On April 9th, Luke Marion, a gardener and seed purveyor who runs the YouTube channel MIgardener, posted a video that recommended planting particular crops for a “RECESSION PROOF Garden.” “We’re going to talk about twenty-one varieties that you need to add to your garden to survive the oncoming recession,” Marion narrates in a foreboding tone, standing with a rake over a back-yard planter. He continues, “The time to learn to swim is not once you’re swept out to sea from a riptide.” He suggests garlic, cabbage, tomatoes, and kale, among other vegetables—produce that will cut down on your grocery bills if you grow it yourself. Marion’s video, which has more than eighty thousand views, came in the midst of President Trump’s whipsawing global tariff announcements, which headlines predicted could kick off said recession. Marion wasn’t alone in offering agricultural solutions: “Having a vegetable garden can soften the blow of an economic downturn,” another gardening YouTuber advised last week. Others proposed foraging stinging nettles as “recession prep” or building a “Hydroponic & Aquaponic survival garden.”
Anecdotally, signs of a recession are already here. Hairdressers are reporting that their clients are ordering less expensive treatments. “I’ve been eliminated from their budget,” one aesthetician told Bloomberg. Young people are hosting home cafés, making their own cappuccinos and iced matchas in lieu of patronizing coffee shops. (The price of coffee is increasing under the new tariffs, and cafés are raising prices in turn.) In Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in the nation, applications to law school are up precipitously, a classic indicator that previously freewheeling young people are seeking more secure employment. Georgetown University reported a twenty-five-per-cent increase in the size of its applicant pool. Even if investors are slightly more confident this week, after Trump backed off most of his harshest tariff rates, the changes in people’s life-style habits serve as their own kind of affective barometer. The vibes are off; Americans are panicky and confused. In their addled state of mind, any unusual consumer behavior or trend seems like it might foretell a coming crash.
On social media, identifying “recession indicators” has become a meme. A Dunkin’ closing in downtown Boston, in the chain’s home state, is a recession indicator. As is Leslie Odom, Jr., reprising his original role in “Hamilton,” no doubt a lucrative gig. As are Coachella 2025 ticket buyers taking on debt with payment plans to afford their admission. Other recession indicators call back mordantly to the era of the 2008 financial crisis: a new album from the d.j. and producer Skrillex, a fixture of recession dance music; the return of the flash mob, an example of which was recently spotted in Los Angeles celebrating a single drop by the rapper Doechii; reinvigorated interest in “American Idol,” the peak form of two-thousands kitsch. (According to my parents, this season is better than ever.) Fresh music from OK Go and Bon Iver, who also released a co-branded tinned fish with the direct-to-consumer brand Fishwife, is a throwback, as is “The Pitt,” the latest hot streaming show, a hospital drama starring Noah Wyle, of “E.R.” fame. The retreat to comfortingly familiar entertainment might be a variation of the “hemline index,” in which skirts are supposed to become shorter when times are good and longer when they are bad.
Bon Iver did not plan an album drop around Trump’s tariff plans, of course. Most of these indicators are meant as jokes, but like many internet memes, they hint toward a collective psychological state that’s reaffirmed with each Like and Share. Could a recession evoke feelings of nostalgia, recalling memories of the previous financial crisis, when the economy and labor force endured major damage but at least the international democratic coalition didn’t seem so shaky? For millennials who came into adulthood around 2008, the current atmosphere of pessimism triggers a kind of déjà vu. My college cohort graduated into a decimated job market, desperately seeking internships that were likely to be unpaid and casting about for gigs working in bars or cafés. There was some wan satisfaction to be found in the fact that youth culture at the time glamorized lo-fi grit: wearing plaid, drinking draft beer out of mason jars, Instagramming dive-bar photos with heavy filters that smoothed out any visual defects. In retrospect, there was a clarity to the Great Recession that is missing from our current moment. Now we’re confronting tides of artificial-intelligence slop and misinformation, with fewer strong media institutions to provide a sense of authority and a barely shared understanding of our political realities. We are more aware of the ways in which social crises (whether a global recession or a global pandemic) tend to benefit the already wealthy. The plethora of seeming indicators hints at the fact that we still don’t know precisely what’s coming down the line. Trump’s penchant for sudden policy reversals may mean that our 401(k)s will be fine, but what about the damage to our country’s reputation? The uncertainty being felt is not only economic. The recession is in our national character, too.
In January, a culture strategist named Edmond Lau posted a brief essay and graphic on X identifying a “dark mode shift” in culture and branding. In both form and content, the trend is toward the nihilistic. “If nothing matters, then everything – no matter how dark – is fair game,” Lau wrote. A mood board that he compiled showed how Charli XCX’s bouncy album “Brat” has been replaced as the musical style du jour by FKA Twigs’s gothic “Eusexua”; how a grinning Joe Biden has been swapped for a glowering, vengeful Trump in news coverage; how wellness culture has taken the warped shape of “American Psycho”-esque ads for Equinox. Lau’s observations went viral, inciting a wave of responses embracing the label “dark mode” with an attitude of ecstatic negativity. Like pointing out recession indicators, recognizing a dark-mode micro-trend reflects a state of hypervigilance: if we can detect the vibe shift first, then we might just survive it. In a follow-up essay that Lau co-wrote, he argued that the startup boom of the two-thousands created a culture of convenience and an appearance of innovation that has now dwindled: “a generation of youth are experiencing a brutal realization that nobody is coming to rescue them.” Hence, a turn toward self-reliance, whether in the form of back-yard gardening or ruthless self-optimization that anticipates Darwinian competition amid crisis. Regardless of whether there’s officially a recession, any collective sense of stability is out the window. As the essay notes, “acceptance of unknowing is integral.”
We could call our looming moment a Content Recession: whatever form it takes, it’ll be an economic downturn in which victims are tacitly encouraged to document their suffering on social media and become hardship influencers, romanticizing cooking meals at home, canning vegetables, and finding alternatives to careerist achievement. Goodbye, corporate girlies; hello, budget-conscious cottagecore. (So far, smartphones are exempt from Trump’s tariffs, the better to keep documenting ourselves, and TikTok, thank goodness, hasn’t been banned.) Growing your own produce was a popular pastime during the pandemic as well; the tools are probably still hanging out in our closets, ready to get dirty again. The only problem is that planting much of a garden requires having a home with a back yard, a comfort that many millennials gave up on ever achieving around 2008. Luckily, there is another viable form of influencer content that requires fewer resources: wilderness-survival videos. ♦
