me explain.

We’ve always been influenced by what other people buy

Most of what we spend money on — outside of rent, groceries, prescriptions, the stuff you actually need to survive — is shaped by our environment. By who we’re around, what we see, what seems normal. I’ve written about this a lot — we use spending to communicate who we are, to signal belonging, to participate in the groups we want to be part of.

Buying the same shoes as your friends, going to the same coffee shop as everyone in your neighborhood, wearing the brand that marks you as part of a particular scene — this is all identity spending, and it’s been happening forever.

The way trends have always worked is that someone discovers something, tells their friends, the friends tell their friends, and a thing becomes popular through a slow, organic spread. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book on this. The whole process was fairly messy and unpredictable and it meant that a lot of different places, products, and experiences could coexist, because discovery was decentralized. There was no single funnel directing everyone to the same 20 spots.

Until now.

The winner takes it all

Over the past decade, social media has completely restructured how we discover things.

@shwinnabegoWe need to discuss waiting in line (in nyc)

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And the algorithm, by design, picks winners. It tests content on small groups, and if it performs, it pushes it to bigger and bigger audiences. The result is algorithmic concentration: millions of people get funneled toward the exact same handful of places.

Maybe you’ve experienced it before, when TikTok blows a place up. When I lived in East Village I had a local bookstore-slash-coffee-shop that I worked at every day, until a few viral posts rendered it uninhabitable.2

Whenever you see a line, or an article about “an impossible reservation,” it creates the impression that there’s a shortage of good places to eat, or drink, or shop.

This is a textbook misallocation of demand. It looks like a supply problem — not enough restaurants, not enough seats — but it’s really an information problem. There is plenty of supply. The algorithm has just convinced everyone to want the same thing.

Kyle Chayka wrote a whole book about this phenomenon called Filterworld — how algorithmic recommendation has homogenized culture to the point where cafés in Nairobi look like cafés in Portland, and every Airbnb has the same furniture. You can find this flattening everywhere, from the media we consume to the places we eat to the technology we use.

Spotify’s Discover Weekly shapes what music you think you like. Netflix’s recommendation engine determines what you watch — and therefore what gets made. Amazon’s recommendations feature drives purchasing patterns across millions of consumers toward the same products.

And this flattening applies specifically to money. These forces reshape how you spend, what you think you want, and whether you can even tell the difference between a desire that’s yours and one that was manufactured for you.

And it changes how businesses operate

When your ability to get customers is dependent on TikTok, you start designing for the algorithm instead of for the people who eat your food.

And a lot of these places are built this way on purpose — because looking like the kind of business that goes viral is also how you look like the kind of business that gets funded. I’ve written about the VC and PE pipeline before — how companies optimize for what investors want to see (growth, hype, branding) rather than what customers actually need (good product, fair prices, a place you’d go back to without posting about it). Many of the places that blow up on social media are hospitality group–backed operations with investor money behind them. The virality is the business model, the algorithm is the distribution channel and the content is the marketing.

The algorithm shapes your desires and then charges you for them

The thing about algorithmic curation is that it doesn’t just show you where to eat or what to buy. It shapes what you want. And then it monetizes the want that it shaped.

We often talk about algorithms like they’re neutral tools that surface things we’d probably like based on our preferences. But your preferences are being actively built by the same system that profits from them. The restaurant you “discovered” on your For You page was surfaced because it drives engagement, not because it’s the best meal you could eat for that price. The product you “stumbled on” was placed in front of you by a system that utilized millions of data points to identify the most profitable thing to show you, specifically.

A study on consumer autonomy and AI-driven recommendations found that while algorithms expand the appearance of choice, they simultaneously create filter bubbles and bias outcomes — reinforcing existing patterns and narrowing your world while calling it “personalization.” Another study on Spotify’s algorithmic curation found that recommendation algorithms reinforce prior preferences, reducing musical diversity and leading to what the researchers called “taste tautology.”

So when you stand in a line for an hour, it feels like your choice. You chose this restaurant, you wanted this, right? But the wanting itself was shaped — or at the very least, heavily subsidized — by a system that has financial incentives to send you there. This is the same model that creates manufactured hype around artists, movies, and product drops: engineer the scarcity, amplify the demand, collect the margin.

And because it all feels like a decision you made freely, it’s much harder to recognize overconsumption when it’s happening. If your taste is shaped by what’s algorithmically served to you, and what’s served is determined by profit incentives, then taste itself becomes a form of consumption.

But then we start doing it to ourselves

At some point, people stopped just responding to algorithmic curation and started running the same logic on themselves.

Sure, it’s easy to brush off someone who stands for 10 hours in a pop-up line to buy a sweatshirt as stupidity, but it sort of misses the point.

Because you’re waiting in line to consume, yes, but you’re also documenting that consumption. And that documentation earns you the possibility of social capital (clout). And so the waiting, itself, becomes consumption.

I’ve written about optimization culture before — the way we’ve started treating ourselves as projects to be measured, improved, and performed. Line culture is the consumer spending version of that same impulse. Where you spend signals something about who you are, and then you document it to prove you were there.

If you didn’t record yourself doing something, did it really happen?

We live in a consumption culture where a lot of that consumption has become content production — and it almost doesn’t matter what you’re actually consuming. A study on social media–centric consumption found that 84% of respondents reported consuming products or services primarily to generate social media content, motivated by the need to signal identity and increase social value. We are experiencing less and recording more, optimizing for a digital audience instead of for ourselves.

And this has a very real effect on how you spend. When you’re choosing restaurants, products, and experiences based on what will perform online rather than what you actually value, you’re making spending decisions on someone else’s criteria — and you’re likely spending more, because the places that are popular charge a premium. The dopamine hit of posting alongside the dopamine hit of spending reinforces the behavior, and the cycle continues.

What dies when spontaneity goes away

@yourbrainonmoneyOn reservation culture, tierfication, and why optimizing every experience is making us lonelier. #tiktoklearningcampaign #learnontiktok

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Ft. a TikTok I made earlier this year on the subject.

There’s a guy on TikTok whose whole thing is trying to walk into restaurants in New York without a reservation, and (surprise, surprise) he often doesn’t get in.

In my opinion, he’s essentially documenting the death of something that used to be normal (and expected!) from living in a city. You could walk around, see a place that looked good, and go in. That was, historically, how people interacted with restaurants, shops, bars, the whole consumer economy. You browsed. You wandered. You stumbled into things. You developed a sense of what you liked through direct experience, not through an algorithm telling you what you should like, but through the slow, messy process of trying things and seeing what stuck.

That’s what spontaneity actually was, economically. It was the mechanism through which people developed independent judgment about what things are worth, what they actually enjoy, and how they want to spend their money. Jane Jacobs wrote about this decades ago — the whole value proposition of cities is that density creates serendipity. The sheer concentration of options means you can compare, experiment, and develop real preferences instead of algorithmically assigned ones.

When every restaurant requires a reservation, every experience requires a waitlist, and discoveries get exclusively filtered through the digital world, you lose that mechanism entirely. Living in the city becomes a curated, pre-sorted experience that’s sort of … boring.

And then it gets lonely

I write about the loneliness epidemic constantly in this newsletter because it is, at its core, a financial problem as much as it is a social one. Lonely people spend more because they’re easier to sell to. Disconnected, dissatisfied people are the ideal consumers because of their isolation, not in spite of it.

Line culture has eliminated the conditions for spontaneous connection — the kind of unplanned, low-stakes interaction that builds social fabric and makes people less lonely. When most experiences require advance planning, a reservation, a waitlist, or an hour of standing in line staring at your phone, serendipity disappears. And sure, you’re standing next to people, but mostly everyone is on their phones.

The infrastructure that manages consumer demand at scale also dismantles the conditions for the kind of connection that used to happen by accident. The economy has built systems to manage human desire efficiently, and the cost of that efficiency is the spontaneity that made both financial autonomy and genuine connection possible.

So, if a tree falls in a forest …

The problem isn’t really individual behavior, it’s more about the system that shapes the behavior. Though I personally would recommend against getting in a line you have no idea what people are waiting for.

Next time you are standing in a line, or booking a table three weeks out, or adding something to your cart because you saw it on your feed — ask yourself: Would you still want this if nobody knew you had it? Would you wait in that line if you couldn’t post about it? Would you go to that place if the food didn’t look as aesthetically pleasing?

If the answer is yes — if you’d still want the thing in a world where no one was watching — then go ahead. Enjoy it.

But if the entire point is the story, the post, the proof that you were there, then I would argue what you’re spending money on is a performance. A performance that your algorithm wrote. That quite an expensive way to live.

Americans have been doing European summers forever, obviously. The past few years particularly involved a flurry of think pieces about “euromaxxing” and romanticizing the European way of life.

But this summer’s desire to sojourn across the Atlantic is less like a vacation and more like an escape plan.

America is having a pretty bad PR moment right now. People who live here are not having a good time. People who don’t live here don’t want to visit. The country that spent two centuries as the place people wanted to move to — the biggest cultural exporter on earth — has become deeply uncool. That’s a sizable shift for a country whose entire brand was aspiration.

You take a country that’s become too expensive, whose promise of upward mobility has broken, filled with political dissatisfaction and intertwined with an intense, exhausting culture of hustle and optimization — and maybe a desire for a European summer is becoming a desire for a permanent European life.

A country built around the rat race

America’s relationship with money is different from basically every other wealthy country’s. Our entire national identity is built on the idea that you can make it here. Upward mobility. Meritocracy. The belief that effort translates to prosperity in a way that’s uniquely American. That story really helps justify a lot of our policy decisions, like the lack of a safety net, pensions and subsidized healthcare tied to full-time employment, zero guaranteed vacation days.

The argument has been: sure, the floor is lower, but the ceiling is higher.

Which did work for a long time and shaped how Americans related to money in a very specific way. Our risk tolerance was higher because the upside felt real. People took on debt for college because college was a path to a better life. People worked long hours because the payoff (financial stability) was tangible.

When people stop believing in that story, the way they think about money and prosperity flips. It also becomes destabilizing to our identities as Americans, which changes how we feel about being here at all.

It’s still technically true that many American salaries are higher on paper. But wealth on paper and wealth in lived experience are very different things. You might earn $120K in New York, but after rent, healthcare premiums, groceries, childcare, student loan payments, and the thrumming dread of knowing that one medical bill could wipe out your savings, it feels precarious. Especially right now.

Compare that to the European model. In most of Western Europe, your healthcare is covered. Your parental leave is measured in months, not weeks. Your vacation time is guaranteed by law, higher education doesn’t come with $100K in debt, childcare is subsidized, retirement is a public system.

When you have a safety net, your relationship to risk changes. You can leave a bad job. You can start a family. You can go to the doctor’s. The cognitive load of just existing is lower, which frees up bandwidth for things like long-term planning, career satisfaction, and — this matters — being a decent person to the people around you. (I wrote about that dynamic last week.)

The things Americans romanticize about European culture — the long lunches, the walkable cities, the café culture, the sense that people have time — those things are downstream of policy decisions. Europeans walk everywhere because their cities were built for people, not cars. They have time for lunch because labor laws mandate breaks and cap working hours. Third places exist because public space is funded and maintained. Case in point:

When Americans romanticize European culture, what they’re often romanticizing is the existence of a functioning safety net.

Which is why people are actually leaving

And this emigration wave is part of a larger trend: America’s population is shrinking. I hosted a video for Dynamo this week about why the U.S. is facing a population crisis unlike any other country’s. Three forces are driving it — falling birth rates, a shutdown of immigration, and a rising wave of Americans leaving the country.

All three are rooted in our current economy. People are having fewer kids because they can’t afford them. Immigration is being cut off by policy. And the people who are leaving — primarily working-age, college-educated, in their thirties — are chasing the version of the American Dream that America itself has priced them out of.

The people leaving are often the highest tax-paying, lowest service-using cohort the country has. And when the people who fund the most services and consume the fewest are the ones who leave, the economy gets worse for everyone who stays.

What we romanticize about European culture is not doing things

Waking up late, lingering at a cafe, smoking a skinny cigarette, having a long, leisurely lunch with your friends, reading on your balcony, working for a handful of hours until it’s time to relax again. The aesthetic of Eurocore, European summer, Euromaxxing, whatever you want to call it — is often defined by absence.

There’s no Notion, or Teams messages or even a laptop. It’s a fantasy rooted in the physical world (nature, books, conversation) in a way that American hustle/optimization culture is not.

Nylon put it well: Europe has come to represent a state of mind rather than a continent. After years of political disappointment and a sense that American culture has gone vacant, many young people are rebelling against being American.

The fact that so many young Americans romanticize European life can be read as a simple aesthetic choice. But as someone who’s written about optimization and how it’s rooted in both economic precarity and American culture, I would argue that it’s actually a coping mechanism (and rational response!) for downward mobility.

I see a longing to live like a European as a rebuke of what the last decade of American culture has told young people to do: optimize everything. Hustle. Side-hustle. (and maybe side-side-hustle?) Build your personal brand. Monetize your hobbies. Track your steps, your macros, your screen time, your sleep.

Many young people are questioning whether the definition of a good life means having a lot of money, and finding new ways to discover contentment outside of making money and consumerism. For some, that means going to Europe.

This is the same impulse behind lazy girl jobs, soft living, the quiet quitting discourse, underconsumption core, the general opting out I wrote about a few months ago.

But take a pure desire for a better life, and capitalism will do what capitalism does and commodify it. Kyle Chayka wrote about this a few years ago — how TikTok’s “eurocore” trend turns the experience of being in Europe into a participatory game, something you perform and share. The desire for less gets repackaged as just another thing to consume.

Not everyone gets a European summer

The European summer — the real one, the one where you actually go and sit in that café for six weeks — is of course a wealth signal. The ability to travel internationally, to take that much time off (or to have flexibility where you can work remotely), to afford the flight when prices are at record highs — is not available to most Americans.

Four in ten Americans have considered moving abroad, but the ones who actually do it skew educated, mobile, and financially stable enough to make the jump.

It’s also worth pointing out that this fantasy is specifically a European fantasy, even though there are plenty of places that offer walkable cities, slower paces of life, affordable cost of living, and strong community. American taste hierarchies tend to put Europe at the top, and that’s rooted in whiteness and colonialism in ways I don’t have space (nor am I credentialed) to fully unpack here.

Essentially, this is a trend that is feasible for a subset of people, that carries a significant amount of privilege, that is shaped by dynamics of race and class.

Is the grass actually greener?

Europe is not necessarily a utopia.

America is not the only country that has an intense work culture or affordability issues. Europe has its own collapsing social contracts, far-right surges, racism, housing crises, youth unemployment, productivity stagnation, and real inequality.

Fantasy tends to be better than reality, which is why there aren’t many expat TikToks that include navigating a foreign bureaucracy, or the isolation of being an expat with no community, or the fact that the charming walkable city also has a ten-month wait to see a specialist.

Plus, uprooting your life and moving isn’t the panacea we often hope for.

Last summer I spent two months in Amsterdam. I arrived feeling burnt out — the kind where you stop being able to tell if you’re tired or depressed or just done with everything. I was going through the beginnings of a breakup, feeling unfulfilled in my job and disconnected from the world. I thought that getting out of New York would reset the neurotic workaholic in me.

And parts of it worked. I biked everywhere. I drank giant lattes. I walked around feeling incredibly short (Dutch people are very tall). I drank natural wine and swam in the canals. It was one of the best summers of my life.

But I was also still working 8-9 hours a day and checking my email at dinner. I was forcing myself into a confined routine to avoid dealing with my emotions. Still carrying all of the psychological stuff I thought a different city would fix.

Towards the end of my stay, I seriously considered moving abroad — even looked up visa requirements, wrote a 12-step plan. But at some point I started wondering if I was trying to build a life for a version of Hanna that didn’t exist.

Something I think about from that summer is how much of what I loved about it was the novelty — the ability to go somewhere and try on a different version of myself for a bit. But it’s different from actually reorganizing your life, which is harder and slower and isn’t very aesthetic.

What we’re actually looking for

It really all comes down to values.

Sure, some people want to be in Europe because they love the culture and the food and the wine. But strip that away and a huge part of this is a fundamental desire for things that aren’t really about Europe at all: flexibility, security, stability, community, time.

The desire to escape the rat race is real, but I think it’s less about geography than it is about the structure of work and meaning. You’re probably drawn to Europe because you want a life where work doesn’t consume everything, where getting sick doesn’t mean thousand-dollar medical bills, where rest isn’t something you have to earn or justify.

Euromaxxing, soft living, European summer, whatever you want to call it — it’s really just an attempt at intentional living. The question behind all of this is really: what do I actually want my life to look like, and is the way I’m currently living giving me any of it?

The macro story is that people are pessimistic and still spending, which sounds like a contradiction. But to me, it’s an example of how people behave when they feel like the rules have changed and they’re trying to either a) genuinely afford the necessities and/to b) spending to feel more in control of their life when everything around them feels increasingly scary/stressful/anxiety-inducing. But why do they feel so sour?

I have a theory about why people feel the way they feel…

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1. Lauren Sanchez (Jeff Bezos’ wife, in case you weren’t aware) making a Schiaparelli gown look like a BCBG prom dress at the Met Gala. (and, TBH, her entire wedding).

2. Trump adorning the Oval Office with gaudy gold accents and building a $400 million White House ballroom.

3. Mark Zuckerberg showing up to his birthday party wearing a giant chain.

4. TikTok stars going viral for their lavish displays of jewelry and shopping hauls (posted under the aptly-named #richtok).

5. Rich women sporting obvious facelifts and proportion-defying boob jobs.

6. Finance bros showing up to their investment banking internships sporting their brightly-colored Rolexes (are they real? Does it matter?).

Answer: They’re all tacky as hell.

I absolutely loved this piece for Business Insider by Emily Stewart about how quiet luxury is dead, how we’ve entered what she calls a “Gaudy Age,” how the aesthetic preferences of America’s richest people have swung hard toward loud and gauche.

Sean Monahan — the trend forecaster who coined “normcore” — named it the “boom boom” aesthetic. Think 1980s power dressing, fur coats, gold everything, McMansions, Y2K maximalism. The Guardian described it as a vibe shift toward the flashy and the sleazy.

As Stewart writes, wealth, taste, status used to be connected, and has recently become more uncoupled as economic inequality has risen. But how does that change the way regular people think about spending, saving, and what a good life is supposed to look like?

The taste-wealth-status loop

But taste, status, and consumption are directly connected to how we spend.

Taste is your set of aesthetic preferences and lifestyle choices — what you wear, eat, listen to, decorate with, spend time doing. Taste is also a social signal, communicating your class, education, and background. It helps tell other people where you sit in a hierarchy, whether you fit in.

Status is your actual position in that hierarchy, your rank relative to other people. I wrote earlier this year about how every minute of every day, a nontrivial part of your brain is devoted to keeping track of how you measure up.

Conspicuous consumption is the bridge between the two. Veblen coined the term in 1899 to describe the practice of buying and displaying things — not because you need the thing, but because being seen with it tells people something about where you rank.

For most of the twentieth century, these three things moved together in a closed loop. If you had lots of money, you used that money to buy expensive things. That communicated to everyone else that you had money (i.e. status symbols). Status also brings access to culture (travel, education, art) which helps you develop taste, which in turn helps reinforce and justify your status and wealth.

This is known as cultural capital. The idea that taste itself functions as a credential. Knowing the right wine, understanding architecture, and being able to evaluate quality all functioned as class markers.

That system was self-reinforcing: The upper classes set the aesthetic standards and the middle class copied them — what sociologists call trickle-down consumption. Of course, for something to be a status symbol there often has to be an element of exclusivity or scarcity, so the goalposts keep moving. Taste created invisible walls between social groups because the things that signaled “good taste” required money and time and education to appreciate. You couldn’t just buy your way in, you had to have the knowledge as well.

That loop — wealth → cultural access → taste → status → legitimacy → wealth — has since disappeared.

What broke the loop?

• The commodification of luxury. The explosion of fast fashion, mass-market “luxury” brands, and the dupe economy meant the appearance of wealth became available to basically everyone.

• The internet collapsed the information gap that used to keep “good taste” gatekept. For example, a 22-year-old in the Midwest can now curate a more sophisticated apartment than a partner at a white-shoe law firm. Knowing what’s good is decoupled from the ability to perform and acquire what’s good.

When taste, wealth, and status become decoupled, it’s really easy to perform the veneer of wealth without the substance. I’ll get back to this in a minute.

Traditionally, when taste signals get diluted, the wealthy pivot to something subtler. Status gets redefined around knowledge, access, and experiences rather than material goods — inconspicuous consumption. This is why a trend like quiet luxury was all the rage.

But now, they’re going loud.

Why loud luxury is hot right now

A lot of the people with a ton of money right now genuinely do not have taste. Many tech billionaires dominating the headlines — Zuckerberg, Bezos — didn’t come up through the old system of cultural refinement. They came up through engineering and venture capital and the specific Silicon Valley meritocracy that actively disdained the humanities.

Stewart’s piece quotes Ana Andjelic: “Those people, it’s the same thing as the robber barons in the Gilded Age — they came into money, but they don’t have taste.” They have so much money it doesn’t matter anymore. They can just move the culture toward them instead of the other way around.

Part of it is structural. Conspicuous consumption increases during periods of high economic inequality. We are objectively in a New Gilded Age, and the aesthetic is matching.

If taste can’t differentiate you anymore, because algorithms give everyone access to that knowledge, then the power move is to signal that you don’t need taste. Status shifts to things like raw economic dominance, platform ownership, political power. This is known as “vice signaling”, or the performative rejection of social norms, because rejecting it is the flex.

It’s the inverse of “virtue signaling”, born out of the anti-woke movement after Trump’s second election. It’s essentially bad taste as a deliberate assertion of dominance. It maps to the depravity economy I’ve written about — the way we've culturally normalized grifting and spectacle as legit ways to build wealth.

As Stewart writes, Trump’s gold-leaf Oval Office sends a message: I don’t need your approval, and I don’t need to pretend I do. And for a large part of the American public that chafes at the snooty, understated elites who they feel have long looked down on them, that loudness is the appeal.

And then the loud and tacky aesthetic at the top cascades into mass consumption patterns via the algorithm and trend cycles.

What this actually does to your money

Taste becomes the way people who lack structural wealth perform class. And this creates a psychological and financial bind where people invest huge amounts of energy and money into curating a life that looks right, because the structural markers of actually having it right — homeownership, retirement security, economic stability — feel out of reach.

But the aesthetic markers of a good life are more accessible than ever. You can buy a designer dupe on the sidewalk in Chinatown, or through fast fashion. You can gain the cultural knowledge of taste through your algorithm. You can put an entire aesthetic life on credit.

Essentially, you can perform the lifestyle without building the foundation underneath it. And the entire consumer economy is engineered to make buying that performance as easy and frictionless as possible.

As object-based signaling collapses, status moves from objects → experiences → access → time. Sure, rich people started dressing more tacky, but they still have (and leverage) status by being chronically offline or having control over their schedule or giving themselves privacy.

All of this, together has consequences on our money behavior:

• It makes comparison much more difficult. Social media has always enabled upward comparison, but the decoupling of status and consumption made that comparison confusing, because you can no longer tell who’s actually wealthy and who’s performing wealth. You may end up feeling behind even when you’re not — because the reference group you’re comparing yourself to is the entire internet, and it’s very easy to lie on the internet.

• When the reward of financial discipline (the visible markers of a good life) is available right now on Afterpay, and the destination (actual security) feels structurally unreachable, everyone stops deferring gratification (aka financial nihilism). This is how you get compensatory consumption, mass consumerism, instant gratification, and the frictionless spending economy.

• In times of economic precarity, consumption has become the place where people can exercise agency. You may not be able to control whether you’ll ever own a home, whether your industry will exist in ten years, whether you’ll even be able to retire — but you can control your wardrobe, or your skincare. And the economy is happy to oblige, because coping through consumption is very, very profitable for the people selling things to you.

The last scarce thing

If good taste is no longer gatekept — if anyone with a phone can learn what’s well-designed, what’s beautiful, what’s worth caring about — that should be a leveling force, right?

And in some ways, it is. But it’s also created a world where the people actively building taste are the ones with the least structural power, because the ones with money don’t seem to care too much about it. They’ve decided curation is for suckers.

This is partly because these same people are the champions, creators, and benefactors of artificial intelligence, a force that’s rapidly democratized taste and flattened culture. Of course the billionaire who stands to make an (additional) fortune is pushing for a tasteless, tacky monoculture, because AI cannot create genuine taste.

It’s now incredibly ironic that the same tech industry (which spent years devaluing the humanities) is now deciding that taste matters. If AI can do everything else, then discernment — the ability to tell what’s good from what’s not, and to know why — is the final moat.

I have a lot of thoughts about that, which I’ll share next week.