Rakib Hasan Alif

At 1:42 a.m. Akshara reaches for his phone. The scroll is the same as every night. Another LinkedIn post about layoffs at a Dhaka tech company. Another Facebook debate over BCS recruitment quotes. Another update from a cousin preparing to leave the country. His chest tightens the way it always does. He is in his final year. And the question that won't leave him alone is what happens after this? Twenty minutes later, almost without thinking, he has ordered a pair of headphones that he had never intended to buy. Using a card he is still paying off from last month. For a moment, the purchase offers a small sense of control. The relief lasts about as long as the checkout animation. This is not a one off lapse in discipline. It is a pattern now recognized well enough to have a name, doom spending. 

Doom spending differs from ordinary retail therapy in one respect. Retail therapy is usually episodic. A rough week may lead to an impulsive purchase and brief sense of relief. Doom spending runs much deeper. It is shaped not by the frustrations of a single day but by years of economic uncertainty and persistent anxiety about jobs, money, and the future. This creates a cycle in which consumption becomes a recurring attempt to ease fears that never fully disappear. Underlying this behaviour is what some behavioural economists have begun to describe as financial defeatism. A quiet conviction that long term goals like owning a flat, building saving, retiring with dignity are no longer realistically available. Then there is little point organizing once's life around them. Saving, once regarded as a sign of responsibility, start feeling pointless. 

What makes this significant is that mechanism behind it is well understood not mysterious. At its core lies hyperbolic discounting. A cognitive bias that leads people to overvalue an immediate reward against future one, even when the future reward is objectively larger. A flat ten years from now struggle to compete with a phone case today, especially when the future itself feels unreachable. The second mechanism is compensatory consumption. When someone has no real control over larger forces such as hiring freezes, inflation, or a housing market that keeps moving out of reach, they unconsciously look for a domain where they do have control. Making a purchase becomes one of the few decision they can exercise entirely on their own terms. 

The deeper issue is that social media doesn't merely host this behaviour, it manufactures the conditions for it. Doomscrolling raises cortisol and the body's stress hormone with every alarming headline or anxious comment thread. Almost immediately afterword, the same algorithm presents a product designed to look like relief. Once stress has elevated cortisol and domaine feels scare, the brain start treating consumption as source of emotional relief. This is how digital domain cortisol loop operates. 

The evidence has now moved well beyond speculation. A 2024 Intuit Credit Karma found that more than a quarter of Americans engage in doom spending to cope with economic stress. The pattern is even more pronounced among the younger generation, affecting 37 percent of Gen Z and 39 percent of millennials. This is not an failure of willpower. It is measurable generational response to prolonged economic insecurity. What merely acknowledged is how contradictory this spending appears on closer inspection. Mckinsey's Consumer pulse research describes what it calls a spending dichotomy. In one survey, 88percent of Gen Z respondents said they were trading down on everyday purchases by choosing smaller pack sizes, lower priced retailers, and cutting back on nonessential extras. Yet 64 percent of the same group also reported splurging on categories such as fashion and travel. Frugal in routine necessities, indulgent when a purchase promises can a brief emotional reward. This is not financial inconsistency. It is financial defeatism expressed through consumption. 

Dr. Ylva Baecktrom, a behavioural finance lecture at King's Business school, describes this pattern as both unhealthy and deeply fatalistic. Her argument is that young people who spend much of their lives online are also exposed to an unending stream of economic anxiety and global crisis. This matters because it changes how we should understand doom spending. It is not simply a story about lazy or undisciplined young people but a documented psychological response to real economic insecurity. 

Critics argue that financial discipline has always required resisting temptation and that blaming the economy simply excuses impulsive spending. They are not wrong. Self-control remain essential. The twenty four hour rule, waiting a full day before making any unplanned purchase much easier to resist. It works because it creates distance between the initial cortisol surge and the purchasing decision. Adding friction to payment, by removing saved card details or disabling one-click checkout, forces a moment of deliberate effort that doom spending depends on not having. Replacing distant financial goals with small achievable ones can change the way people think about saving. Limiting time on social media also helps by reducing exposure to constant mix of bad news and targeted advertising before the stress response has a chance to drive spending. Economic uncertainty in Bangladesh, like elsewhere is real. No amount of personal discipline can repair a broken job market or an unreachable housing ladder on its own. What people can control is how they respond to that uncertainty. They can step away from the screen before the impulse takes hold. That choice may seep small but repeated over time it becomes an art of financial resilience. 

The writer is a student at the University of Chittagong