Buy Now, Pay Forever

I remember the first and only time I used buy-now-pay-later. It was when I was trying to hide from my mom that I'd splurged $400 on a new smartphone. I was shocked at how simple the process was. In all but 5 minutes, my new phone was en route. In the end, my mom ended up finding about the purchase anyways, but that doesn't mean my loan was worthless. After all, if it hadn't been for Klarna, I probably would have just stuck it out with my old phone.

Buy now, pay later services give consumers a superpower: the ability to purchase anything that one's heart desires. Inconvenient details like "price tags" and "budgeting" seem to disappear. But with great power comes great responsibility. According to this NY Times article, Klarna recently reported a 17% rise in credit losses since last year. Consumers are abusing BNPL and being burnt for it.

BNPL is the latest in a line of - what I consider to be - miracle cures, peddled by snake oil merchants looking to make a quick buck at the expense of consumers. Even more concerning is how positively consumers seem to respond to these cures. Dating apps are now the primary way people date; influencers across the Internet all promote a course; and Ozempic flies off the shelves faster than it can restock. Because these painkillers never address the underlying problems, people who buy now will ultimately have to pay forever.

As a young lad in my twenties, a cure that many of my peers (and myself) have fallen for is online dating. Dating apps are tempting because of how easy they promise to make what should otherwise be an intimidating process. It's scary to meet new people and it's scary to tell someone you care for them. But dating apps promise to do both of those things for you! Just slap on a few photos, jot down a few tidbits about yourself, and you're off to the races! Just scroll through a buffet of attractive individuals until you find the one.

Everyone who's used dating apps in my generation have their complaints and most - if not all - are totally valid! Getting constantly rejected because of your physical appearance or personal preferences is dehumanizing. Men sending vaguely or outright sexual messages to strangers is creepy. And - let's be honest - the most influential factor in judging a profile is in fact the mug shot at the top.

Online dating is imperfect because it fundamentally misrepresents what a healthy relationship looks like and how it's formed. In reality, relationship success is determined more by the time and effort you put into it than the initial affinity you have with your partner. Believing the opposite only leads people to avoid accountability for their faults within their relationships and enter their next without having adequately reflected, healed, and grown.

I used to think in the 2010s that we'd seen the worst of technological addiction in the proliferation of social media. Little did I know just how much further we would sink. Nowadays, it's common knowledge that the key to a product's success lies in its addictiveness. In business school, we learned that "social responsibility" and "branding" were vital tools for high customer retention, but in reality the optimal strategy is simply to remove the customer's ability to choose at all.

What I'm most pessimistic about is the fact that - with each generation - we accept a lower standard than the last for how companies - tech in particular - can market and sell to children. Gen Z adopted social media as routine, but Gen Alpha are faced with online gambling and generative AI. Once the smartphones have fused into our faces and we can no longer form even a coherent sentence without ChatGPT, perhaps then we will pause to consider what we have lost.

Until then, we can only strive to take care of ourselves. Abstaining from miracle cures is unrewarding and working hard on yourself is lame, but remember that the things that you buy today, you'll still have to pay for later... or perhaps forever.