Admitting that she couldn’t afford shampoo any more – that was the hardest thing. “People might think it was gross,” says 23-year-old Yash Jayachandran, a psychology master’s student and podcaster from Brisbane, Australia. “But I was like, this is just the reality of where I’m at.”
It wasn’t that Jayachandran couldn’t buy shampoo. Technically she could. But at what cost to the rest of her budget? For months, she’d watched in horror as the cost of everyday essentials rose. At the supermarket, she’d fill her cart, calculate the bill and start putting things back. “What can I substitute for something cheaper?” she says. “What can I cut down on?”
Jayachandran stopped buying fresh fruit. She stopped going out to bars to see her friends. Drinks were too expensive, as were the taxis home afterwards. Besides, she couldn’t afford to be hungover. She was juggling her academic requirements, the 1,000 hours of unpaid placement work she needed to complete to graduate from her degree, alongside part-time tutoring and remote research jobs. On average, Jayachandran worked 60 hours a week. And yet she couldn’t afford to buy shampoo or fresh fruit. This was the reality of her life as a student in the 36th most expensive city in the world during a global cost of living crisis, and Jayachandran wanted to share it.
So she picked up her phone, opened TikTok and began filming. Her videos, explaining the things she had to give up due to the cost of living crisis, went viral. “I was embarrassed to admit these things to someone,” Jayachandran says, “but as a society, I think the best way to deal with feelings of shame and doubt is to talk about it.”
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Other creators, as TikTok users are known, began responding with their own videos on cost of living cutbacks. No more makeup, skincare, takeaways or eating out. Others made more painful economies. They stopped eating lunch. If they did eat lunch, they couldn’t afford fresh produce, such as salad. They stopped going to therapy. “I can’t spend £70 a week any more,” one user quipped, “to have a cry to a random person on Skype.” Some cancelled their health insurance and stopped doing their laundry.
What can these “austerity influencers” tell us about the real-world impact of the cost of living crisis?
“Let me give a caveat first,” says Dr Lindsay Flynn, an expert in intergenerational inequality at the University of Luxembourg. “The caveat is that this isn’t new. People on low incomes have regularly faced hard decisions about where to spend their limited discretionary income, if they have any at all.” With the average TikTok user aged 18-34, unsurprisingly many are on tight budgets. “Young people are often still in education and don’t have stable jobs yet and are at the beginning of their income trajectory,” says Flynn.
But what is new, she adds, is the context in which these TikTokers find themselves. “The housing and employment situation has shifted,” she says. “Housing is more expensive. The job market has changed. There are more temporary jobs, and more precarity in the labour market.” Housing, energy, transportation, food costs – everything is more expensive, not only for young people but for people in well-paid professions who until recently were not struggling. “I bought an apple,” Jayachandran says, “and it was a dollar-fifty [79p]. It used to be 30 cents.”
In the UK, inflation is at 6.7%. In April, food inflation hit a record 19%. “It crept in very slowly,” says Heidi Ondrak, a 52-year-old project manager and TikTok creator from Plymouth. “You noticed every month you had less disposable income. My Aldi trolley increased from £60 a week to £80.” Ondrak became a TikTok creator earlier this year and posts under the handle @DuchessofThrift to her 41,000 followers; she is shortly to publish Thrift Your Life: Cost-of-Living Hustles to Waste Less, Save More and Live Well. After breaking up with her partner and becoming a single parent to a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old, Ondrak was responsible for what had been a joint mortgage, amid spiralling inflation. “It’s a terrifying position to find yourself in,” she says.
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To make ends meet, Ondrak moonlighted as a food delivery courier, delivering takeaways in the evening after work. She sold her clothes on the resale app Vinted. The money-saving tips she shares on her TikTok recall the second world war-era frugality she learned from her grandmother. “If the cheese had a bit of mould on the outside,” Ondrak says, “she’d just cut that bit off.” Ondrak routinely waters down her milk to make it go further: “The kids don’t even know the difference.” She showers at the gym, and didn’t put her heating on last winter. “If you sit there shivering, going ‘It’s cold,’ feeling sorry for yourself, you’re going to feel cold,” she says. “If you tell yourself, ‘It’s a bit chilly today but I’m going to put on a jumper,’ surprise surprise, you actually feel fine.” Other methods are more 21st century. “If I have leftovers,” she says, “I put the random ingredients into ChatGPT, and it comes up with a recipe.”
Ondrak sees herself as a corrective to a rampant consumer culture. “Our kids have grown up with a lot more,” she says. There is a certain irony to austerity influencing on social media. Historically, such platforms have bred desire: YouTubers unboxing hauls of makeup; Instagrammers posing in designer clothes at luxury resorts. TikTok recently launched TikTok shop, an integrated shopping platform. These are algorithmically driven engines of consumer demand, designed to encourage us to spend money online.
“I cannot scroll without always seeing something I am being convinced to buy,” says Ifesinachukwu Chike, an 18-year-old university student, healthcare assistant and content creator from Northampton. “It is on your Snapchat. Your Instagram. Your Safari ads.” Despite the fact that Chike has worked since she was 16, until this year, she had no savings. Instead, every time she unlocked her phone, Chike had the sense she was in a shopping mall, each window a gleaming invitation to spend. “This is what keeps me buying and buying and buying,” she says.
Chike posted her own “things I’m giving up” video as a way to “hold myself accountable”, she says. Out went nail appointments, clothes hauls and takeaway meals. “I was spending £40 to £50 on a set of acrylics that were done after two or three weeks,” Chike says. She’d long known she was spending too much, but she felt trapped by the societal expectations placed upon young women. “There is this unspoken standard on what you are supposed to look like,” she says.
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“You see people buying so many things and going to all these places and spending all this money,” says Katie McDonald, a 25-year-old account manager from Chicago. “And it’s like, how are they doing this? I wanted to share the things I have given up. Because it’s very real. The cost of living is insane.” McDonald has renounced nail appointments, drinks and meals out: “Small luxuries that didn’t use to cost so much money are so much more expensive now.”
When TikTok exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, the platform was mostly known for its dance videos. “People are over the dancing phase on TikTok,” McDonald says. She thinks this new wave of austerity videos serves a growing community of people who seek out relatable content online. “We see celebrities online flexing [flaunting their wealth] on everything,” she says. “It’s so out of touch.”
“TikTok has become a digital public square,” says Bondy Kaye, co-author of TikTok: Creativity and Culture in Short Video. “It’s a place where people can share ideas, opinions and advice about anything.” When TikTok removed its 60-second time limit in 2021, it opened the door to longer, instructional videos. “It’s not as frantic as it once was,” says Kaye.
“You can learn anything on TikTok,” agrees Noah Bear Nyle, a self-employed business consultant from south Wales. Nyle explains the benefits system to his 139,000 followers. “I’m doing this to help other people,” he says, “because I know what it’s like to be in that situation.” In addition to demystifying an often arcane setup – “The gov.uk website is a nightmare,” he says – Nyle feels his videos have a broader social purpose. “I’m on universal credit,” he says. “There’s a lot of judgment for people on benefits at the moment. And a lot of stigma. So I say to people, ‘I’m with you on this one. I’m waiting for the cost of living payment myself.’”
But austerity influencing isn’t just about surviving from one month to the next. All of these TikTok creators urge their followers to manage their budgets so they can afford discretionary purchases that are important to them. “Actually,” says Ondrak, “it’s really important, even if you are trying to live frugally, to have some joy in your life and do things that make you happy. It’s not all sackcloth and ashes and misery.” When we speak, she is on holiday in Spain with her children, paid for by a “ruthless” wardrobe clearout that raised money on Vinted.
There’s a sense that people struggling financially should be nibbling mouldy cheese, washed down with watery milk
After Jayachandran’s video went viral, she posted a follow-up, highlighting the things she refused to give up. Her gym membership; gifts for friends – these were non-negotiable. McDonald, for her part, refuses to stop travelling. “You only get one life,” she says. “I am going to see as much as I possibly can.” As a black woman living in a predominantly white area, Chike says that having her hair done is not something she considers to be a luxury, even if she has recently started doing it herself to save money. “People are going to say, ‘Oh, you look so unkempt’ if you walk into school every day with your afro.”
In prioritising these purchases, they are in keeping with societal attitudes. Even in times of economic recession, says Dr Cathrine Jansson-Boyd of Anglia Ruskin University, much consumer spending proves resilient. It’s what Leonard Lauder (son of Estée) termed the “lipstick effect”: small purchases designed to lift the spirits in difficult times. “Even though you would think logically that they would be the first thing to go, they are usually the last,” says Jansson-Boyd, “because when times are harder, we want cheering up.”
These purchases tend to incite controversy. Jayachandran’s followers have criticised her for going to the gym. McDonald’s followers chastised her for taking a holiday. “That’s because I prioritise my spending,” she says. “I cut back on some things so I can do other things.” She is relaxed about it. “People like to manage your pocket,” she shrugs.
What this criticism taps into is the deep-rooted sense that people struggling with the rising cost of living should practise a sort of performative asceticism. They should nibble parsimonious slices of mouldy cheese washed down with watery milk, ideally while sitting in an unheated home. To ask for anything else, anything more, is to display an outrageous moral fecklessness.
It is the same logic that castigates people on benefits who have smartphones or flatscreen TVs or tattoos, or argues that millennials could buy homes if they didn’t spend all their money on avocado toast. “On some of my TikToks,” says Nyle, “people say what they’re getting with the cost of living payments, and people rip into them, saying, ‘Why are you buying new clothes, you could go to the charity shop, you are on benefits, and why do you need Christmas presents if you’re on benefits?’” Nyle blocks these users. “Just because you’re struggling,” he says, “doesn’t mean you can’t have a treat. Doesn’t mean you can’t have Christmas, or a new coat.”
In reality, renouncing all worldly pleasures will not pull those on low incomes out of the cost of living crisis, or enable avocado-guzzling millennials to buy property. And yet still this narrative persists. “If you see a low-income person with an iPhone,” says Jayachandran, “they’re instantly vilified for not being responsible. That’s why they’re in a low-income bracket. But wealthy people who spend money on questionable things aren’t held to the same standards.”
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She emphasises how hard it is for individuals to “fight against bigger socioeconomic conditions” such as inflation. “A lot of people have this mentality that people just need to help themselves,” Jayachandran says. “But it’s very naive to think that it’s all on the individual.” Flynn has researched what enables millennials to buy homes – and it’s not a porridge-and-water diet. “If you take higher levels of financial risk,” she says, “that’s actually associated with higher levels of housing wealth. So this idea that if you stop buying avocado toast you can become a homeowner doesn’t play out in the data.”
Because, at their root, the austerity influencers of TikTok aren’t merely helping us shave a few pennies off our bills, or make the odds and ends in our fridge stretch further. They’re asking us to ask ourselves what makes life worth living. And find a little room in our budgets for that.
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