Much like not looking beyond the short-term in our professional lives when it comes to employee trust, hard work, and wanting to be paid well upfront, our personal spending habits are among the worst.
Gen-Z spends, saves, and invests, but not on a much wider scale than previous generations—even as things like stocks have become more accessible and the entry barriers lowered with sports betting and digital credit card companies becoming more accessible than ever. The difference for us is that many of these more accessible apps are the only ones we can hope to join.
For example, real high-stakes investing or simply working in that industry is not easy or accessible to everyone, just by the nature of where the great financial centers of the world are located. However, for just half a week’s pay, you can put a little money on this or that—token or stablecoin—or get a dopamine hit by downloading a gambling app that lets you win just long enough to hook you into thinking you’ll win again.
Where did this come from? The data points to small business growth and entrepreneurship. Mass media was the cause, showing us the boom and bust of the market like a game played by the cunning, and not someone simply in the middle of the pyramid with foundations in imperialism and its capstone as a number on a computer screen so large that you could not conceive there is such wealth in the world at the same time as famine. Not human-caused like in Gaza, but ‘we can’t pay for wheat after crops failed due to climate change and desertification.’
People want to climb the pyramid, and it makes you feel good to see the number go up and, in your core, you believe you are special and talented for that improvement to take place. But in using these apps, whether to gamble or order food in, you are losing out on connection because it is all just you and the phone.
In discussing financial literacy today, it is so much bigger than just credit cards and budgeting. Me, my family, my classmate, their families, and pretty much everyone around the world have nice and comfortable six-figure USD salaries while raising their children to believe in the same?
I don’t mean to cry Star Trek, but the oil will run out. There is value in entrepreneurship and ideation, but the pace of things will not be able to keep up, and eventually, it will come to improving the material conditions of the bottommost rung of society rather than enriching the top. Financial literacy to Gen-Z means understanding your place in that system and not making the mistakes that make it harder to live your life.
The ultimate lesson of this column is that your professional life is not your life; it’s just work. Life is love, funerals, birthdays, and bringing your friends soup when they’re sick, even though it’s flu season. Life is not money, numbers on a screen, or credit ratings, and if we have to live and even thrive inside this system and work to improve it from within or build something better, it’s not everything.
