OK doomer 🥀

When Irvine Welsh penned Trainspotting’s famous monologue in the 90s, rejecting the milestones of adulthood was a counter-cultural choice. Renton and his crew were outsider nihilists, completely eschewing the trappings of middle modernity by choice.

Today, the middle class is an endangered species, harder than ever to enter or stay in. Doomer finance is what happens when people stop believing they will ever enjoy the security their parents had. But it’s probably not the best approach. It’s time to take control of our wealth and prosperity. Nobody is coming to save us.

Choose a job

These days, the relationship with work is more transactional. The doomer does not necessarily hate their job. But the primary objective now is to maximise income and avoid burnout.

When work is more mercenary, money works harder. Wages fund hobbies, travel, and small comforts like coffee, brunch, and cronuts. These luxuries keep us sane in an unsane world. Nearly 40% of Gen Z and Millennials ‘doom spend’ in the face of economic anxiety. More than 40% cannot justify saving at all due to the end times. Traditional thinking would suggest uncertainty leads to a rise in the savings rate. But we are not Homo economicus, especially when the world’s on fire.

Choose a starter home

Younger home buyers aren't just competing against wealthier individuals. Over the last decade, private equity firms, pension funds, and real estate investment trusts (REITs) have aggressively scaled their portfolios across the UK and US.

Housing has become a high-yield, inflation-hedged asset. Because these funds buy in bulk and have access to cheap credit, they often outbid normies who are constrained by mortgages and high interest rates.

It’s not just institutional investors that have nuked housing. For reasons covered elsewhere, the UK house price-to-earnings ratio has skyrocketed to more than 8 times average wages. Saving a 10% deposit on a single salary used to take eight months in the 1970s. Today, it takes four years. Because the state’s political base relies on protecting house prices, the system has chosen to prioritise the generational wealth of existing homeowners over the young.

To the doomer, the game feels rigged because, well, it is. Nearly 30% of adults aged 20 to 34 in the UK live with their parents. The average age of a first-time buyer is now 34. For those who do manage to leave the nest, UK renters burn 41% of their take-home pay on rent, which rises to 48% for those in the cap. No wonder more than half of renters have zero meaningful savings.

Choose compact disc players and electrical tin openers

Way back when, when you bought software or music or tools, you acquired a permanent physical asset. In 2026, you’re much more likely to lean on software-as-a-service (SaaS) and recurring subscription models.

Consumers today face monthly fees for car features like heated seats, smart home appliances, productivity software, and wellness apps. It’s a model designed to extract maximum lifetime value (LTV) from people and their disposable income.

Sony (SONY) recently announced it will discontinue physical disc production for all new PlayStation titles starting January 2028. XBOX (MSFT) is also set to drop the disc drive. Killing the disc kills the used-game market, eliminates retail competition, and ensures you can only buy media directly from digital storefronts. The ongoing return to vinyl, CDs, and physical books is a rejection of digital serfdom, owning something the corpos can't delete.

Choose rotting away at the end of it all

Disgruntled doomers do have something to look forward to. Maybe. The Great Wealth Transfer will see trillions handed down from boomers to their children over the next two decades. 

This windfall is supposed to solve the housing and retirement crisis. But the equity in parental homes faces a major drain: late-stage healthcare and elder care. And the size of that windfall depends a lot on where in the country your parents’ property resides. 

Private equity firms and corporate care providers have spent the last decade consolidating the nursing home and assisted living sectors, transforming elder care into a cash extraction machine. With average UK care home fees between £4,000 and £6,000 a month – and nursing care above £8,000 – a few years of late-stage decline can liquidate a family’s primary asset.

Choose your friends

For forty years, the advice to beat inflation was simple: take some risk and buy shares. But with inflation still stubborn, especially in services, central banks are keeping interest rates high.

When you can get a 3% to 4% return just by leaving your cash in a savings account or short-term government bonds, the incentive to take bigger financial risks changes.

This is the doomer portfolio barbell. One half sits in hyper-liquid, short-term cash instruments for immediate access and zero market exposure. The other half goes into high-volatility plays. Neither of these approaches offers meaningful long-term growth. Many doomers’ money is doing nothing at all.

Cutting out the slow-growing stock portfolio is an adaptation in an economy where playing it safe no longer feels like enough to get ahead. This outlook is behind the explosion of YOLO trading, wallstreetbets, gamification, memecoins, and sports betting. Both the safe and risky approach seem more appealing than a diversified stock portfolio growing 7% a year, if that.

Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments

In 2026, nominal wage growth was roughly 3.4% to 3.6% in the UK. But because the brackets for income tax and National Insurance have been frozen, even inflationary pay increases may push workers into higher tax bands. Combine this higher rate with the 9% student graduate tax and a bump in pay is swallowed by the state before it ever reaches the worker's bank account.

Brackets were frozen in 2021 to help pay down the massive debt from the pandemic. Initially, it was only supposed to last four years. The Conservatives extended the freeze to 2028. Then, Labour extended it until April 2031.

It’s estimated this policy will rake in more than £55 billion a year by 2031, dragging an extra 5 million people into paying income tax and turning nearly 5 million middle-earners into higher rate taxpayers. Fiscal drag is a stealth tax on wagies – and pensioners.

Choose life

Doomer finance is bad for financial planning. Debt drains wealth. Speculative trades usually lose money. And idle cash is eroded by inflation. An uncertain future does not make the present risk-free. Doomerism risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The world’s not going to end. Not in any real meaningful sense. Probably. The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves. That means building cash buffers for near-term resilience while relentlessly saving and investing what you can. Because when the world is gonna end, with no hope for any of it, the real counter-culture is looking past the end of the runway.