From 10-step skincare routines to lavish, overpriced clothes, many wonder if our generation has become obsessed with simply obtaining things rather than actually enjoying them.
Over the past few years, some believe that Gen Z’s exposure to online marketing and ads hidden within unassuming videos has made the generation primed for a culture of quick shopping without much thought. People today are often exposed to a constant stream of sponsored content, promoting a large range of products all at their fingertips—from a new collab water bottle to suction phone mounts—and it’s much harder to resist when all you have to do is click add to cart.
“I think social media influences what I spend my money on mainly because it pops up on my feed constantly, with ads and everything,” sophomore Connor Holzman said.
A lot of struggles with overconsumption can be traced back to following a trend. But when trends are constantly changing and pushed by large corporations with large advertising budgets, it creates pressure among the population to catch up to the rapid and constant pace of production that manufacturers create in order to maximize profit.
It’s no longer enough to have one of something—such as one cleanser, or one pair of shoes. Often, by the time the item has been purchased, there’s already pressure to buy another trending or newer version of it. “Old” things have become more stigmatized, making certain purchases seem obsolete.
“Gen Z tends to gravitate towards buying what’s popular and trendy and not considering the long-term disadvantages of that,” junior Lucia Kanazir said. “I know so many people who buy items of clothing just to toss them aside within a few months because they’re not getting as much hype anymore.”
It’s no surprise that people want to copy what their peers are doing, but in the age of social media, when one’s peers expand to strangers online, mimicking their spending habits can border on dangerous. People only see snippets of others’ lives online; the snippets they want their viewers to see, not the various daily struggles they undergo.
“In some ways, there definitely is pressure to do or purchase things that you don’t need because your friends are doing the same thing,” sophomore Veer Anand said.
Chasing the dopamine high that shopping gives the purchaser can become a dangerous cycle of impulse buying, where people constantly seek out another thing to purchase in order to feel satisfied.
According to Newsweek, Gen Z is currently in the lead in average personal debt per person, coming in at a whopping $94,000—significantly more than millennials’ $60,000 or Gen X’s $53,000. And it doesn’t help that Gen Z (within the U.S.) has the lowest financial literacy scores on average—making our generation ill-equipped to face the targeted marketing pressures of today.
“I think my purchasing habits are unhealthy because I tend to follow a lot of trends on TikTok or buy things that my friends buy that I don’t need,” freshman Shahar Granit said.