The future feels uncertain. You buy something. It does not help. You buy something else.
Literal meaning: Doom spending describes the pattern of making purchases — typically non-essential, often small — as an emotional response to anxiety about the future: economic precarity, climate anxiety, political uncertainty. The spending provides brief relief, sense of control, or momentary pleasure in a context that feels uncontrollable.
Origin: The term gained currency from around 2023–2024, as research documented correlations between economic anxiety and impulse spending among younger generations. A Credit Karma survey (2023) found that 27% of Americans reported spending money to cope with news-driven anxiety. The term was widely discussed in personal finance and mental health journalism. It builds on the broader concept of emotional or stress spending documented in consumer psychology from the 1990s.
Purchasing as a coping mechanism for future anxiety — where the consumer economy provides short-term relief from the conditions it helps to produce.
The Appeal: Doom spending addresses real anxiety with a real mechanism. The brief sense of control that a purchase provides is psychologically genuine — the dopamine response is real, the momentary relief is real. For students in genuinely precarious economic situations, small discretionary purchases may be the few areas where agency is available.
The Friction: The relief is temporary and the cost is real. Dopamine Feedback Loops — variable reward schedules — are what makes the pattern compulsive: the relief from one purchase is followed by the return of anxiety, which triggers another purchase. Hustle Culture creates the anxiety the spending responds to: the constant pressure to perform, produce, and succeed generates background stress that spending temporarily addresses. FOBO — Fear of Better Options — is the related pattern: purchasing as a response to the paralysis of infinite choice. The consumer platforms that facilitate impulse purchasing — one-click buying, targeted advertising — are optimised to capture precisely this emotional state.
Why This Matters: Doom spending makes visible the connection between future anxiety and present consumption — and the specific way that consumer platforms profit from that connection. Once you see the emotional mechanism, the purchase is a different kind of decision.
Related terms: Hustle Culture · Dopamine Feedback Loops · FOBO · Comparison Culture · JOMO · Digital Detox
Read more:
- Forget doom scrolling, Americans now doom spend to cope with stress, Dickler, J., Credit Karma.
- Overcoming Financial Anxiety and Doom Spending, Klontz, B. (2024), Psychology Today.
- Doom Spending Behaviour Among the Digital Generation: The Role of Financial Literacy and Social Media Interaction, Husnayetti, H., Novida, I., Junarti, J. & Yudiman, A.T., (2025) Journal of Economics, Finance and Management Studies.