When the future becomes unaffordable and saving money is pointless, a $30 poke bowl makes complete sense
The great baseball legend and jokester Yogi Berra once quipped that a restaurant had become so crowded that nobody goes there anymore. Here’s a version for today: young people in America have such dismal economic prospects that they spend more money than ever.
A Reddit thread appeared recently in which a man posed the question of where kids in America are getting the money to live a DoorDash lifestyle. DoorDash is one of several smartphone apps in the US that deliver restaurant meals to your door for a steep premium. The thread went viral but was subsequently deleted for reasons that are unclear to me, though many screenshots exist.
The post was from a 44-year-old man with no kids: “[I] own and operate a fast casual restaurant with four locations. I’m intimately familiar with the insane amount of money it costs to have food to your front door. At my own restaurant; a $16 poke bowl, delivered, with tip is gonna run you close to $30. For someone making six figures? Sure, have at it. But trust me when I tell you, almost every high school aged kid these days seems to use DoorDash multiple times a week.”
This thread got ping-ponged around on X and one user jumped in with an explanation that caught my eye. “They’re behaving like people living in a post-middle-class economy…where ownership is unattainable, savings are pointless, buying a home is impossible, and upward mobility is gone. So what happens? They shift to a present-maximization mindset. If the future is unaffordable anyway, why not buy the burrito now? Younger people are not reckless. They are rational inside a broken incentive system.”
Luke Gromen, one of today’s most incisive financial analysts, chimed in: “Watch the movie ‘Cabaret’ – the youth in Weimar Germany behaved similarly.”
For most of the post-war period, saving money made sense. A young person or family would convert savings into a down payment and pay it off gradually thanks to a stable and reliable job. There was a direct connection between the ability to save and prospects for future prosperity. The value of money was proportional to the middle-class goodies that one sought. This rewarded discipline and delayed gratification, and it also attested to people’s optimistic view of the prospects for stability.
This world is shattered and broken. For starters, home ownership is an ever receding mirage for many. Bankrate recently released a report claiming that the average American household has been priced out of 75% of the housing market.
The homeownership rate for households under the age of 35 fell again last year, while the share of first-time buyers of all ages has plummeted to a historic low of 21-24%, well below the historical average of 40%.
Even Charles Schwab published a piece advising Gen Zers how to avoid “doom spending,” defining it as “responding to a poor outlook on the future of your finances or the planet we live on by saying, ‘What’s the point of saving for the future?’”
Financial analyst Demetri Kofinas coined the term“financial nihilism,” to describe how individuals who, having lost faith in the real value of money and in the traditional ways of earning it, turn to various high-risk behaviors. The old trades of gambling and prostitution return in new guises: reckless Crypto speculation, betting on the outcome of real-world events via Kalshi, and, of course, OnlyFans.
What this points to is a disconnect between the wealth that can be generated by earning hourly wages, working the gig economy, or relying on sporadic Venmo transfer from family members, and what can be generated by holding assets – such as the real estate that nobody can afford. These two parallel tracks are diverging more and more as the real economy diverges from the financialized paper economy. We still benchmark everything to the dollar. However, because the dollar as a store of value is being debauched faster than an ordinary person can earn dollars through labor, the path to success lies in asset ownership and not in simply in earning marginally more dollars.
In the current American economy, it is asset ownership that matters (or a very high wage in an industry in the business of asset ownership). Accordingly, Gen Zers correctly identify $30 as not being worth much more than a poke bowl.
For a good comparison, in 17th century England, historians estimate that beer and ale could account for as much as 10-25% of a laborer’s cash outlays. This wasn’t because England was populated by inveterate drunks or fantastically irresponsible people, but because there was no point in saving the marginal unit of money in a rigid, hierarchical system in which the barriers to true social advancement were too high. DoorDash culture is the digital version of that.
If this sounds a bit like feudalism, it is because that is exactly what it is. Or more precisely, it’s a hybrid of feudalism and the type of pre-Weimar detachment that arises when wages don’t match prices, the currency is being debauched, and the future is profoundly uncertain and ominous.
To take the analysis a step further, think of the US economy as not just a post-middle-class economy but a post-growth economy. Let’s run a simple comparison of two different eras.
The 1960s were a time of growth driven by manufacturing, industrial innovation, infrastructure, and rising productivity; GDP gains largely reflected the expansion of real-world economic activity; markets functioned without hand-holding by central banks; debt levels were manageable; high interest rates rewarded saving. Housing was affordable for working families.
The 2020s are a time of growth driven primarily by financial services, asset inflation, and debt-fueled consumption, with government spending and central bank liquidity the primary engines rather than real productivity gains; central banks engage in all manner of gimmicks to prop up a system that no longer self-corrects. Asset prices are inflated; housing is unaffordable, while real wages are declining.
These days, there just isn’t much growth, and whatever there is has to be squeezed with great exertion as if out of an empty toothpaste tube. And it takes a whole lot of debt to even attempt the squeeze. The US economy managed to expand at a clip of 2.4% in 2024 – hardly an impressive figure – but it did so with deficit spending reaching a staggering $1.8 trillion and by vastly understating systemic inflation.
It also bears keeping in mind that the 2.4% figure is already distorted because GDP makes no distinction between organic growth and the growth created by debt-fueled consumption.
This brings us back to the notion of feudalism. This is the type of system that coalesces in one form or another when an economy exits a growth phase and enters zero-sum mode. Periods of economic expansion are dynamic and tend to reshuffle the cards. Avenues appear for upward mobility, new elites are created, and savings can be deployed to productive endeavors. In the post-growth world, by contrast, the main mechanism defining economic relations becomes rent rather than production.
The period from about 950 to 1250 in Europe was very economically dynamic. The heavy plow became widespread, which allowed northern Europe’s heavy soils to be brought under cultivation. The three-field system replaced the two-field system, which increased yields. The horse collar, horseshoes, and windmills all appeared or spread widely during this period. These were incremental but transformative innovations. Deforestation and reclamation advanced. Lots of forest and swamp were converted into farmland across France, Germany, England, and Poland. Europe’s population roughly doubled between the years 1000 and 1300.
The great cathedral-building boom of the 12th and 13th centuries was a direct expression of this surplus. The Reconquista in Spain, German eastward expansion, and the Crusades all represented outlets for surplus population and ambition.
By the late 13th century, however, the limits of this expansion were being reached. Virtually all arable land had been brought under cultivation. Marginal lands were being farmed, temporarily increasing output but with falling yields. Population growth began to outstrip food supply.
It was this world of economic stagnation after a long period of expansion that produced the feudalism of the High Middle Ages. Hierarchies hardened and social structures rigidified as mobility and opportunity shrank. The feudal pyramid “froze”: a static hierarchy of rent-seeking landed elites presided over a peasantry with declining freedom. Cities and noble courts were often fiscally overextended and clung tenaciously to existing structures because change felt dangerous.
We are exactly at that point, except the feudalism of today isn’t recognizable to us. But how different are things, really? In the rearview mirror are the dynamic post-war decades. Now, meanwhile, we've settled into a system where the elites own the scarce assets while everyone else pays ever more in participation costs while securing less ownership. Perpetually rising asset values are a perfect defense against those rising participation costs – if, that is, you’re fortunate enough to be part of the asset-owning class. What’s 8% inflation and 15% higher childcare costs if your stock portfolio is up 25% and your home is now worth nearly $2 million?
Asset prices are always rising because the system is designed to prioritize preserving balance-sheet stability. Markets are always too big to fail and a disorderly decline in asset prices is treated as a systemic emergency requiring intervention. But this means that losses are socialized on the downside whereas gains remain private. The result: asset prices trend upward over time almost by definition.
To put it bluntly, central banks and governments guarantee that asset prices stay ahead of inflation – an updated form of the old noble privileges dished out by medieval kings.
We can extend the analogy. Power is tied to control finite resources, not so much land but financial claims and, maybe even more importantly, access to credit. Whereas average people who need funding pay 25% on credit card debt, too-big-to-fail banks get to post underwater bonds as collateral at full face value – not to mention a full bailout if things go awry. This becomes even more perverse when you realize that this abundant and essentially free credit provided to certain institutions is being used to bid up asset prices even more.
Elites, meanwhile, protect their assets via political capture, while the rest of society pays rents rather than shares in growth. In medieval feudalism, power was decentralized: nobles had their own justice systems, militias, and taxes. Today, corporations and asset-holders function like mini-sovereigns. Hedge funds and private equity control housing and employment structures. The list goes on.
However, this is not the feudalism of the Arthurian legends that can exist in a state of bucolic stasis for centuries. This version is perched precariously on a highly financialized economy that itself is kept afloat by unsustainable debt levels. It is a system that is both highly unstable and quite rigid at the same time, however paradoxical that sounds. And Generation Z senses both sides of that equation. This is where feudalism meets Weimar Germany.
The US is nowhere near hyperinflation. But DoorDash culture points to the psychological pre-conditions of a world that can quickly turn very inflationary. Spending money because saving it is pointless is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But Weimar was more than wheelbarrows of devalued money: it was an era drenched in a deep cynicism and foreboding, and nihilism (financial or otherwise) was rampant.
This brings us to the sudden strangeness of the moment. Underneath the glittering digital panacea of food delivery apps and instant friction-less tap-to-pay everything, and despite the familiar signposts of American life, lies an economic system now operating under very different premises.