I’ve wanted to write this for so long, but there’s so much to say and it never feels complete. I’ve tip toed around it— talking about founder debt, how we are living through a second Gilded Age, “quiet luxury”— but never hit it right on the nose. As I’m learning with writing, more regularly and more seriously, you sort of have to release the hope of ever fully capturing the thing. You will never fully get it all down on paper. Someone will always send you some interesting podcast or deep dive article about it after they read what you hit publish on. Said podcast or article will crack the nut in a way you wish you had in what you wrote. I’m deciding that that’s the beauty of Substack rather than a defect— I get to write you again or post a note and say “so-and-so had a great point to add!” instead of having my thoughts etched on a scroll for all of time. Feeling bad for all the philosophers of yore. I wonder if Socrates was ever like in the shower and suddenly remembered something he didn’t put down on paper in his latest and greatest and was like “fuck! I can’t believe I left that out.” (From what I know about Socrates… prob not!)
Back to the headline, and let’s make this more of a conversation/jumping off point than a defined and finished thesis:
How the hell is everybody living like this?
I look around and I see myriads of people that I have to assume are living well above their means— the rise of “luxury” as a trend (as if real luxury could ever actually just be a trend!), the consumerification of every single social media platform (TikTok’s transition to full on store with TikTok Shop looking like it was always the endgame), every single thought or suggestion from influencers big and small pushing product or affiliate links, the absolutely obscene costs of living in America’s biggest city… I’ve been looking at all and wondering to myself— particularly when I made a founder salary, which is to say none at all— how are you all doing this? How are you all living like this? Is everyone just saddled with crushing personal debt?1
All I see, all around me, all the time, is money. Money lit on fire!
I looooove shopping. Always have! I don’t think there is anything morally terrible about loving shopping or fashion, even from a sustainability standpoint. Thrifting is shopping too, and New York has no shortage of vintage shops & markets. I make a living and have always made a living working at or with brands that want to sell you stuff. I’m okay with that. I genuinely believe there is nothing wrong with buying yourself a new bracelet or body lotion or dutch oven to bake bread in.
On the flipside: I feel kind of disgusting about what the algorithm has done to our taste, how we spend money, and how valuable we’ve made things seem as a society that people have hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal debt (not your mortgage! not your car payment! but stuff..) that they will never be able to pay off. I’ve mentioned my founder debt before, and while I am in a good place now (thanks fully to the support of my friends/partner/family who all helped set me up to pay things off effectively), I know what it is like to be absolutely fucking crushed under the shoe of debt & interest. Nothing is worse. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m glad it happened to me and I struggled as hard and as much as I did with debt, despite having had a really healthy relationship with it and with money before I became a founder: this is how most people in America are living and will be living, pinned beneath the heel of debt they may never wriggle out of.2 Having a taste of that first hand, as I’m sure some of you do too, changes the way you see things. I understand intimately how when you have no money and lots of debt, it is almost easier to spend money on things that you think will feel good in the short term, just to get by— clothes that will make you feel like the put-together career-person that you are, decor that’s going to make your workspace better so you can make more money, clothes for the life you’re going to have when you’re successful. Or just the expensive pedicure because you’re so fucking exhausted and burnt out from drowning. 3
wrote this well in How are people affording fashion?. I am inundated with links to buy items that cost more than anything I’ve ever spent on a single item— except, perhaps a plane ticket or a car— at an alarmingly constant rate. Is everyone really buying those $900 High Sport pants? (God bless for actually doing some real journalism on whether or not those insanely expensive pants are good or if the Old Navy version would do just as well. She also, importantly pointed out that the influencers who are so effectively “pushing” these $900 pants all make 15% commission on them. If you can sell 40 people those pants, that’s over $5K in your pocket, easy— but are regular people realizing that the creators they follow are profiting off of not just their recommendations, but off of followers spending above their means?)The slow, steady ease with which influencers have usurped magazines and fashion editorial in the last decade have left us with a pretty useless Vogue, and instead, plenty of rich thin women (of the exact same stock that would have been able to work for Vogue back in the day, with paltry pay) telling us via Instagram, TikTok, and increasingly, Substack, what fashion is and looks like. (You could certainly argue that social media has also liberated us from just “one” look, body type or type of fashion, but I’d push back— thin white women still dominate this space.)
Social media has more than shifted the way people spend money so as to better display it to their followers. Over the top closets are one thing, and I do feel the designerification has been getting particularly bad lately— The Row tote, Khaite jeans, the High Sport pants, The Row jellies— do regular people need these things? They are all, of course, things you could still find well-made and more reasonably priced versions of, without the brand name4, so is this a textbook case of lifestyle creep? It’s easy to say that I don’t think regular people need to spend $1,200 on stretchy pants. But what about travel? What about experiences? Who is to say who should or should not spend a grand a night to stay at Il Pelicano?
Not me. But social media drove this shift too: how the hell has suddenly everybody been to Italy?
I don’t say that so that someone can school me on low-cost ways to travel to Italy. (That said, I will accept those tips if you have them, I’d genuinely like to go but have found it cost-prohibitive.) More so, the point is that travel has become its own out of control wildfire in the showing-off-on-social-media era— why else, then, are so many people going to the same places? Going to the Amalfi coast is like the High Sport pant of travel. Everyone’s going, so why not you? Who cares if it’s a little pricier than you can handle right now— charge it.
I think in many ways it comes back to influencers: we watch them live lives that are well above the means they had when they got started or even when we discovered them.5 But we’re missing the context: *we*, the followers, the viewers, are the essential mechanism that makes it possible for our favorite influencer’s trip to Positano to pay for itself. Our attention buys the ads, or the comped resort stay at that famous hotel. Our purchases using our favorite influencer’s affiliate links pay for the designer bags and the $300 skincare, all so you can see those things in your feed a week later, hear how amazing or efficacious they were and click to buy again, repeating the cycle. Don’t get me wrong: influencers deserve to make a living too, and I have no problem with someone getting a kickback for their recommendations. But have we lost the plot when we assume that we can live the same quality of life as the influencers and creators we follow?
If you spend time on the internet, the speed of trend can start to feel dystopic, if not disgusting. There’s a homogeneity that can be really alarming. With that homogeneity comes the loss of individual taste, identity, critical thinking. (Like, should I be buying $900 pants when my rent just went up? Do I like these, or do I like that I would have “the thing” that everybody else has or is talking about?) I’ve yet to finish reading Kyle Chayka’s new book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, but I listened to his appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast recently and am thrilled he’s putting words to the phenomenon that has made living the post-Covid 2020’s so… icky.
I consume a lot of fashion and travel content, so I’ve felt like I’ve had a front row seat to the “how the fuck are you all affording this?” party, but thankfully some of my favorite content— food!— is mostly spared. I’m sure there are other corners of the internet where folks are feeling it too, curious if you think I left anything glaringly obvious out.
I think of myself as maybe a little more privy than the average consumer to the mechanisms through with brands make money, influencers make money, and brands make money through influencers— even with that context, I sometimes have to shake myself out of a reverie of want. I catch myself wanting something just because I see it over and over and over again in the fashion Substack echo chamber, and only a week or two after I’ve hovered over “add to cart” do I find myself actually asking myself if I even like the thing, if it will even look good on me, if it’s something I need as bad as the things I desperately do need but have put off buying so as to be responsible with my cash flow. The answer has been, almost unequivocally, no.
That scares me for girls younger than me6… or who haven’t actually started getting charged interest on their credit cards. What’s going to happen when the house of cards comes tumbling down? What is going to happen to all these young people with lifestyle debt? Where will the money to pay it down or off come from? And will they— we— ever actually be able to buck the defining trend of the roaring twenties thus far: spending above our means?
I don’t know the answer. I’d love to know your thoughts— I’ll gladly start a comment thread or chat group for us if you have two cents to add. 🤍
Yes. Millennials have more debt than ever before— and worse, they’re behind on it.
For an incredible representation of debt, watch the latest season of Fargo. It’s about debt in the macro, not like you’re watching the repo man in every episode. But it’s really, truly, incredibly good commentary on the Trumpian, Robin Hood, outlaw & in-law world we live in. It is also just entertaining to watch, which is actually what matters most in content and what I fear we have lost sight of as a society.
For the folks who are in crushing debt because of medical reasons or accidents or traumatic events— I am so sorry. This is also not about you. Today I am really writing about people who are in debt because of dining out at the hot new restaurant they could barely snag a reservation for on Resy, or because they bought the new Loewe bag. These are such dramatically different reasons to use your credit card, and I’m compartmentalizing today— you are in a totally different bucket.
I feel lucky that Instagram was so nascent when I was broke and 20-23 living in New York. I didn’t have lifestyle creep, we all were happy living in shitty apartments and eating dollar slices of pizza. There was even a glamour to all being broke together. This was the GIRLS era. I don’t think things work that way now… I think we can look to Stanley bottles as a great example. Girls today are even being told what type of cup they need to buy… and it’s $50. For a cup. (I’m not talking shit, I have one.) You get the point.
I thoroughly enjoyed this newsletter, thank you! I feel like you and Elle have let the cat out of the bag by just saying what most of us are thinking. I admit that I’m not even on traditional social media but Substack chats have been a mindfu*k of people asking about high dollar items and expensive vacations. Is everyone RICH or living outside their means or what?!
I think we, also, collectively need the reminder that influencers lives are paid for by the layperson. When I found out that if you click an Amazon link you are cookies for 24 hours for said influencer to make a commission, I stopped clicking all links!
It’s a wild world out here and I’m just a fashion-loving girl on a budget trying to navigate it.
this was so great. you hit on so many good points! i could identify with so much especially as someone who was both a founder and a young person that racked up a ton of credit card debt because I felt like I should be living a kind of lifestyle since everybody else was. this is the question that's been on mind lately: what does it reveal about our economy and society when, despite top-tier education and corporate backgrounds, some women are achieving greater success and a better quality of life by filming themselves in clothes? It's not about passing judgment on influencers or people who love clothes; it's about acknowledging that in 2024, the most lucrative path for a woman might involve portraying a socialite persona. It feels like a societal letdown for women, especially because the driving force behind this trend is often large companies—paying for partnerships, brand deals, and affiliate commissions—to then sell the illusion of an enviable lifestyle to everyday people. Yet, it's likely that many will never attain that lifestyle due to the societal and structural failures that have perpetuated this situation. thanks so much for the mention, really looking forward to reading more of your newsletter <3