Gen Zers are increasingly looking for ways to prioritize quality of life over financial achievement at all costs. The TikTok trend of “soft life”—and its financial counterpart “soft saving”—is a stark departure from their millennial predecessors’ financial habits, which were rooted in toxic hustle culture and the “Girlboss” era.

“Soft savings” is, to my understanding, the opposite of savings – it’s about investing resources into making yourself happy now versus forever growing your savings for some future good time. It sounds ridiculous because they’re hitting on good critiques of capitailsm, but using the language of capitalism itself.

I think this really bolsters my argument that the self-diagnosis trend might be better understood as young people being critical of society, but their education system completely failed them. Since they lack access to critical, social, and political theory, they don’t have a vocabulary to express their critiques, so they’ve used the things we have taught them, like the language of mental health, to sorta make up their own critical theory. When mental health experts are super concerned and talk about how all these teens’ self-diagnoses are “wrong,” they’re missing the point. It’s a new theory using existing building blocks.