Meme-stock trading deferred consumption into a permanent future with no payoff

Evidence

The protagonists in The Wolf of Wall Street spend their ill-procured dollars on sex, drugs, and menace for the audience’s vicarious pleasure. The characters in Dumb Money spend their time staring at expanding zeros in their accounts but never use the money to do anything glamorous or even practical. Online trading culture revolved around holding at all costs—“diamond hands.” All the fun was postponed for the future. “Wen Lambo?” they asked longingly. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 739

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the exhausted-consumer critique of Adorno/Horkheimer’s culture industry — pleasure always deferred, never delivered. Also connects to sketch of how ‘diamond hands’ inverts the Protestant ethic of deferred gratification into pure suspension.
• SEED: Angle: ‘Wen Lambo?’ as the consumerist dead-end of a generation that gambles on escape but cannot imagine what to do with winning — the secular, financial analog of medieval purgatorial waiting.