Slow Economics: Is Gen-Z Anti-Capitalist?

The turn to Analogue 

I was strolling around London recently, drifting by some shops and watching people pass by, a convenient activity when three problem sets are due in a few days. After admiring the airy and sleek Apple store, I walked into an Urban Outfitters, where the demographic was a lot younger. Beyond the clothing racks, I found a photo booth and a printing station. A vinyl record collection with some turntables for sale sat alongside a display of film cameras. 

 

I began to wonder: why sell these analogue products when the iPhone next door consolidates all of them into one hyper-efficient device? Why is Gen-Z moving away from efficiency, towards organic or analogue products?  Is this shift just another teenage trend, or caused by structural issues? To answer these questions, we need to merge philosophy, sociology and economics.

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Moral Outsourcing and Interpassivity

A useful starting point is Pfaller’s concept of “interpassivity”: the idea that we want our commodities to act on our behalf, allowing us to remain passive and free from moral burden. Slow consumption becomes not an act of rebellion but individual self-optimisation framed as social moral virtue. Ethical responsibility is outsourced to the objects of consumption themselves: The commodity is doing the restraint, the lengthy action or sustainability on behalf of the agent. The very moral kernel of the action is delegated to the thing, acts that the subject no longer has to perform.  

Why slow our consumption and create deprivation if our commodities can simulate it on our behalf? This is perhaps best shown in the statement that 83% of Gen Z say they want brands to take a stand on social issues. The individual feels less compelled to carry the moral burden and delegates it to the corporate actor. Slow consumption thus shifts from sacrifice to simulation. One can, therefore, participate in this slow, minimal, anti-efficient economy without having to suffer the absence and the barrenness that would result from it.

 

Capitalism Absorbs Its Critics

 This is an excellent example of capitalism's absorptive capabilities. A well-functioning economic regime not only tolerates criticism, rather it actively adapts to it. We then observe a supply-side filling of the niche that the illusion of the anti-consumptive movement opened. The cycle becomes self-fulfilling; critiques become the fuel for the very market economy from which they emerged. In this sense, apparent shifts in the economic order are less transformative than they seem and serve more as temporary adaptations. The defining strengths of our contemporary economic system lie in its ability to monetise what appears to oppose it.

 

One illustration of the profitable countercultural niches filled by firms is the anti-screen-time and anti-social-media sentiment. As soon as consumers began to turn against the accelerating pace of screen consumption and recognised the harms associated with social media, companies saw gold. The £520 3-day “digital detox” retreat offered by Unplugged or the 4% rise in flip-phone sales in Western Europe in 2024 are perfect examples of the profitability of ostensibly anti-capitalist consumption.

 

Another successful example is the fashion and sportswear brand Patagonia, profiting from the sustainable slow fashion movement. Its “DON’T BUY THIS JACKET” marketing campaign featured their signature fleece and bold lettering, urging the consumer to consider the ecological impact of their purchase. The campaign resulted in a 30% increase in sales the following year. Patagonia profited not in spite of its anti-consumption messaging, but because of it. Buying Patagonia becomes a proxy for non-consumption, a way to purchase the feeling of restraint.

 

At first glance, this may appear to be naive or youthful hypocrisy. What matters, however, is to show that this is not the case and highlight the drivers of this new form of commodified anti-consumption. Essentially, we want to explore the economic and social context that makes these patterns not only possible but rational among younger consumers.

Precarity and the Search for Control

We can also read these consumption behaviours against the backdrop of declining traditional stability and mobility metrics. For example, the widening gap between wages and house prices or the volatility of the modern employment market.

 

The average house price in the UK today is nearly six times higher than it was three decades ago, while wages have not kept pace. Average deposits, now almost 10 times higher, are increasingly out of reach, especially as rent consumes a bigger proportion of the young people’s income. Initially, this may seem unrelated to the behavioural questions surrounding slow consumption, however, the connection is both economic and psychological. Rucker & Galinsky point out that powerlessness, and consequently the feeling of Gen Z in front of the ever-expanding property ladder, drives compensatory consumption.

 

The slow consumption outlined earlier aligns closely with this type of consumer behaviour. It is precisely because we feel a lack of power and control that we splurge on symbolically important commodities. These symbolic commodities restore a sense of control. Instead of shuffling my playlist on Spotify, I place the needle onto my vinyl record, restoring a sense of agency. Instead of having my pictures uploaded automatically from my iPhone to the cloud, I have to go to the shop and get a physical development of my pictures, restoring a sense of tactility. Instead of passively accepting the reality of animal harm, I try to adopt vegan alternatives, restoring a sense of ethical control. 

 

We can, therefore, read these vinyl records, film cameras, and vegan meat as compensation for feeling powerless in the face of traditionally important purchases. As economic stability becomes harder to access, these small acts of control help render an unmanageable landscape slightly more navigable.

 

Identity, Ritual, and ‘Luxury Poverty’

We can also interpret these consumer behaviours as forms of group-identity seeking. The modern shortcomings of the employment market and the growing uncertainty surrounding future career paths can be seen as stripping away many socio-economic markers from the younger generation. It is no mystery that sociologists like Durkheim pointed out that employment and stable work create status groups and foster social solidarity.

 

 Gen Z, however, struggles to access this employment-created identity and solidarity because they simply struggle to get a job. The Independent reports that “Entry-level job postings have fallen by 29 percentage points since January 2024” while UK youth unemployment has risen from 13.7% to 14.5% between June 2024 and June 2025. Coupled with the threat of AI replacing many junior roles, the younger generation has been forced to reevaluate stability markers.

 

Consumption has always been identity-driven, but it now carries a heavier role in the construction of identity. For Gen Z, consumption is no longer a decorative extension of, but rather one of the remaining foundations on which identity can be built. This consumption phenomenon is not merely a trend. Trends are governed by taste and aesthetics. Rather, this is a precarity-driven shift. Macro stability weakens, so micro stability is found in consumptions that are proxies for control, predictability, and meaning. These are slow, analogue, durable and more often ritualistic commodities rather than a form of fun mass-following novelty.

 

While music taste corresponds to a trend, the record player corresponds to a timeless ritual, where stability is found somewhere other than the job market and a predictable wage. In this sense, Gen-Z lives in a sort of luxury poverty, able to afford expensive organic goods, costly photography habits, but not homes or jobs, which can be seen as real economic stability. The consumption of the younger generation, therefore, results from structural problems and cannot be reduced to a simple surface-level trend.

 

Essentially, Gen-Z’s consumption is less a form of rebellion and more a rational response to structural precarity, mediated through capitalist adaptability. When traditional routes to stability, housing, secure work, and upward mobility narrow, consumption steps in to provide both control and identity. The market quickly adjusts, packaging authenticity and restraint as profitable niches. What appears to be rebellion is, in reality, adaptation: a generation navigating uncertainty through imperfection with a ribbon. And if that means buying a turntable at Urban Outfitters after passing the Apple store, it only proves the economy still knows how to sell both the problem and the cure.