THINKING. A Sterile Collapse. A Recession Without Rebellion Revelry or Whimsy.

Economic crises have always sparked rebellion, but today’s downturn is met with a shift towards individualism and self-optimisation. With wellness culture dominating, the communal spaces and hedonistic outlets that once fostered creative resistance have vanished, leaving us in a sterile, hyper-disciplined world.

In an age where discipline is king, perhaps the most radical act will be to once again embrace chaos.

A Sterile Collapse: A Recession Without Rebellion, Revelry, or Whimsy

History has shown us that economic downturns often birth countercultures. The Weimar Republic, with its decadent cabarets and avant-garde art, transformed austerity into rebellion. The punk movement of the 1970s emerged in direct response to economic stagnation, embracing nihilism and anti-establishment fury. Even the Great Depression saw the rise of jazz-fuelled speakeasies, where hedonism thrived despite financial ruin. But as we enter what could be one of the most defining recessions of the 21st century, we are met with a landscape devoid of these historical mechanisms.

This era has been heralded by a series of economic and cultural shifts: the near-total decline of communal spaces (see ‘London Sees Annual drop of community spaces’ by Amy Glass For Foundation of Future London) the removal of nightlife (See ‘its not just a dancefloor: the precipitous Decline of UK nightclubs’ by Rob Davies for The Guardian), the loss of affordable art spaces (see ‘My studio costs half my income’ by Anita Chaudhuri for the guardian) , the criminalisation of squatting (Squatting became a criminal offence on 1 September 2012), the disappearance of cash payments (see ‘The Decline of Cash’), and the erosion of benefit systems (see ‘Labor to fix benefits system to get people back to work’ by Michael Savage for The Guardian).

These were once the vital arteries of countercultural resistance, providing the infrastructure for rebellion, creativity, and survival outside mainstream economic systems. Their absence has left a sterile, hyper-individualised landscape where financial hardship is experienced in isolation and as personal failures rather than collectively resisted.

The Loss of Subculture

Subcultures have historically provided an outlet for economic frustration, creating alternative communities where survival meant resistance, and resistance meant reinvention. The Parisian bohemians of the early 20th century lived in squalor but embraced artistic freedom over material wealth. The 1980s saw the rise of club kids in New York, a generation that danced through the ruin of the post-industrial decline.

Subculture gave people a means to process despair collectively, through shared aesthetic, music, and ideology.

Today, subcultures have been hollowed out by the internet’s ability to algorithmically flatten everything into marketable aesthetics. What once was punk, goth, or rave culture is now a hashtag, a fleeting TikTok trend. The internet offers the illusion of subculture, but it is largely surface-level, unable to provide the deep communal bonds that made rebellion meaningful. As a result, in the absence of physical, radical spaces, economic hardship is now met in solitude, framed as a personal failure rather than a systemic collapse.

Hedonism as Rebellion. Replaced by Optimisation

Periods of crisis often fuelled hedonistic excess, an acknowledgement of mortality through indulgence. The roaring twenties were a direct reaction to the trauma of World War I, where people drank, danced, and spent lavishly in the face of an uncertain future. The 2008 financial crash saw the explosion of drug-fuelled warehouse parties in Berlin, a city that had long embraced its reputation as a sanctuary for libertine pleasure. Even in times of collapse, there was a recognition that escape—even if fleeting—was a vital coping mechanism.

But the current era has taken a radically different approach. Instead of embracing pleasure as a response to instability, we have been conditioned to fear indulgence.

The rise of wellness culture has reframed self-denial as virtue: intermittent fasting instead of feasting, cold plunges instead of warm excess, self-discipline over self-destruction. Hedonism, once a political act of defiance, is now seen as a weakness, a failure to optimise one’s potential.

Even sex and nightlife have been subdued, increasingly replaced by sober-curious movements and early morning routines that favour productivity over debauchery.

The Tyranny of Wellness: How Self-Optimisation Became a Moral Obligation

The wellness movement, once a niche interest, has now become the dominant cultural force of our era, infiltrating everything from corporate language to social media algorithms. It has evolved beyond simple health-consciousness and into an all-encompassing doctrine of self-improvement, where every aspect of life must be optimised, monetised, and tracked.

The logic of wellness culture insists that happiness, longevity, and success are purely matters of personal discipline, ignoring structural inequality, economic instability, and the impossibility of endless self-perfection.

This obsession with self-regulation has turned individual bodies into sites of moral judgment: to be disciplined is to be virtuous, to indulge is to fail. The mechanisms of control once enforced by religious or political institutions have been internalised, repackaged as ‘self-care.’

Even rebellion has been absorbed—partying becomes an act of ‘biohacking,’ rest is reframed as ‘productive recovery,’ and communal spaces dissolve into fragmented online self-branding exercises. Where previous eras might have responded to crisis with acts of radical togetherness or reckless pleasure, we are encouraged to meet it with further self-discipline, cutting back, streamlining, and restricting.

The End of Whimsy: Why Everything Feels Sterile

Whimsy—the embrace of the absurd, the nonsensical, the unnecessary—has also been a casualty of our era (and the driver for my work for many years) Historically, economic downturns have often resulted in cultural explosions of surrealism and absurdism. The Dadaists, emerging in response to the horrors of World War I, rejected logic in favour of chaotic creativity. The 1990s saw the rise of rave culture, a rejection of capitalist monotony through excessive and colourful self-expression. Even meme culture, once a strange and chaotic space for internet absurdity, has become increasingly sanitised, dominated by branded content and corporate relatability.

The problem with a world that prioritises optimisation over absurdity is that it leaves no room for the irrational, the weird, the playful. A future without whimsy is a future without creative rebellion. And in a moment where systemic failures demand a radical reimagining of society, our cultural landscape offers little in the way of true subversiveness.

A New Form of Rebellion

If we are to reclaim a sense of rebellion in this coming economic crisis, it will not look like the past. The mechanisms that once allowed for countercultural explosions—underground music scenes, radical art movements, physical community hubs—have been eroded by digital surveillance, social atomisation, and the commodification of culture.

Instead, rebellion may take the form of a rejection of self-branding. It may manifest as a return to genuine anonymity, a refusal to be optimised, a re-embrace of inefficiency, decay, and the unproductive. It may mean the rise of unmarketable art, of communities built on shared experience rather than aesthetic curation. Perhaps, in rejecting the pressure to be eternally optimised, we will find a way to break free.

The real rebellion may not be in wellness, but in the rejection of its grasp entirely.

In an age where discipline is king, perhaps the most radical act is to once again embrace chaos.

But even as we inch towards revolt, there is no unifying call to arms, no rallying cry to bring forth a new decadent wave. Lady Gaga’s whispered Abracadabra lingers in the air, a promise of magic that never quite materialises, an invocation to a spectacle that refuses to begin.

The spell has been cast, but the rebellion has not yet arrived.