>a laptop, computer, furniture - and an outright lot of that is financed on some sort of credit for many people
I... can't relate. This is entirely a choice, one that advertisement tell you is the right one, but a choice nonetheless. Personally, I don't understand why people take on debt to buy shiny goods.
Yes, some of that things are necessary, but you don't have to lease a new car or change your phone every two years.
Well, you need a phone and a computer these days to be part of society, no way around that unless you're willing to live like the Amish. And manufacturers do everything they can to force you to upgrade at least every three-ish years - Microsoft keeps upping the requirements for no reason at all (e.g. TPM requirement in Windows 11), and lots of smartphones on the budget end only come with two years worth of firmware updates after which these devices are up for grabs for malware authors and you're being a bad netizen by keeping these devices connected to the internet.
Cars are a different thing, but planned obsolescence is the norm there as well. After the manufacturer warranty expires, the repair bills come due for all kinds of shit just to keep it safe for traffic. Cars older than five years tend to become massive money sinks, even if you are capable of repairing them yourself which becomes ever more difficult and expensive as modern cars are datacenters on wheels with tons of failure modes requiring very expensive and difficult to operate tools.
And then there's the rent extraction that is paying for things. You all but need a bank account these days, depositing checks and cash costs money, cash acceptance is going down, and there's only Visa/Mastercard/AmEx left over, which extract absurd amounts of money from everywhere in the transaction chain - merchant fees that the vendors add to the price of goods, and interest on the customer side. And credit providers for all the "shiny things" and necessities of life also extract huge amounts of interest. And all of that siphoned off money ends up in the hands of the very rich.
I'm guessing you're not in dire financial straits? Is that accurate? Or you're simply not struggling to house and feed yourself (and any dependents)? Not an accusation BTW.
> I don't understand why people take on debt to buy shiny goods.
So real incomes have been hit hard since the pandemic. One interesting aspect is that the effect on consumer spending has been limited. This sounds like a good thing (from the perspective of the economy not collapsing) but it's actually not.
Why? As an enecdote, there was a Tiktok trend for awhile where people would do different versions of "my retirement plan is to die", basically. They're struggling. They might want a family but can't afford it. Or they have a family and have to have 3 jobs just to stave off homelessness. There is no time for a fulfilling life or to spend leisure time with pets, family or friends.
So the dark side of continued consumer spending (the "shiny things" you allude to) is that there is a growing hopelessness crisis and people are buying the shiny thing they cannot afford to distract from their material conditions. More importantly, they don't see that they even have a future so why not enjoy the shiny thing now?
This doesn't explain all of it. There are existing problems of people wanting to spend money, to show off how well they're doing (even if it's fake) and so on.
But I think over the coming years the level of awareness about the hopelessness crisis will only increase and it will probably rise to the level of national discourse.
Exactly this. Neo-feudalism is the endgame. The 99% own nothing to their name, the 1% extract rents.
Just think about your daily life: your car is leased/financed and only has a small residual value at the end of the term, your phone is financed under contract from your provider and almost worthless at the end of the term, you live in a rental home and can't save enough for a downpayment on your own real estate, and if you're lucky enough to have been gifted/inherited some money, you still pay down debts for decades, and when you inevitably run into old age you have to sell your home to pay for medical and end-of-life care.
All that you really own in your own name is maybe some consumer goods (e.g. a laptop, computer, furniture - and an outright lot of that is financed on some sort of credit for many people) and a 401k or its equivalents. And your pittances of savings are routinely wiped out by everyday bullshit: your car breaks down, you lose your job because of capitalism rewarding mass firings on the stock market, you have health expenses that aren't covered by your insurance, you have to pay a vet because your cat ate a shoe string, some relative (or you yourself) needs to move out of their home for employment or domestic violence reasons...