Gen Zers are increasingly looking for ways to prioritize quality of life over financial achievement at all costs. The TikTok trend of “soft life”—and its financial counterpart “soft saving”—is a stark departure from their millennial predecessors’ financial habits, which were rooted in toxic hustle culture and the “Girlboss” era.
“Soft savings” is, to my understanding, the opposite of savings – it’s about investing resources into making yourself happy now versus forever growing your savings for some future good time. It sounds ridiculous because they’re hitting on good critiques of capitailsm, but using the language of capitalism itself.
I think this really bolsters my argument that the self-diagnosis trend might be better understood as young people being critical of society, but their education system completely failed them. Since they lack access to critical, social, and political theory, they don’t have a vocabulary to express their critiques, so they’ve used the things we have taught them, like the language of mental health, to sorta make up their own critical theory. When mental health experts are super concerned and talk about how all these teens’ self-diagnoses are “wrong,” they’re missing the point. It’s a new theory using existing building blocks.
Very interesting way of looking at this. Thanks for that comment. Definitely food for thought.
I‘m sorry but…girlboss and hustle culture? I only remember “YOLO” and “treat yo self” financial habits. Do I have to turn in my millenial membership card somewhere now?
I noticed a lot of 92-96ish babies feel the same way. Either they agree with most of both Millennial stuff and the Gen Z stuff, or they really don’t relate to either for whatever reason.
Grew up on the whole “bootstraps and fuck you” because that’s how my family was raised (staunchly god fearing), now I’m like “I’ve upcycled my bootstraps to a noose because fuck this capitalistic hellscape”. But I don’t know where that puts me xD
“god fearing” means their worldview is one of dictators and dictated, and even their spirituality is based around the ultimate dictator in the north korea in the sky
Not gonna lie, millennial here, despite normally preferring scientific explanations, I’ve been seriously considering getting into witchy stuff. Sounds like fun and seems like a way to feel like I actually have some control over this insanity; and anything that doesn’t fit can be chalked up to evil hexes or some shit.
Edit: PREFERRING not PREVENTING fuck you autocorrect.
An idle thought: who says you can’t have a foot in both worlds? While ‘witchy’ points of view typically obscure material causes and effects, the rituals and concepts they provide can still be useful. The trick is recognizing what their utility actually is for you, and where a more rational pov needs to be deployed.
I’ll give a pretty tame example of the idea here: horoscopes. I do not believe in astrology, in the sense that the position of stars and planets have a real, direct influence on human activities. But when I read a horoscope, I typically find myself looking at events from a different perspective, and it may cause me to notice something I otherwise would not have. That thing may be legitimately advantageous, and I may pursue action to my benefit because I noticed it. I should pursue that action rationally, with an eye to protecting my safety broadly understood (financial, bodily, etc.) and maintaining a level of risk I can legitimately manage - but I wouldn’t be acting on it at all without that moment of magical thinking.
Now, on the other hand, if I just blindly accepted that what I noticed due to the horoscope is truly pre-ordained, and therefore I should pursue action whole hog without any risk assessment or any rational thought, more likely than not I’d find myself in a shitty set of circumstances.
It’s a very fine line to walk, and too many people fall off into really wacky, dangerous or delusional shit. But if you can strike a balance, you may find yourself in far more unique, beneficial position than you would be otherwise, simply by widening the field of stuff you’re watching for.
Tl;dr: Deliberate, controlled fancy can be useful if you’re careful to not let it fuck with your ability to eat, cloth, house and protect yourself and your loved ones, or fuck with members of your community. You also need to take pains to not confuse those moments of fancy for objective truth.
/wook-rant
Honestly, I’ve seen multiple takes on what “magic” is; with some people describing it in more traditional terms (spells, hexes, potions, etc), and others basically saying, “it’s any time action A seems to lead to outcome B, but the mechanism is unknown”. The latter I’m fine with and actually encourage, because tbh, the physical world is fucking weird.
There’s so much we don’t know about physics that putting some cool rocks and a stick in a letter and mailing it to a friend might legitimately bring them good fortune, either because you’ve improved their mood (most likely), leading their brain to being more positive and efficient, or maybe something you did in the process happened to kickstart a row of dominos that happened to bring them good fortune. It doesn’t really matter that you don’t know the exact step that caused it, just that one of the steps seemed to do it and that’s fine.
I suppose you could take a scientific approach to it though and study what exactly you did and how it seemed to effect the outcome of your magic. Who knows, might stumble across a new scientific law in the process.
On a side note regarding horoscopes, I don’t believe in them except that I sometimes wonder if they’re the result of patterns, which then became self-fullfilling prophecies. Astrologer notices that X happens more often when A is high in the sky and B is near the horizon, and predicts the occurrence of X. X occurs and people believe the astrologer. Next time A is high in the sky and B is near the horizon, the astrologer once again predicts X, and the people, as part of their belief, unintentionally cause X to happen again. Same thing with Chinese birth years. I wonder if it’s the result of people noticing patterns in society and then laymen misattributing it to magic.
You don’t need to actually believe something just to walk the walk. That’s all roleplay is. If it looks cool or sounds fun, dive on in.
I don’t understand what witchy means, especially in this context. Can someone please explain?
At the risk of annoying people for copy-pasting my reply to someone else:
That’s a really good question, and I’m not really sure. Part of it is the wide variety of interpretations on what it is which makes it hard to decide where I’d go with it. I think part of it would be just finding neat objects, whether they’re rocks, sticks, gems, whatever, and attributing some kind of secret power to them. Tbh I think as someone else pointed out, it’d really be more of a roleplay thing than actual belief.
Part of what’s eating me up right now is the realization that under known physical laws, free will doesn’t exist. You don’t make choices, you don’t make decisions, these were all things the universe already knew would occur because at the end of the day, you’re a big chemical reaction. All those bigots, all those dictators, they never stood a chance. They never became good people because the conditions necessary for them to change never existed; it was merely an illusion.
I kinda want to believe in free will again, but I’m not sure how to convince myself that free will is possible. I’ve even explored the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, but I realized that even then, free will is an illusion. If every possible reality occurs, then does free will actually exist? Probably not.
I know that doesn’t fully answer your question, but that’s kinda where my brain is at right now.
If people who believe in a magical bearded sky father manifesting their bedtime wishes and helping devotees win sporting events and awards are somehow taken seriously, well, I feel perfectly fine choosing to believe in free will.
Humanity didn’t have a clue about all kinds of shit just a few generations ago. It’s quite possible that there is more to the world than what we currently understand and that we really are more than some crazy elaborate finite automata. It’s an egotistical blindspot to think that there are no more unknown unknowns.
I mean I save plenty, but there’s no way in hell I’ll ever be able to own a home without a serious bubble burst somewhere. I have a career in a skilled field that pays generally pretty good, but even a 1 bed apartment where I’m at requires a six figure income let alone a house.
Of course I’d be down to buy a studio apartment since I really don’t need that much space, but zoning laws prevent anything like that from being constructed unless I move into the city which I don’t want to do (it would just be even more expensive anyways.)
I don’t buy into the “just don’t save, treat yourself” mentality since it’s so obviously self destructive, but unless something big happens it’s unlikely that the major life milestones will ever be within my grasp. That really does put a damper on any hope for the future and makes dating and marriage seem pointless too. Can’t even afford a place of my own how am I going to support a wife and maybe kids? Assuming she doesn’t work which she would almost have to anyways.
I was hoping that in the wake of an entire generation having a fraction of the buying power of their predecessors we would see a ton of businesses collapsing and people would realize how stupid of an idea reducing earning potential and kneecapping everyone with five times the cost of education was, but unfortunately I’ve seen how poor of consumers most people are and they’ll keep these shitty businesses alive due to entitlement that they deserve to live luxuriously instead of letting them die to prove the point that we don’t have enough money to survive.
makes dating and marriage seem pointless too. Can’t even afford a place of my own how am I going to support a wife and maybe kids? Assuming she doesn’t work which she would almost have to anyways.
You should date to enjoy someone’s company (or find someone who’s company you enjoy). That’s the point. It doesn’t have to have a larger point where anything not getting you closer to marriage and kids is a waste of time.
I don’t know about the point of marriage and kids, those have pretty personal motivations, but it would be a shame to let buying a house be the gatekeeper. You can have a very happy marriage in a rented flat. You can raise lovely children without owning a house or even having a great financial outlook. Sharing expenses with a significant other who has similar values can be a huge financial boost (on the flip side, marrying the wrong person can lead to financial ruin). Like don’t have 20 kids that you can’t afford to feed, but don’t feel like you have to be wealthy to have a family, if that’s what you really want out of life.
Finally, almost an entire generation that recognizes playing the owner’s rigged game just makes you a sucker.
Subsist and save your entire life, conflating the pressure to be miserable living for rich owners who don’t care to know your name with being “responsible,” as they’ve propagandized most to believe, and for what?
If you don’t get hit by a bus or a tumor getting there, to be a withered husk in one of our many almost-dead communities, thrown away by family too busy playing the same rigged game you did to care for you? Sitting in front of a TV you can’t see clearly, too broken from work and time to do the things you always told yourself you’d get to do one day as your reward for studiously toiling for entitled sociopaths barking orders remotely from their lives of perpetual vacation that you were trained from Kindergarten to live most of your waking life for like a good lil’ doggy?
Hard Pass🖕
Molly Barth is a senior cultural strategist at Omnicom’s cultural consultancy sparks & honey.
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