Millennial lifestyle spending functioned as self-advertising rather than mere consumption

Evidence

But building a personal brand required more than professional achievements. It also demanded a curated aesthetic across social media feeds—foreign travel, rare goods, and perfectly plated meals—while quietly omitting menial aspects of life like flying in economy. Older generations often mistook this conspicuous consumption as pure avarice, but millennials often justified it as a coping mechanism for being priced out of cars, homes, and children. Others saw their lifestyle spending as advertisements for themselves: Establishing a vision of present success would lead to even greater success in the future. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 311

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly articulates the status-as-signal mechanism undergirding omnivore monoculture; curating feeds to signal success is taste as investment.
• QUESTION: If taste spending is self-advertising for status, does the ‘blankness’ Marx sees actually mask a coherent signaling economy he hasn’t decoded?

Related

• Millennial lifestyle spending doubled as coping and self-advertisement for future success (similarity 0.95)
• Millennials’ defining trait was economic anxiety rather than aesthetic distinctiveness (similarity 0.79)