I personally think that the huge increase in the money supply and all of the stimulus money that has went out to people is the primary fuel to speculative investing (like GME and Crypto). Savings rates in the pandemic have never been higher.

I see it less as desperation and more of 'whoa, i have more money now, i want to put it into things that go up in value!'. I haven't seen the data (so do correct me), but I would suspect that less sophisticated retail investing is on the rise over the last year, correlating with increased savings.