What Really Happens to Spending When the World Feels so Uncertain.

Nick Gray
2 days ago
8 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

“Emotional self-preservation in consumption refers to the way people use purchasing decisions to restore control, identity and meaning when the future feels uncertain and institutional trust is low.”

If we're honest with ourselves, we could say the world doesn’t feel particularly stable right now, not in the dramatic sense of one defining catastrophe, but in a more subtle and unsettling way where nothing quite feels anchored anymore. Technology is reshaping work faster than our social systems can adapt, politics in many parts of the world feels increasingly volatile and performative, institutions that once offered us continuity are no longer carrying the same authority, and the future of earning, identity, and security feels less legible than it did even a decade ago. What I think is missing most isn't optimism, it's that shared story about what comes next and because the future might be difficult, but because it is becoming harder and harder to picture it at all.

None of this normally shows up as panic. It shows up as a low-grade, constant awareness that the structures we use beneath our everyday lives feel less dependable than they once did, that the assumptions we used to build plans, careers, and identities on no longer feel as solid as they once were. It’s in moments like this, we see a familiar belief that tends to take hold. When fear rises and the world feels unstable, people pull back. They conserve and they wait. They stop buying until some certainty returns.

History however tells a more complicated story.

Not because people have suddenly become reckless or irrational, but because consumption doesn't actually disappear when the world feels fragile. It simply changes what we use if for.

Before we start exploring why, I think it’s worth staying with what actually happens in earlier moments when uncertainty and fear were powerful enough to reshape everyday behaviour.

September 11, 2001

In the weeks following the attacks of September 11, consumer confidence in the United States collapsed, air travel fell by more than 30 percent almost overnight, tourism stalled to a screeching halt, and equity markets dropped massively as the basic sense of safety that underpinned ordinary lives was suddenly taken away. What we saw next however, did not line up to the expectation that fear alone would stop or suppress consumption for a prolonged period of time.

By early 2002, US retail sales had returned to growth again, domestic travel began recovering months before international travel. Dining, entertainment, and lifestyle categories stabilised far sooner than many forecasts had predicted. What people chose to buy during that period was revealing. Experiences and purchases that had once been treated as those “nice-to-haves,” deferred to some safer, later version of life, were suddenly brought forward to now, driven by a quiet but unsettling recognition that the my future is not guaranteed, that my time is finite, and that when the world feels so uncertain, waiting for the perfect moment is feeling like a good way of losing it altogether.

The data told us an uncomfortable story for conventional economic thinking. Trust in the world had not been restored, fear had not disappeared, and geopolitical uncertainty remained really elevated, yet spending returned in really meaningful ways. Not everywhere, and definitely not evenly, but clearly enough to challenge the idea that anxiety simply shuts our consumption down.

The Global Financial Crisis and the resilience of “small luxuries”

A different kind of rupture followed in 2008 and 2009, when we saw the collapse of major financial institutions, government bailouts, rising unemployment, and falling housing markets which all damaged the public's confidence in the system. US consumer confidence fell to its lowest level ever on record, and household wealth declined by trillions of dollars. Large discretionary purchases slowed, major commitments were postponed, and long-term financial risk became something many households were just unwilling to take on.

I remember that period clearly, having just started my 10 year career at Nike, Joining the company during a time when many within our business were being let go, when the atmosphere was filled with this feeling of unease, insecurity, not to mention the sadness of saying goodbye to people who had shaped the culture and the work there.

And yet, once again, during this time spending did not disappear. It was just redirected.

Despite the downturn, categories associated with what analysts later described as “affordable luxury” proved unexpectedly resilient. Cosmetic sales in the US continued to grow, premium coffee and café culture expanded, and spending on small home upgrades and wellness held or increased even as broader economic sentiment remained very weak. This again was not the behaviour of consumers suddenly becoming confident about the future; it was the behaviour of people selectively protecting smaller purchases that carried for them a personal meaning while avoiding larger, more uncertain commitments.

Trust remained low, anxiety remained high, and yet consumption adapted rather than collapsed.

COVID and the reshaping of everyday life

The pandemic also introduced this form of disruption that most modern economies had never experienced. If you remember it like I do our movements were restricted. Work became unstable. Our social life disappeared. Institutions contradicted themselves in real time. And the future became pretty unclear in a way that was not abstract, but deeply personal.

We saw spending patterns shift pretty abruptly. Global travel collapsed by more than 70 percent in 2020, while e-commerce adoption accelerated by several years in a matter of months. Home-related categories surged, with furniture, décor, fitness equipment, and self-care products experiencing double-digit growth. By 2022 and 2023, travel spending rebounded aggressively, with “revenge travel” pushing global tourism revenues back toward pre-pandemic levels and luxury, particularly in categories tied to personal meaning and experience, recovered faster than most analysts expected or predicted.

And again none of this was driven by confidence in the system or clarity about what lay ahead. It unfolded smack bang in the middle of confusion, fear, and emotional fatigue. Across three very different crises, you see the same pattern emerge: uncertainty increased, institutional trust weakened, and yet certain forms of spending did not merely survive, but accelerated with force.

It has nothing to do with whether this happened. The data makes that very clear. The question is why.

Today: emotionally and experientially, yes. Historically, not quite.

There have been periods in history that were objectively far more dangerous than what we are experiencing today, from world wars to depression and nuclear brinkmanship, and fundamentally the risks faced by most people in developed economies today don’t even compare to those eras. The thing that feels most different now is not the scale of danger, but the texture of uncertainty itself.

The instability we live in today is continuous rather than episodic, not arriving through one single defining event, but through politics, technology, culture, climate, work, and economics and all at once. The future does not simply feel more difficult; it feels increasingly opaque, harder to picture, harder to map and plan and harder to orient toward. Institutions that once acted as anchors for the decisions in our lives are being questioned or contested, expertise is treated as provisional, media fragments our reality rather than clarifying it, and technology is reshaping our identities faster than social frameworks can absorb. There is no longer that one shared narrative about what comes next.

The result of all of this doesn't mean panic, but a persistent and underlying sense that the structures beneath our everyday lives are increasingly less reliable than they once were. Emotionally and experientially, what we live in today carries the same psychological conditions that defined earlier periods of upheaval: uncertainty, fear, and the loss of stable reference points. Historically, this period may not be unprecedented but psychologically, it is deeply destabilising.

The Paradox

This is where unfortunately the assumption breaks. When the trust in systems weakens, people don’t stop needing safety, identity, meaning, or agency; if anything, those needs all become more pronounced and heightened. What does change though is where they are satisfied. As institutional narratives lose all their capacity to provide that needed emotional grounding, people start to turn inward, toward the parts of life they can still shape through personal choice and control.

In this context, spending is no longer primarily about optimisation, progress, or aspiration. It becomes something more fundamental.

For many, consumption becomes emotional self-preservation.

It's not because we have all of a sudden changed what we think the future might hold but because they are trying to remain human inside a period or time that feels very unstable. When our world feels fragile, we seek moments that allow ourselves to feel alive through experience and sensation. We want to feel normal, which comes from things that are familiar and that have continuity, and in control through the simple but powerful act of choosing what enters their lives. This is not denial or over indulgence. It is psychological grounding in an environment or world where so much feels beyond influence.

What this looks like in real behaviour

This shift is really visible in the way spending patterns reorganise themselves. Experiences begin to matter more than accumulation of things, identity becomes more influential than just function, and those emotionally resonant brands outperform those that compete primarily on efficiency. Spending polarises, with heightened value-seeking at one end and deeply meaningful premium choices at the other, while the middle ground of undifferentiated “good enough” and those offerings steadily erode.

People are no longer asking whether something is objectively the best option. They are asking whether it feels right, familiar, human, and most importantly emotionally anchoring in whatever way is needed for them. The purchase itself can become less important than what it provides psychologically: a restoration of agency or control, a reinforcement of my identity, and that small pocket of certainty in a world that no longer feels structurally reliable.

Let me be clear here, trust does not disappear under these conditions but it does become selective, relational, and very emotionally weighted, which is exactly why brands that offer clarity, coherence, and a genuine human alignment attract disproportionate amounts of loyalty, while those that rely solely on features or price all struggle to maintain relevance.

Why this moment feels different, even if history says it is not

Previous crises were undoubtedly more severe, but they were all bounded by a sense of eventually being solved. There was a war to end, a recession to recover from, a virus to contain, and even in the midst of hardship, the emotional arc still pointed forward. What we are living in today does not offer that same clarity.

Instability for us is no longer just a chapter., it's become the backdrop. We are missing that widely accepted narrative about where work, technology, politics, or society is heading, and when people cannot orient themselves toward what is coming, they naturally turn their attention to what is present, not out of indulgence, but out of necessity. Consumption becomes one of the few remaining ways people can assert meaning, coherence, and personal agency in a world that no longer provides those things by default.

What this means for brands

When trust is low, persuasion weakens, features become very interchangeable and efficiency alone no longer builds loyalty. It's that simple. What matters most is emotional legitimacy: that sense that a brand is real, consistent, human, and aligned with how people understand themselves. Don’t get me wrong this has always mattered, but right now it becomes decisive.

The role of brands quietly changes and they are no longer simply providers of goods or services, but become emotional reference points and places where people seek familiarity, identity, and a sense of grounding.

The truth beneath the paradox

Uncertainty doesn't kill consumption. It just changes its purpose.

People don’t buy because they trust the future. They buy because they are trying to remain alive, normal, and in control inside a moment that feels fragile. That is not a market anomaly at all. It’s just human behaviour and in a time where instability is no longer episodic but ambient, the emotional function of consumption doesn't fade. It becomes permanent.

So to put all this simply, this is not about what people spend on. It is about what spending does for them.

In uncertain times, consumption is not optimism. It is survival, expressed through choice.