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.

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.

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