Doom Spending, FOMO, and Keeping Up: Why We Overspend and How to Ease Off Without Punishing Yourself

Tim Moneysaurus · 2026-07-18

Ever had a rough day, opened your phone, and somehow already checked out something you did not really need? Or scrolled social media, saw a friend on holiday or with a new gadget, and felt a small ache that nudged you to buy something too, just so you would not feel left behind? That does not make you weak or hopelessly bad with money. It is human, and it has a name and an explanation.

Overspending is often about feelings, not just discipline

Spending to soothe stress has a term: doom spending. It is the habit of buying things, often unnecessary ones, to calm anxiety about the economy or life in general. An Intuit Credit Karma survey found roughly 41% of Gen Z admit to doom spending to ease anxiety, and 42% to panic buying out of fear that prices will rise (Entrepreneur, citing Credit Karma research). That data is from the US, but the pattern shows up here too: amid economic pressure, many young Indonesians use impulsive buying as a brief escape from stress (Snapcart, 2024).

Then there is FOMO and the pressure to keep up. Populix research in its "Indonesia Digital Economic and Financial Outlook 2024" found Gen Z tends to shop more impulsively and around lifestyle, driven heavily by social media exposure that builds a fear of missing out (Bloomberg Technoz). The pressure to look like you are not falling behind is real, and it sometimes gets paid for with debt. Indonesia's financial regulator OJK reports that people aged 19 to 34 dominate online lending, making up about 58.72% of active borrower accounts (GoodStats, OJK fintech lending data).

And there is one technical factor making leaks easier: paying is now almost frictionless. Bank Indonesia recorded 6.05 billion QRIS transactions worth Rp579 trillion in just the first half of 2025, across 57 million users (Infobanknews, BI data), with volume growing about 139.9% year on year (GoodStats, BI 2025 economic report). That is billions of tiny taps, each one feeling trivial, that pile up into something huge. Money stops feeling real when there is no physical cash shrinking in your wallet.

How to ease off without punishing yourself

The key is not to punish yourself. Guilt often just triggers the next spending spiral. Here is a gentler sequence that actually lasts.

1. Name the feeling first. Before you rein in your wallet, admit it: "I am tired, anxious, or insecure, and my brain is looking for a quick escape." This is not fluff. The moment you see the trigger is emotional, you get a little distance to choose a different response, like a short walk, a call to a friend, or sleep, before your thumb reaches checkout on autopilot.

2. Reframe FOMO against your own goals. A social feed is a shop window, not the full picture. You only see the shiniest slice of someone's life. When the urge to "just buy it so I match up" appears, ask: does this move me closer to what I actually want, or just closer to an image I want others to see? Celebrate the quiet wins, like savings creeping up or debt shrinking, because that is what really changes your life, not a story that disappears in 24 hours.

3. Add a pause and watch the pattern, do not shame a single purchase. The strongest brake arrives at the moment of buying, not as generic advice later. Set a pause rule: for non-essential items above a certain amount, wait 24 hours. The urge often evaporates on its own. More important, look at the combined pattern. It is not about one Rp25,000 coffee, but if those little taps add up to Rp900,000 a month, that is when it lands. Logging it can be as easy as messaging "coffee 25k" to Moneysaurus on WhatsApp, so the small patterns you could not see become visible.

4. Automate saving so the cut is not felt. Behavioral economics shows the pain of losing money is much larger than the pleasure of gaining the same amount. That is why saving feels heavy: it registers as a "loss." So do not rely on daily willpower. Set an auto-transfer to savings right after payday, before you get to "feel" the money. What never lands in your spending account will never feel lost.

One thing to take home

You do not overspend because you are a failure. You overspend because you are a human who is anxious, pulled by social pressure, and surrounded by payments that are far too easy. So stop punishing yourself and start building a gentle system instead: name the feeling, add a pause, watch the pattern, automate the saving. The brake that lasts longest is the one that does not feel like a punishment.

Data sources: Gen Z doom spending from an Intuit Credit Karma survey via Entrepreneur; the phenomenon in Indonesia from Snapcart; Gen Z FOMO and impulsive buying from Populix via Bloomberg Technoz; the 19-34 age group's dominance in online lending from OJK data via GoodStats; QRIS transaction growth from Bank Indonesia via Infobanknews and GoodStats.