Degeneracy is a Symptom
On Conspicuous Despair, the Ponzi stage of being alive, and why your grandparents are wrong about you.
The Inventory
A young woman in Manchester pays her rent through OnlyFans. She is twenty-four, has a 2:1 in English from a respectable university, and earns more in a quiet month than her father did as a deputy headmaster. She finds the work tedious rather than traumatic, which is, in its own way, the worst part.
A young man in Bolton has not left his bedroom, except for cigarettes and the occasional GP appointment, in fourteen months. He plays a game on his phone in which he opens digital boxes that may or may not contain rare digital cards. He spent £340 on this game last month. He does not consider himself a gambler.
A thirty-one-year-old software engineer in Zürich, on a salary that would have bought his parents a four-bedroom house, lives in a shared flat with two strangers and takes a small amount of cocaine on Friday evenings. He is saving, in theory, for a deposit. He has been saving, in theory, for a deposit for eight years. The deposit required has, over the same period, risen faster than his savings.
A woman in Tokyo, thirty-seven, single, working as a department-store cosmetics consultant, has chosen (the word is doing some work here) not to marry and not to have children. She lives with her mother. Her mother lives with her mother. None of the three women own the flat they share.
A man in Shenzhen has decided to lie down. Tang ping, they call it. He works the minimum hours required to feed himself, refuses promotions, refuses to date, refuses to acquire anything. The state has identified him, and the several million who think as he does, as a threat to social harmony. He has identified the state as a threat to his time.
A teenager in Ohio has lost $11,000 on sports betting in eight months. He is nineteen. He has not yet lost more than this because he has not yet had more than this. He will, soon enough, have more, and then he will lose more. He believes, with the unfalsifiable conviction of the truly devout, that his system is almost working.
You have noticed these people. Everyone has noticed these people. They are the texture of contemporary life. They have, collectively, become the favourite subject of a particular kind of newspaper column, the kind that asks, in a tone of bewildered sorrow, or studied outrage, or sometimes both at once: what has happened to us?
The answer, dear reader, is mathematics.
A Brief Defence of the Word “Degeneracy”
I am going to use the word “degeneracy” throughout this essay, and I should explain why, because the word has a history, most of it unflattering and some of it murderous, and a reasonable person might prefer I use something else.
I am using it because it is the word the other side uses. It is the word your aunt uses when she shares the Telegraph column on Facebook. It is the word the silver-haired commentator uses on GB News between segments on the cost of fuel and the wickedness of cyclists. It is the word that floats, untethered to any particular speaker, around every dinner party at which someone over fifty-five surveys the world and finds it wanting.
The word is doing real work in our culture. It is the word that links, under a single moral category, every behaviour I described in the inventory above. The OnlyFans worker, the gacha addict, the cocaine-fuelled software engineer, the celibate office worker, the lying-flat refusenik, the teenage gambler. The word groups them. The word explains them. The word implicitly assigns them blame, and implicitly absolves the speaker of the obligation to look any further.
The word is wrong. But it is not stupid. It is grasping at a real pattern. Something is happening, something is unmistakably happening, and a person who has lived long enough to remember the world before the something can be forgiven for reaching for a word, any word, to name it.
My argument is that they have the pattern right and the cause wrong. My argument is that the behaviours they group together as “degeneracy” are indeed linked, and indeed share a common cause, and the common cause is not, as they suppose, a moral failure of the young, or the death of God, or the rise of TikTok, or the decline of marriage, or the welfare state, or the schools, or feminism, or the internet, or any of the other usual culprits.
The common cause is that the productive game stopped paying, and the people in question have correctly noticed.
This essay is about why. It is also, secondarily, about why the people who are most appalled by the behaviour are also, structurally, the people who caused it, and why their appalled-ness is itself a load-bearing element of the system that produced what appals them.
I am calling the phenomenon Conspicuous Despair, with apologies to Thorstein Veblen, who is not in a position to object.
Veblen, Inverted
Thorstein Veblen, writing in 1899, observed that the rich do not consume in order to live. They consume in order to be seen. His Theory of the Leisure Class is the founding document of what we now call status economics, and its central insight is that the consumption of the wealthy is conspicuously wasteful on purpose. The waste is the point. A useful expenditure could, in principle, be matched by anyone with sufficient income. A useless expenditure (a yacht that sits in harbour, a watch that tells the time no better than a £20 Casio, a horse that exists to be photographed beside) signals not merely wealth but wealth’s freedom from utility. The leisure class signals its position through the visible expenditure of resources on nothing.
This is a famous argument and you have heard it before. I bring it up because I want to point out the symmetry no one talks about.
If the leisure class signals its position by visible expenditure on nothing, by the conspicuous enactment of having transcended productive work, then what does the excluded class do? What does the class signal when it has also transcended productive work, but in the opposite direction: not by rising above it but by being shut out of it?
It signals through Conspicuous Despair. It enacts, visibly and publicly, its exclusion from the productive game. It does the things that would be unthinkable for a person with a stake in the future, because it has no stake in the future. The OnlyFans account, the sports-betting app, the ketamine on Tuesday, the bedroom one does not leave: these are not, primarily, hedonism. They are legible refusals. They are the way the propertyless class makes its position visible to itself and to others. They are the bottom-up mirror of the yacht.
Veblen’s leisure class wastes resources to prove it has more than it needs. The despairing class wastes itself to prove it has less than it requires.
The two phenomena are not coincidentally simultaneous. They are the same phenomenon viewed from opposite ends of the wealth distribution. A society in which both are flourishing is a society in which the productive middle has been hollowed out, and what remains at either end is the public performance of disengagement from production: gilded at the top, soiled at the bottom, structurally identical in the middle.
This, incidentally, is why every era of conspicuous luxury in human history has coincided with an era of conspicuous degradation at the bottom. Late Republican Rome had its Lucullan banquets and its bread doles, its Crassus and its Catiline. Late Qing China had its Summer Palace and its opium dens. The Belle Époque had its Faubourg Saint-Honoré and its absinthe. The Roaring Twenties had Gatsby and the Bowery. The eras rhyme because the dynamic rhymes. When a small class consolidates rents to a degree that excludes a large class from the productive economy, both classes stop producing, and both classes start performing.
We are in such an era. Everyone knows this. The disagreement is about who is performing what, and why.
Minsky, Applied to People
Hyman Minsky was an economist whose name is invoked, these days, mostly in financial-crisis post-mortems. His framework was developed to describe the behaviour of firms and banks across a credit cycle, and it goes like this. There are three stages.
In the hedge stage, the borrower’s cash flows cover both interest and principal. Loans are conservative, debts are serviced, the system is stable. In the speculative stage, cash flows cover interest but not principal; debts must be rolled over rather than repaid, but the system is still functional so long as credit remains available. In the Ponzi stage, cash flows do not even cover interest; the borrower can only service debt by taking on more debt, or by selling assets into a rising market. Ponzi finance is sustainable only as long as the music plays. When it stops, at the famous Minsky Moment, the structure collapses.
Minsky was talking about balance sheets. I want to talk about households, and about lives.
Consider what it means to be a young adult in a developed economy, and consider it across the same three stages.
In the hedge stage of being alive (call it 1955 to roughly 1975 in the Anglosphere), a median wage covers the median life. You leave school, you get a job, you find a partner, you buy a house at three or four times your annual income, you have children, you save into a pension that your employer co-funds, and at the end you retire on something approaching your final salary. Cash flows cover principal. The future is, in the literal financial sense, affordable. The system is hedge-financed at the household level.
In the speculative stage (call it 1980 to roughly 2008), wages cover the running costs of a life but not the accumulation of the assets a life requires. You can pay your rent but you cannot accumulate a deposit at the rate house prices are rising. You can service your student loans but you cannot retire them. You take on more debt to bridge the gap. You roll your overdraft. You buy your house with a 95% mortgage at six times income because there is no other way to buy it. The system is functional so long as credit remains available and asset prices keep rising. You are speculatively financed. You are, in Minsky’s terms, depending on the music continuing.
In the Ponzi stage (call it now), wages do not cover even the running costs of the life that previous generations defined as normal. The deposit is unreachable; the family is unaffordable; the retirement is fictional; the career path that was supposed to deliver these things has been replaced by a sequence of contracts. The only way to access the reference standard of living is to acquire assets that rise faster than wages, which means either inheriting them, marrying them, or speculating into them. Productive labour, in the Ponzi stage, is a losing strategy by construction. You cannot save your way to the life your parents had, because the life your parents had is now priced in a currency (asset wealth) that wages do not convert into.
What does a rational agent do in the Ponzi stage?
She does not work harder at the losing strategy. That would be irrational. She pivots to strategies with the property that their upside actually reaches the reference threshold, even if their expected value is poor. She buys lottery tickets, metaphorical and literal. She speculates on crypto. She gambles on football. She starts an OnlyFans. She day-trades. She marries for money. She sells her eggs. She joins a multi-level marketing scheme. She bets her redundancy on a single hand at the roulette wheel of life because the steady strategy has a known terminal value below the threshold she needs to clear.
Or she does the opposite. She lies flat. She withdraws. She refuses to play a game she has correctly identified as unwinnable. She becomes a hikikomori in Tokyo, a tang ping refusenik in Shenzhen, a NEET in Manchester, a deaths-of-despair statistic in Ohio. Both responses, the manic and the depressive, the gambling and the giving up, are rational responses to the same underlying condition. They are the two ways a rational agent expresses the recognition that the productive game no longer pays.
This is the Ponzi stage of being alive. It is what your aunt calls degeneracy. It is what the framework calls mathematics.
The View From Shenzhen
The Anglo-American reader is in a poor position to see this clearly, because the Anglo-American culture war has loaded every relevant observation with a moralising charge. To see the structure cleanly, it helps to look at societies where the same mechanism is producing the same outcomes without the Anglo-American cultural overlay.
China is the cleanest case. In 2021, a young man named Luo Huazhong posted a manifesto on Baidu titled “Lying Flat Is Justice.” He had quit his job. He was living on minimal savings, eating two meals a day, doing nothing in particular. He argued that the productive demands of contemporary Chinese life (the 996 work culture, the impossible urban property market, the marriage market that demanded a flat in a tier-1 city as the price of entry, the parental expectations stacked on top of all of this) were not worth meeting. The rational response was to opt out. Tang ping. Lie flat.
The post went viral in a way that Chinese state media found alarming. Within weeks, the term had been censored, the discussion suppressed, and a Party line developed: lying flat was selfish, decadent, an abdication of social responsibility. The Global Times ran editorials. Xi Jinping made speeches about the importance of struggle. The young, it was suggested, had been spoiled by prosperity and seduced by Western influence into a lassitude unbecoming of the Chinese nation.
This explanation is interesting because it is structurally identical to the explanation a Telegraph columnist would offer for a British twenty-five-year-old who refused to take an unpaid internship in London. The cultural specifics differ; the diagnostic move is the same. The young have a character problem. The young are insufficiently struggling. The young need to be exhorted to virtue.
But the Chinese case strips away the cultural overlay and reveals the structure. Tang ping is not a Western import. China has no permissive sexual culture, no decadent welfare state, no woke universities, no TikTok-mediated nihilism imported from Brooklyn. China has, instead, a property market in which a flat in Shenzhen costs forty times the median annual salary, a marriage market in which men without flats are functionally unmarriageable, a work culture that demands twelve-hour days six days a week, and a one-child generation now expected to support four grandparents on its lone shoulders. The structural pressure is brutal and the behavioural response, lying down, is rational.
Japan made the same discovery thirty years earlier. The hikikomori phenomenon (young men, predominantly, who withdraw from social life entirely, sometimes for decades) emerged in the 1990s, after Japan’s asset bubble burst and the lifetime employment compact dissolved. The cultural commentary at the time, both Japanese and Western, framed it as a peculiarly Japanese pathology, something about shame and conformity and the pressure-cooker school system. This was wrong. It was a structural response to the closure of the productive ladder, and it has now appeared in every developed economy that has reproduced the same structural conditions.
Korea has produced its own variant: the sampo generation, then the opo generation, then the N-po generation, each successive label naming a longer list of the things young Koreans have given up: relationships, marriage, children, home ownership, careers, hope. The progression tracks, with eerie precision, the progressive unaffordability of the Korean reference standard of living.
The convergence across cultures is the evidence. East Asian Confucian-collectivist societies and Anglo-American liberal-individualist societies, with diametrically opposed cultural priors, are producing behaviourally convergent responses to structurally identical pressures. This is not a culture story. The culture story cannot explain the convergence. Only the structure story can.
The structure story is: when the productive game stops paying, agents stop playing it. They either pivot to lottery strategies or they withdraw entirely. The cultural particulars determine the form of the response (gacha gambling in Japan, sports betting in Britain, crypto in America, lying flat in China, OnlyFans in the Anglophone West, the manosphere everywhere) but the fact of the response is structural. It is what people do when they have correctly read the odds.
The Scapegoat
We come now to the most important part of the argument, which is also the most uncomfortable, because it implicates the reader (implicates, perhaps, the writer) in a structure of complicity that is easier to ignore than to confront.
Every late rentier society in history has responded to the behaviours of Conspicuous Despair in the same way: by locating their cause in the character of the despairing, rather than the structure that despairs them. This is not a coincidence. It is, structurally, the only available move for the propertied class, because the alternative explanations implicate the propertied class itself.
Late Republican Rome blamed the moral softness of the urban plebs while the latifundia consolidated the agricultural smallholdings that had been the basis of the Roman citizen-soldier. Tiberius Gracchus, who tried to point this out, was beaten to death with the legs of broken benches by his fellow senators. His brother Gaius, who tried again a decade later, was hunted down and killed on the Aventine. The senatorial class understood, with the clarity that self-interest provides, that the diagnosis was the problem, not the disease. To name the cause was to threaten the structure.
Late Qing China blamed the opium-smoking peasantry for the dynasty’s military weakness, while the gentry-bureaucratic class extracted ever-larger rents from the agricultural surplus, the imperial examination system calcified into a closed shop, and the Qing court spent the indemnity from the First Sino-Japanese War on the Empress Dowager’s Summer Palace.
Weimar Germany blamed the cabaret, the Jews, the cosmopolitans, the homosexuals, the modernists, anyone whose visible behaviour could be coded as cultural decadence, while the Junker landlords retained their estates, the industrial cartels reconsolidated their position, and the hyperinflation that wiped out the bourgeois middle class was followed by a deflation that wiped out what remained. The eventual political response targeted the visible decadents, not the structural rentiers, and the result was the catastrophe everyone knows.
The contemporary version of this move is the daily content of the British and American culture war. The behaviours of Conspicuous Despair (the OnlyFans, the gambling, the substance use, the failure to marry, the failure to reproduce, the failure to strive) are presented as the causes of decline, when they are in fact the symptoms. The cause is the rentier capture of the assets that constitute the reference standard of living: housing, principally, but also education, healthcare, and the credentialled pathways to professional employment.
This misattribution is not, in most cases, conscious. The Telegraph columnist who writes that the young are insufficiently resilient is not, I imagine, deliberately concealing the role of the planning system in his readership’s housing wealth. He is operating within an ideological framework in which his readership’s housing wealth is simply a fact of the world, like gravity or the weather, and the only remaining variable available to explain the behavioural patterns he observes is the character of the people exhibiting them. This is what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism: the structural causes have become invisible, and so only personal causes remain available for description. Every systemic problem is re-described as a personal failing because the system itself has dropped out of cognition.
The migration debate is the cleanest contemporary parallel. Migrants do not cause housing scarcity; planning regimes, land banking, and the financialisation of housing cause housing scarcity. But migration is visible, individuals are identifiable, and the structural causes are abstract and politically untouchable. So the visible symptom is named as the cause, the abstract cause goes unnamed, and the resulting policy debate is conducted entirely within a frame that cannot, by construction, fix the underlying problem. The “degeneracy” debate is the same move. The young are visible. The behaviours are identifiable. The structural causes are abstract and implicate the readership’s own balance sheet. So the symptom is named as the cause.
This is the rentier class’s most reliable rhetorical move, and it has worked, with minor variations, for every rentier class in recorded history. It works because it is useful. It works because it directs political energy at the powerless rather than the powerful. It works because the alternative, admitting that the structure is the cause, would require the propertied class to give up rents it does not wish to give up.
It is, in short, a cop-out. It is the same intellectual move as blaming the migrants. It is what a society does when it cannot bear to look at what is actually happening to it.
What This Essay Is Not
I should pause here to say some things this essay is not arguing, because the argument is incendiary enough that careless readers will assume the worst version of it.
I am not arguing that problem gambling is harmless. Problem gambling destroys lives, families, and futures, and the British state’s regulatory capture by the gambling industry (the shirts, the adverts, the apps, the in-play markets) is a national disgrace.
I am not arguing that OnlyFans is liberating. The OnlyFans economy is brutally unequal, exploitative at the median, and produces long-tail psychological consequences that the platform has every incentive to obscure.
I am not arguing that drug use is fine, that nihilism is healthy, that lying in bed for fourteen months is a defensible life strategy, or that the manosphere is a misunderstood social movement. The behaviours of Conspicuous Despair are, in many cases, genuinely corrosive. The despairing class is not having a good time. That is, after all, the point.
What I am arguing is that moralising about these behaviours while preserving the structure that produces them is either stupid or dishonest, and usually both. The behaviours are symptoms. The symptoms are bad. Addressing the symptoms without addressing the disease is what doctors call palliative care, and it is what a serious civilisation reserves for conditions it has given up on curing.
We have not given up on curing this condition. We have merely been told, by people who benefit from the condition, that the condition is incurable, or that it is not a condition at all, or that it is a condition of the patient’s own making. None of these claims is true. The condition is structural. The structure is the rentier capture of the assets that constitute a viable life. The cure is to break the capture.
The Minsky Moment, Politically
Minsky’s framework, applied to balance sheets, predicts that the Ponzi stage ends in a crash. The music stops; the assets cannot be sold into a rising market because the market is no longer rising; the cash flows that never covered the debts now cannot even pretend to; and the structure collapses.
Applied to households and to lives, the framework predicts something slightly different. The household sector does not, exactly, collapse; people continue to exist, to eat, to sleep, to move through their days. What collapses is not the household itself but its consent to the system that produced its position. The Ponzi stage of being alive ends, politically, in a withdrawal of legitimacy.
This is what every late rentier society eventually produces, and it is the part of the cycle we are, I think, now entering. The behaviours of Conspicuous Despair are not, in themselves, politically dangerous. A generation that gambles, fornicates, takes drugs, refuses to marry, and lies in bed is not, by virtue of these activities, going to overthrow anything. The political danger comes at the next step, when the behavioural recognition that the game is rigged becomes a political recognition that the game is rigged, and the political recognition organises itself into a demand that the game be changed.
This is what the Gracchi were, in Rome. It is what the radical Reformation was, in Northern Europe. It is what 1848 was, what 1917 was, what the various inter-war movements were. It is what populism, in its current Anglo-American forms, is: an inchoate, ill-directed, frequently malignant version of the same recognition. The populist instinct that the system is rigged is, in its raw form, correct. The populist instinct’s diagnosis of who has rigged it (usually some combination of migrants, minorities, and cultural elites) is wrong, in the specific and load-bearing way that all rentier-protective ideologies are wrong: it names the visible rather than the structural, the powerless rather than the powerful.
But the instinct is correct. And the instinct, even when wrongly diagnosed, eventually finds its target. Every rentier class in history has, at some point, discovered this. The discovery is generally unpleasant for the rentier class.
The question facing developed societies now is whether the recognition can be channelled into a structural reform (a meaningful redistribution of the assets that constitute a viable life, principally through some combination of land value taxation, planning liberalisation, asset recycling, and the dismantling of the credentialled rentier professions) or whether it will be channelled, as it has been so many times before, into a scapegoating politics that protects the rentiers by directing the recognition at someone else.
The honest answer is that both are possible, that the second is more likely on current trajectories, and that the first is the only one that addresses the underlying condition.
Coda: The View From Below
I want to end with the observation that the people doing the behaviours I have described are not stupid. They are not depraved. They are not lazy. They are not, in any meaningful sense, worse than their grandparents were.
They are reading the odds.
The OnlyFans worker in Manchester has correctly identified that her degree, in the labour market she actually faces, is worth less than her capacity to sell access to herself online. The teenage gambler in Ohio has correctly identified that the expected value of his wage labour, compounded across his working life, will not deliver the standard of living his parents had, and that only a sequence of high-variance bets has any chance, however slim, of closing the gap. The lying-flat refusenik in Shenzhen has correctly identified that the marginal hour of additional labour, given the rate at which Shenzhen property prices outpace Shenzhen wages, has a negative expected return on his happiness, his time, and his future. The hikikomori in Tokyo has correctly identified that the social roles available to him are not worth the price of admission.
These are not moral failures. These are not character defects. These are correct calculations, performed by ordinary people, about the structure of incentives they actually face. The fact that the calculations produce behaviours their grandparents find appalling is not evidence that the calculators are appalling. It is evidence that the structure has changed.
Your grandparents lived in a hedge-financed world. They could afford to be virtuous, in the conventional sense, because virtue paid. The young live in a Ponzi-financed world. They cannot afford to be virtuous in the conventional sense, because virtue does not pay, and the only strategies that have any chance of clearing the threshold their grandparents took for granted are strategies their grandparents would not recognise as strategies at all.
When your grandparents look at the young and see degeneracy, what they are seeing is the behavioural footprint of a structural condition they have not yet learned to see. The behaviours are real. The condition is real. The connection between the two is real. What is not real is the moral framing that lets the older generation blame the younger one for the consequences of a system the older generation, in most cases unwittingly, built and benefited from.
Degeneracy is a symptom. The disease is rent.
We will not cure the symptom by moralising at it. We will cure it, if we cure it at all, by curing the disease.
The alternative is that we continue, in the manner of every rentier civilisation before us, to perform our Conspicuous Despair until the Minsky Moment arrives, and then we will find out, as Rome found out, as the Qing found out, as Weimar found out, what the politics of structural recognition looks like, when it finally arrives, no longer asking but demanding.
I would rather we got to it before that. But that, I suppose, is what every essay like this one has ever said.
The Rentier Blackhole - a social singularity of guaranteed depravity
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I will eventually give you some small hope, in the form of the most hilarious patch to this problem which weirdly fixes capitalism back to the purist intentions of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, including why if Marx was alive today, he wouldn’t start a revolution, he would start a long vol long property - short banks cyclical macro strategy hedge fund….no really.