Gen Z is rebelling against the economy with ‘disillusionomics,’ tackling near 6-figure debt by turning life into a giant list of income streams

What happens when a generation is raised on economic promises that never materialize? Gen Z may want to ask their older siblings, the millennials, how that turned out, as the Great Recession of 2008—and the ensuing “jobless recovery”—left millions of altered lives, if not dashed dreams, in its wake. But as the oldest Gen Zers approach the 30-year-old benchmark, the economic habits of a generation who was born during a financial regime change are looking increasingly different from those of the generation that lived through it. The zoomers double as the so-called “doom spenders,” dishing out hundreds of dollars on concert tickets or international travel, entrenching the “YOLO economy” that emerged in 2021 amid the meme-stock craze. Gen Zers average $94,101 in personal debt, the highest of any generation and far more than millennials ($59,181) and Gen X ($53,255). This could be easily written off as the financial mismanagement of youth, but taken as a whole, Gen Z’s outlook on the economy is at once a rejection of conventional wisdom and a deep, almost subconscious absorption of the commodification of everything. Economist and author Alice Lassman, a (British) Gen Zer herself, has written for Business Insider about her personal disillusionment after her stint at Columbia led to a verbal, later rescinded offer to be an economist at USAID. She calls Gen Z’s approach to economic life “disillusionomics,” or a way to cope with an uncertain and mystifying financial future. Lassman wrote about her theory for the Guardian in October 2025, and told Fortune that she came up with the term herself. “I actually was sitting for a while with trying to understand this broad trend, or this broad glue that was connecting together a lot of the disparate Gen Z trends that we were seeing.” She said she thinks much of the way people relate to her generation has to do with this underlying economic phenomenon. Gen Z’s rejection of traditional financial prudence is deeper than coming of age d