Young People & The Financialization of Everyday Life
AI slop made by Google Gemini
One of the reasons I wanted to do research on young people & money toward the end of last year is the way their “risky” financial behaviour is portrayed in the media.
The coverage usually takes a top down view - the epistemology of which is rooted in the theory of financialization of everyday life: A top down, one-way intrusion of the market into the lives of young people.
That’s a mouthful. So here it is in plain English: The behaviour of young people is typically framed as ignorance, irrationality, or victimization by predatory finance. Something that is done to them.
I do think young people are growing up in especially difficult times - a lot of which is outside of their control. But people, regardless of how rich or poor they are, aren’t just victims of finance. They have agency, and use it for their own purposes.
The systemic pressures facing young people are worth interrogating. But the question I think we’ve collectively done a bad job of unpacking is this:
What are young people trying to accomplish socially through their financial choices?
I went down a bit of a research rabbit hole last weekend, and this 2023 piece from the Annual Review of Anthropology asks valuable questions:
How do we study big economic forces without ignoring human agency and creativity? Because, as we unpacked in our Young People & Money report, humans always find creative ways to navigate, resist, or work around powerful systems like capitalism and finance.
How do we understand what is happening when people break the “rules” of money or debt? Because, sometimes people act in ways that don’t follow economic logic, engaging in acts of innovation and/or resistance.
What methods should we be using to study this behaviour? Because it’s critical to see both the power of economic systems and the ways people push back against them.
One of the most memorable stories to emerge from our research was about Xander. He’s 24, lives in Las Vegas, and works a number of different jobs to make ends meet. In our conversation, he talked about the stock market being “a wise man’s casino,” explaining that he regularly direct invests his pay into single stocks despite his income often falling short of his needs.
Why? Because he really needs “that extra 20%” to make ends meet.
When asked if he ever worries about losing that money, he shrugged it off: “I’ve never lost.”
I think it’s easy to explain stories like Xander’s with trendy labels like financial nihilism. And, for what it’s worth, I agree with the core idea there. If stable jobs, affordable housing, and pensions are increasingly out of reach, "risky" investments are a rational response to a situation where playing it safe guarantees falling behind anyway.
But. how useful is that explanation if you’re a brand looking to engage young people around matters of money?
If system-level change is within your locus of control, then great. Or alternatively, if you’re able and willing to position yourself as being against the system then that’s also great.
Neobanks have done a good job of the latter, but not everyone can or wants to play that game.
The Financialization Of Everything
One alternative explanation for behaviour like Xander’s lies in the financialization of everything, which is maybe best culturally reflected by Polymarket’s huge presence at the 2026 Golden Globes.
For many of us, the fact that you can now gamble on award shows, elections, and world events is genuinely strange (and is also a process that is very likely being manipulated by bad actors).
But, for anyone who came of age after the 2008 financial crisis, you’ve never lived in a world where financialization wasn’t a part of everyday life, nor where second-order commodification wasn’t part of the underlying logic of economic life.
For young people, economic life has always involved markets on markets.
Betting on events, and the creation of markets around collective judgment about events is just the next logical step in the world they grew up in, where they could already bet not just on whether Apple will be profitable, but on whether the people betting on Apple’s profitability will have priced it correctly.
There is nothing abnormal or risky about this type of behaviour if it’s all you have ever known.
So, let's return to the core question: What is Xander trying to accomplish socially through his financial choices?
Yes, he needs the money. But the language he uses to describe the market, and the stories he shared with us, say something about his motivations. I heard pride in his assertion that he has never lost. The projection of competence. And, a sense that he's figured something out that others haven't.
For Xander, it’s as much about identity as it is about financial strategy. And that identity does social work. It positions him as savvy rather than struggling. Someone who's playing the game rather than being played by it.
In a world where the traditional markers of adulthood are out of reach, being savvy enough to see markets on markets, and to grapple with second, third, and even fourth-order commodification becomes an alternative way to signal that you’re doing okay. Maybe even better than okay - because making “risky” bets is smarter than making small, safer bets, if winning the safe bet still results in poverty.
There’s a sense of belonging also at play here, because everything surrounding financialization has become such a shared experience for young people. And this matters, because it reframes what "risky" behaviour actually is. If your stock pick tanks, you've lost money, but at least you’re savvy enough to play the game. You still belong.
What Does This Mean For Brands?
Brands looking to engage young people around money have more to work with than helping them survive a system stacked against them, or to make “more responsible” financial choices.
But it means recognizing that financial choices are social, not just individual ones. The lone person staring at a budgeting app is not how a large portion of young people actually engage with money. Spend any time on Reddit, and that becomes abundantly clear.
Compliance and legal hurdles notwithstanding, financial services brands need to be facilitating conversation, rather than positioning themselves as sole experts if they want to feel more relevant and connected to younger people.
And, it means taking seriously what young people are already doing well, rather than starting from what they’re doing wrong.
And, it's not just young people like Xander.
Those who opt out of investing entirely, whether for ethical reasons or because they see the game as rigged, have arrived at the same insight that he has. There are markets on markets, and the system can be more absurd than rational. The difference is just in how they've chosen to respond.
That doesn't seem like financial illiteracy to me. It’s young people recognizing the game and making choices accordingly, based-on the world they've grown up in.