Your personal finances aren't the issue.
- António Silveira
- 11 hours ago
- 3 min read
(LISBON, PORTUGAL) — The other day, I came across some clips from Caleb Hammer. It was fairly inoffensive and ultimately just an overview of someone’s poor personal finance history, with some drama and comedy attached to it. If the discussion ended at that, I would most likely have no problem with it.
The thing is that Caleb Hammer is often used as an example of a broader failing in my generation, Gen Z, and in Millennials as well. Older people often look at Gen Z and Millennials as generations that do not care about their long-term financial growth and, as a result, are unable to acquire anything worthwhile. Gen X and Boomers often compare themselves to Gen Z and Millennials; after all, “they worked hard to get where they are”, so why can’t the younger generations?
What this obsession with personal finances as a reason for generational failure misses is that the world is not the same as it was back then. Right now, there are few long-term investments a person earning minimum wage can realistically make, and forcing them to give up a Netflix subscription does nothing except make their life slightly more annoying. I do not disagree that overconsumption is a bad thing.
Most of these corporations are exploitative, and they not only profit from our subscriptions but also use our own data to keep us locked in through their algorithms or to sell it to advertisers. One example is music apps, arguably some of the biggest offenders here. They have replaced an industry of physical media, where you bought albums from artists and could keep them forever, with new ecosystems ruled by playlists they decide on, giving them growing control over culture and your attention.
But even before music apps, most of the money from album sales did not go to the artist either, and many artists were robbed blind just to get distribution, since it was all controlled by five companies. This is to say that, much like the music industry, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and ultimately, this search for financial purity among young people is just the right-wing version of “ethical” consumption.
The right wing knows that houses are too expensive, but it is now often trying to place the blame on the average person by perpetuating myths such as: “if you work hard enough”, “if you aren’t stupid with your money”, and “if you invest wisely”. It assumes that money is never well spent on small luxuries and that you can always climb the financial ladder if you avoid them. This is just not true.
According to Bango, the average American has 4.5 subscriptions, paying around $77 per month. That is $924 per year. Over 20 years, that comes to $18,480. In West Virginia, the state with the lowest median home price at $169,759, that would only cover roughly 10.89% of the cost of a house.
I do not need to tell you that this money is not enough; it is not even remotely realistic as a solution. $18,480 seems like a lot, but that is after 20 years of someone’s life. It is money that could disappear rapidly in an emergency, or be spent within a year for many people. That subscription is not the thing killing you; the system itself is.
It is important to mention that I do, in fact, have two subscriptions that I use personally, and frankly, they are more of a luxury I choose to have than an actual need. Nonetheless, I do not think I would be systematically better off without them. I think my life would simply be slightly more annoying, rather than changed in any meaningful way.
All this is to say that, frankly, you should not be bothered by the subscriptions you hold, but by the corporations that sold them to you. They are the ones monetizing accessible content, creating ecosystems where you do not own the content you subscribe to, and making it so that content that could be provided by other services is now locked behind them. You're merely trapped by the traps they have laid out. Blame the company, not the worker.
