#9 The Long Squeeze: Recession Indicators and the YOLO Economy
Out = austerity. In = first class flights, vegetable bouquets, and not giving a fuck. As the Recession Indicator meme rips through culture, we're redefining economic life under late-stage capitalism.
We’re not in a recession per se, rather a constant indicator of one. The internet is satiated with memes that talk to an economic reality that has become both absurd and ubiquitous. What was once the reserve of economics and analysts, the ideas of our financial future from the frugal to the frivolous, has become part of our daily discourse. Recession isn’t just for the hushed tones of the board room, but rather what we wear, what we eat, what we dance to, what we post about. Where as in previous years of downturns we’ve looked to long periods of austerity, societally we’ve decided we’ve had enough. If we’re going to lose our economic futures, we might as well look good whilst we’re doing it. Yes, the economy as we know is dead, and we’ve decided to throw the mother of all wakes. We’re bringing £15 bottles of wine, our best vintage fit, and a dance-pop playlist that wouldn’t sound out of place blaring from my plug-in computer speakers in 2008.
The traditional markers of recessions - belt-tightening, coupon clipping, general frugality - feel distinctly out of step with today’s response. Cultural commentator Faris Yakob wrote a 2023 essay entitled the YOLO economy, in which he talks to the models that have predicted every recession since 1955 being thrown out the window. Generations with purchase power have seen what the future holds, and instead of holding back, decide to take out a credit card and just say ‘fuck it’. Scarred by instability but numbed by repetition, we’re seeing a kind of pragmatic hedonism in response to the doom boom. If home ownership is continuing to feel like a fantasy to huge swathes of the population, and retirement an abstract dream, why wouldn’t you book the flight, buy the shoes, or spend £50 on a bang average pub lunch in a building built to be the backdrop for one crap Instagram shot of a Guinness?
Economic markers haven’t necessarily disappeared, but instead become memetic, with “Recession Indicator” being the FYPs current darling. Gallows humour has become quite the mainstay of the modern discourse, but this one is translating to micro-behaviours. Smoking, inexplicably, is cool again. The Instagram account ‘Cigfluencers’ has doubled its following in the last year. Equally, the cult classic girlscarryingshit frequently showcases the ‘shit’ being a fag. Equally, in a recent episode of Pop Culture podcast Shameless, the hosts took to a segment to detail the rise in $1000+ plane fairs become du jour - with influencer press trips to tour the cockpit and ‘come fly first class with me’ videos creeping up. The idea that people would willingly spend double, triple, quadruple the price of economy for a few hours of luxury they can document, feels like the perfect illustration for our collective malaise. And perhaps, most damnably, 62% of all attendees of this years Coachella paid their way there via a payment plan. The ability to temporarily prove we can transcend our economic limitations may seem like the opposite of a recession indicator, but in its defiance it still acts as one.
It’s not just our behaviours, but also what we’re consuming as well. It was hard to escape the all-encompassing bogie green of brat summer last year, but the dance- pop Charli XCX has ushered into the mainstream is here to stay, with Lady Gaga releasing records similar to the genre, and club classics and raves coming back into the fore after years of polished, clean pop. In A24’s newest film, Warfare, the opening scene shows a group of Navy SEALs watching all 5 minutes of Eric Prydz ‘Call on Me’ music video, the music so loud it’s almost deafening, playing like a fever dream of post-apocalypse escapism. And music to my personal ears, after years of hoping and praying, cult classic comedy trio Sally Phillips, Doon Mackichan and Fiona Allen are bringing back their seminal show Smack the Pony. Nostalgia is washing over the nation as we crave the comfort for a time when things were not perfect, but only felt this bad.
There is logic to this defiant optimism. Collectively we’re asking - if the system isn’t working for us, why should we play by its rules? People have stopped measuring success by savings, or long-term investments, or climbing the greasy pole of the career ladder. Hustle culture is being left in the dust. Girlboss is seen as gratuitously cringe. No one really cares about the big car or the big house or the big wedding anymore, but instead moments of unadulterated, fleeting joy and aesthetic experiences. I’ve been long playing with this idea I’ve dubbed the Perello Effect - the idea that much like the hemline or lipstick indicator of yore, we’re buying £10 tins of olives to demonstrate taste and coolness. It’s why food and fashion have come together in such an all-encompassing way of late - if people can’t pay for the product, they might pay for a plate - a shortcut into luxury. This Perello Effect paved way for the rise of interiors, home cooking, and hosting as lifestyle in culture. Recently, style icon Laura Jackson flanked the front pages of The Times style supplement with the headline “Does Laura Jackson have the coolest lifestyle in Britain?”. Laura’s lifestyle comprises of immense table scaping, filling her house with multitudes of guests, finding smart interior and food hacks - and the article resoundingly said ‘yes’ to all of this. With the art of hosting taking such a serious space in society after years of eating out taking centre stage, its hard not to see this particular ‘recession indicator’ as a joyful one. I recently saw a TikTokker create a vegetable bouquet to give to her friends who were hosting as a sustainable, useful gift. The top comment? “Recession Indicator”.
The culture isn’t just coping though. It’s actively critiquing through memes, sardonic humour, and low-stakes joy. Resistance is often seen as this big ball of fiery and revolutionary ire, but under the nouveaux nihilistic world of ‘nothing matters, so nothing matters’, we’re actually seeing a soft, funny, middle finger to the system. In the face of systemic failure, we have created our own rules and our own language - and much like our mother tongue, this one is poetic, absurd, and unpredictable. The surreal syntax.
Ding! It’s almost half-way through the essay and I haven’t mentioned my lord and saviour, Mark Fisher. So here he is, in all his brilliant glory. He called this out in his book Capitalist Realism, in which he critiqued the concept of Margaret Thatcher saying there was no alternative to the all-encompassing, omniscient economic structure. It’s under this concept that we struggle to see any future, any different path, and so we become obsessed with remixing the past instead of inventing the new. This is why we see the endless loop of fashion and music trends, hauntological, nostalgic and self-referential. In his book Ghosts of My Life, he posits that if you were to play someone in the 70s music from the 90s, it would sound so weird and so futuristic it would certainly disorientate the listener. But if you played Chappel Roan’s Hot To Go to me aged 10, I don’t think I’d blink an eyelid. Nor would I be any more surprised to see someone with chunky highlights and an iPod now than I would in 2007. Our psychic reputations are mourning futures that never arrived, but this doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. Its through this lens that we can pick and choose what we liked from the past. We’re actively slowing down, with hustle culture being sneered at, with Pilates becoming the princess movement over the HIIT curse of Barry’s Bootcamp. People are going outside and touching grass and leaving their phone inside. They’re learning how to make bowls out of clay. They’re actively booking holidays where someone will take their tech and lock it away. They pay people to do that! And then they post about it online straight after.
These contradictions are sort of the point thought - societally, we aren’t ready to move off-grid. We are always at once both deeply online and existentially offline, consistently aware of imminent collapse and laughing in its face. Whilst seeming like a dated concept now, we’re only 2 years out of Goblin Mode being the core marker for our perpetual brain and bed rot. Under that meme thought their surfaced a more complex emotional truth - one that we are scared, we are disillusioned, and we’re trying to find control in anyway we can. Through dark humour we find the cure, and through absurdity we find a lifeline. This is why the surreal plays such a pivotal role in our creative outputs.
If this isn’t the end of late-stage capitalism, it sure FEELS like the end of late-stage capitalism. Perhaps this is just another pivot in another endless loop. There is a theory called Critical Slowing Down, which posits that as a system approaches is natural tipping point, it recovers more slowly from big swinging disturbances. This seems pretty apt in a very slow, strange and saturated world, where recession no longer is a sharp, definitive event, a fast train to instant austerity. Instead, it’s a long squeeze, a pressure cooker where joy and despair live side by side.
In the end, the economic future may be unthinkable, utterly hard to predict, even harder to envision, but the cultural present has this oddly positive vibrancy wrapped around the perma-crisis. When we envision societal collapse, we’re like that of the Doom Boom squad, envisioning fires and riots - but instead, we’re acting more like the frogs in the pot that slowly boils. Finding joy in the slow and soft, we’re accepting our fates, slowly, stylishly, and semi-ironically. We’re spending £15 on a bottle of unfiltered wine, or £15 on a pilates class, or £15 on well, anything, because you can’t leave the house and not spend £15 now. We watch videos as we lie in bed for hours about peoples 5-9, the hours they have to themselves, with little care about what they do with the inverse of that. We know that we exist under a broken system, and this time round we’re saying “no actually, we won’t be broken with you”. The markets plunge, but we’re staying afloat.
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The full list of references in this article are as follows:
The Yolo Economy - Faris Yakob, WARC 2023
Girls Carrying Shit - Instagram
There’s No Landing This Plane - Shameless Podcast
Does Laura Jackson Have the Coolest Lifestyle in Britain - The Times
Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? - Mark Fisher