Doom Spending

A reader's summary of the term for spending money to cope with economic dread — the Credit Karma survey that gave it a number, the doom-scrolling wordplay it borrowed its name from, and how loosely a self-reported motive can be measured.

The term at a glance

“Doom spending” names the practice of making purchases — often discretionary ones — while aware of and anxious about bad economic or geopolitical news, as a way of managing that stress rather than despite it. It arrived as 2023's addition to the same TikTok-native money vocabulary as “girl math” and “loud budgeting,” but unlike those two it wasn't coined in a single viral video — it was named and quantified by a financial company's commissioned survey.

Origins

Intuit's Credit Karma commissioned Qualtrics to survey 1,004 US adults aged 18 and over between November 3 and November 9, 2023. Credit Karma published the results under the headline “Forget doom scrolling, Americans now doom spend to cope with stress,” crediting the coinage to its own consumer financial advocate, Courtney Alev, who framed it as a direct successor to doom scrolling's compulsive, anxiety-driven repetition — scrolling replaced with shopping. The topline numbers: 96% of respondents said they were worried about the state of the economy, and 27% said that worry led them to spend money to feel better, rising to 35% among Gen Z respondents and 43% among millennials. CNBC picked the survey up on November 29, 2023 under the headline “Americans are ‘doom spending’ — here's why that's a problem,” and coverage from Fortune, WWD, the Chicago Sun-Times and others followed through December 2023 and into 2024, turning a single commissioned survey into the term's de facto founding document.

History and context

The behavior the term describes predates the name by several years. Kevin Roose's April 22, 2021 New York Times piece “Welcome to the YOLO Economy” had already described pandemic-burned-out millennials spending savings and quitting stable jobs on the logic that the future was too uncertain to plan around — optimistic recklessness rather than anxious coping, but the same underlying move of treating economic uncertainty as a reason to spend rather than save. “Revenge spending,” the 2021–22 term for catching up on deprived pandemic-era wants once lockdowns lifted, sat adjacent to it: revenge spending was retrospective and celebratory, doom spending forward-looking and fatalistic. By late 2022, as inflation and recession fears displaced pandemic reopening as the live anxiety, commentators were already using “doom spending” informally on social media before Credit Karma's November 2023 survey gave the phrase a specific number to travel on — the same pattern by which “quiet quitting” existed as a phrase before a single TikTok made it a headline term.

Main claims

Critique

• The founding data is a company's own commissioned survey. Credit Karma is a credit-monitoring and lending product; a widely quoted statistic about young Americans anxiety-spending against their own financial interest doubles as a case for the exact credit-tracking habit the company sells, without that conflict being flagged in most of the coverage that repeated the 27% figure.
• The definition measures a story, not a transaction. Nothing distinguishes a “doom-spent” purchase from any other discretionary purchase except the buyer's self-reported motive at the moment of a survey — the same $40 dinner counts or doesn't depending on what reason the respondent gives after the fact.
• Therapists quoted in later coverage call the behavior old, not new. Coping by spending during periods of societal anxiety has been documented for decades under labels like retail therapy; what changed by 2023 was the scale, the specific generational framing, and a checkout process — one-tap purchases inside the same apps people doomscroll — frictionless enough to close the gap between feeling anxious and buying something.
• Most anxious people didn't report doing it. By the survey's own numbers, 96% expressed economic worry but only 27% said it turned into spending — a gap the headline framing glosses over when it presents doom spending as the default response to economic anxiety rather than a minority one.

Impact

Doom spending outlasted a single news cycle better than some of its 2023–24 sibling terms because Credit Karma reused it: a second Qualtrics survey run October 25–29, 2024 found the same 27% headline figure, with 37% of Gen Z and 39% of millennials, this time attributed to stress over the upcoming US presidential election rather than the economy generally — coverage from Fast Company and NBC affiliates followed the same pickup pattern as the original. By September 2026, retrospective personal-finance roundups revisiting “girl math, loud budgeting, moneymaxxing” as a set were still listing doom spending among the trends worth weighing, placing it in the same rotating vocabulary as its Business section neighbors even after the specific 2023 anxiety it was coined for had moved on.

Notable engagements

• Credit Karma commentary (November 2023) — “Forget doom scrolling, Americans now doom spend to cope with stress,” the survey and Courtney Alev's founding quote.
• CNBC (November 29, 2023) — the mainstream pickup framing doom spending as a financial-wellbeing problem.
• Kevin Roose, The New York Times (April 22, 2021) — “Welcome to the YOLO Economy,” the pandemic-era precursor to anxiety-driven financial risk-taking.
• Credit Karma / Fast Company (October 2024) — the second survey reattaching the same term and figure to US election stress.