It’s 2012, you’re playing a player vs player video-game, and you can’t seem to catch a break. Behind every corner is a well positioned enemy. Inside every corridor is a myriad of explosives. To make matters even worse, the sky is filled with deadly aircraft. Nothing is working, and the enemy is gaining a massive lead. You take a second to collect your thoughts and eventually consider that something seems incredibly unfair, then it hits you. You’re on the wrong side of the Spawn Trap, a brutal tactic in which one team intentionally positions themselves in or around the enemy’s spawn point (the place where players appear into the game) in order to repeatedly kill them before they have a chance to react.
It’s now 2025, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) a proxy for the cost of living is steadily growing, you’ve lost all bargaining power at work, saving money, let alone investing seems like a distant goal you’ll never meet, and the interest rates on your student loans ensures that paying them off will take as long as mathematically possible. The spawn trap you felt in 2012 while playing online video games has all of a sudden become your lived economic reality.
The spawn trap illustrations fits for two reasons. The first is that it accurately describes how oppressive the current economic landscape can feel. The second is that it accounts for there clearly being a “team” benefiting from the current situation — that being Americans earning more than $175k per year. According to data sources like The K Shaped Economy and people like Senator Bernie Sanders, American households earning less than $175k and those earning more live in “different Americas.” So while there isn’t (likely) a cabal organizing a systemic socioeconomic spawn trap, there is clearly one side benefitting from it.
But what happens to those who spawned in the bottom 80% — those American Households earning less than $175k per year? Currently, the emotional and economic outlook is grim. The cost of meaningful economic opportunity things like: buying a house, investing early in a successful company, going back to school as an adult are essentially impossible to afford, causing many Americans to abandon hope. And where hope once lived doomerism, a perspective that brings nihilism, corporate greed, political corruption, and the inability to affect change under one umbrella has taken up residence.
The unique flavor of hopelessness associated with doomerism was born out of economic spawn trapping. The situation is so bad that many less affluent Americans don’t even see the point of trying to change their economic outlook created by the ultra-rich. The bottom 80% of earners no longer believe that meaningful socioeconomic advancements can be made. We mythologize the 90s, and even early 2000s where things were, at the very least, affordable.
Escaping the spawn trap feels impossible so we are instead refusing to play the game. Those of us who aren’t totally doomer-pilled are leaving the lobby, turning off the console and looking for other things to do. The only challenge is finding what those things might be.