The Road to Ruin is Paved With Credit

A finance company app service sends a girl onto my second monitor. A clip filmed on a camera phone in an apartment hallway with absolute zero production quality. “Like absolutely everyone else, I’ve wracked up debts and credits to pay”, she defensively claims as if credit card debt is the only proper way to live through your 20’s and 30’s. “This service has absolutely saved my private economy”, she laughs nervously, “and helped me save thousands of kroner (hundreds of dollars) each month!”

A second segment comes on, right on the heels of the first. Sometimes featuring a jogger. Sometimes happy vacation travelers. Sometimes even Tormund Giantsbane. Braving jungles and mountaintops for tacky souvenirs, or exploring temples in his completely inadequate VR-rig. Either way, he fucks up. He breaks shit at home. And the zinger is that he should use his credit card to pay for the damages.

Both of these adverts roll on loop on Twitch. A gaming streaming service primarily aimed at 30-somethings and younger.

And I find something very disturbing about the picture that these predatory credit companies paint.

The first message insinuates that an “ordinary” life is supposed to contain an unmanageable mountain of debt, and if yours is not you’re doing it wrong. And if you’re doing it right, you’ve wracked up so much debt that you absolutely need an app service (I’m not naming it, because I don’t want to give it free press) to keep track of it all. The second message tells us that if you klutz something up, just pay for it with your credit card! Preferably, THIS credit card (anonymous for the same reason as the one above). Because you probably can’t afford to fix it out of pocket. So why not just pay even more money that you don’t have, but at some later^[tm] stage! Preferably when the bill is bigger than the initial cost by orders of magnitude. Ka-ching…

Credit card interest rates are traditionally way higher than simple bank loans. But the principle is the same. Get money to pay for what you want now, pay us back later with the wig. Though with credit card companies, that wig tends to be bigger. A lot bigger. From a cursory glance, credit card interest rates soar into the vicinity of 20%. That’s 20% on top of money that the spender already can’t afford to spend, because if they could they wouldn’t use a credit card and tack on an accumulative 20% extra charge.

Private debt is on the rise. And furthermore an indicator of a looming economic crisis. Yes, another one. The years prior to the financial crisis of 2008, US private debt development skyrocketed in comparison to the US federal debt increase. The same relationship can be observed from Japan in the early 90’s. In China, in the years around 2010, private debt began to soar away from the public debt. Suggesting the inevitability of an imminent finance collapse there too.

So ballooning private debt isn’t news. It’s in the anthropological fossil record by now. And yet people can’t get enough of living beyond their means. And, apparently, companies and banks can’t get enough of incentivising it. Despite the indicators that uncontrollable private debt is a surefire way to break an economy.

Look… people are morons. Absolute fucking melons. It’s big entertainment to watch people make dumb financial decisions. Like what the Swedish television show Lyxfällan that doesn’t shy away from shaming fiscally irresponsible people, to Ashton Kutcher’s Going From Broke (which I haven’t watched). But aside from a entertainment-value, we are actively being pushed and prodded to live beyond our means. A “responsible” adult is supposed to get into debt. Like student debt, which is universal in the western world, but particularly predatory in the US as I’ve read. Or mortgages, because we’ve let ourselves be convinced that a home is not a home but an investment. Even medical debt in some fundamentalist regimes that can’t stand even a sprinkling of socialism in their democracies. And eventually, debt just because you want to buy expensive shoes, go on glamorous trips, or drink fancy drinks. We are being taught to be dumb with our money. By societal living standards, social media dreams, unrealistic family expectations, boomer precedents, and now even Twitch commercials that normalize an unsustainable private fiscal situation by getting into even more debt and paying others to manage it for you.

Instead of getting a credit card to fix your shit. Instead of signing up for a financial subscription to manage your subscriptions and loans. Instead of living beyond your means. Have you ever thought about… not? Not getting into more debt than you can handle? And be comfortable with the fact that sometimes you just can’t afford all the meaningless shit that you really, really want? If you can’t afford a house; don’t buy one. If you can’t afford a five ton truck, don’t get one. If you can’t afford a child; don’t have one. And if you can’t afford the latest Playstation or Prada, don’t expose yourself to compound interest just to scratch that itch. Not playing the game is the only way that you can influence our engorged cost of living, and stick it to the pricks that profit off of your need for a life you don’t possess the means to live.

And if you can’t stay away from living beyond your means, well… get a sugar momma and/or daddy. Because either way, you’re going to get fucked by someone rich.

/Sebastian Lindberg 14/9-2021